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Epi(b)logue: Abroad Thoughts from Home

11/16/2014

"Bye-bye Akrotiti"

Well, here I am back in grey, damp, freezing Britain. It’s getting dark before it’s really got light properly today. The journey home was quite interesting. We took off as scheduled at 7pm, after sitting around the air terminal for over four hours as the military like you there good and early. We started our approach at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire still on time at about 9.45pm (local time), it was a bit misty, but the lights below etc looked pretty clear from my plane window. About 50 feet above the runway, the pilot realized he didn’t fancy it, and aborted the landing. Back up to cruising altitude for a bit, and then an announcement over the speakers that we were re-routing to… Manchester (about 150 miles from Brize). We landed Manchester at around 10.15pm. About 11pm we were told that coaches were being dispatched from Brize, and would be with us in about 3 hours….

Obviously, we’d caught the good folk at Manchester Airport a bit on the hop, so it took them about an hour to get us off the plane. Baggage reclaim was a bit chaotic, with piles of body armour and helmets going round and round, so another hour was spent there. A couple of large coaches arrived c 2.00am, but they were not for us, and eventually eight of us were crammed in to a space bus taxi and headed off to Brize about 2.30am.

We arrived at Brize c 5.00am, and a short prayer to the motorcycle gods was rewarded by my bike starting first time, despite the fact that it had been parked up in the drizzle without a cover for 11 days. On with slightly damp bike gear which had been stowed in the boxes on the bike for the whole time, strap luggage to bike, and away. Did I mention there wasn’t a trace of fog of any description at Brize by this time? Got home at 6.45am as the sun came up (well, as the sky changed from black to dark grey). Five hours sleep and I’m feeling a little bit more human now, although the central heating is on full blast to compensate for the 15 deg C drop in temperature compared to this time yesterday…

So, what am I going to miss about Cyprus (in no particular order)?

The weather
The awesome archaeology
The beaches
Being both James Bond and Indiana Jones in a single morning
The Op Nightingale Crew
Beer @ 1 Euro per bottle
Brandy Sours @ 90c each
Red Lucky Strikes @ 4 euros a pack
Meze

What am I not going to miss about Cyprus:

The speed bumps

The base at Akrotiri is littered with the biggest speed-bumps in the known universe, apparently distributed quite randomly. Suspect I have a compressed spine after 11 days bouncing over these things in the Landie and the long-wheelbase Transit minibus.

Life on the base was comfortable, but driving around the housing estates where the military (and us) lived had quite an odd feel. One of my first impressions led me to name it ‘Stepford’, as in the sci-fi film ‘The Stepford Wives’ because the domestic areas were so uniform. All the houses are identical, and all painted the same colour, beige and cream with blue shutters, and while I’m sure that played a big part, there was a lot more to it than that. There was also very little traffic, and no cars parked on the road as everyone had a drive-way, no litter, no graffiti, no stray dogs or kids hanging around on street-corners or in front of shops, but it was only yesterday that it finally hit me: the demography. Basically, everyone I saw walking around the base in civvies was off-duty military, and hence in excellent physical condition and under 50: no old people, no fat people (children or adults). It’s actually quite strange.

So, that’s it from the blog for this year’s trip. Looking forward to going back next year already, getting trowels into some of the fabulous archaeology we’ve been walking over, and meeting up with the lovely, lovely Op Nightingale crew again. The whole trip, and yesterday in particular, was in many ways for me a quite humbling experience. I hope I managed to steer through it largely with stoicism and good humour. If a paraplegic and a blind bloke could retain their sense of humour throughout out the whole thing, then us able-bodied types didn’t really have any right to start kicking off when things went a bit wrong.

PS: This blog saw over 5000 page-views and over 1200 unique visitors during its run. Thank you all very much for taking the time to read my ramblings. Back next year!

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The Home Straight

11/14/2014

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My last full day at Akrotiri. The morning was spent doing a bit of fairly high-speed and basic survey of the City Site with Jim-Bob. It became very clear, very quickly that the site is surrounded by a very substantial stone wall, so we got a couple of hours of taking some GPS points on the visible stretches, and taking lots of photos. We also noticed a gap in the wall which may be an entrance, with a big pile of stones next to it which look suspiciously like the ruins of a guard tower.

Over in one corner of the site, tucked inside the wall, is a very large, wet depression, set in a natural semi-circular bowl which is of a similar size and shape to the theatre at Kourion. It may not be a theatre, but if it isn’t, none of us can think what else it could be. The amount of finds littering the surface of the area inside the walls is staggering. I picked up another piece of what looked like the same marble bowl that we noticed the other day, tapered brick from an arch, a couple of fragments of basalt saddle-querns (rubbing stones for grinding food), pottery water-pipe or guttering, a large piece of a carved limestone bowl, and a tiny, blue glass mosaic tessera (tile) with mortar still attached. We managed to get a couple of hundred metres of the wall plotted before we were called away to go up to Dreamer’s Bay to meet with the big-wigs who are hopefully going to give us permission to dig next year. They seemed suitably impressed, so fingers crossed. We had the afternoon off today, so I spent an hour or so teaching one of the Vets, Jo, the basics of pottery illustration. We’re going to need a lot of it drawn in the future, I suspect.

Photos, as ever, on my Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.762842527096554.1073741883.169284376452375&&uploaded=17

This is probably my last blog of the trip from Cyprus as we’re flying home tomorrow evening, and will have to be at the airport terminal at 5pm. I’ll do a final post from back home probably sometime on Sunday or Monday, sat in the cold and damp of England in mid-November. I’ve had a fantastic time here, and while I’m ready to go home now, I’m really going to miss this place. I can’t believe how quickly the last 10 days have gone. Looking forward to spring already.

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And Now, The End Is Near…

11/14/2014

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Sadly, the helicopter ride never materialized today. Not entirely sure why, but there did seem to be something of a heightened security level at the base, with helicopters buzzing around more or less non-stop, which is unusual, so I suppose they couldn’t spare one for us to fly over sites. Fifteen years on Time Team and I never got a helicopter ride. Ah well, next time…

There’s a real sense that the project is starting to wind down now. The vets had their farewell barbecue up at the monastery site, and tomorrow the chairs, tents etc are due to be collected and packed away. Most of my morning was spent tagging along with Diarmaid, talking to people who can give us the required permissions to take the project to the next level, ie dig some holes before the Dreamer’s Bay sites all fall into the sea, and everything is looking very positive in that regard. The people we need onside appear to be very onside, and we’re taking them out to look at the sites tomorrow. I also spent a large chunk of the morning wrestling with my lap-top in an effort to get email working properly. After a fruitless hour or so I gave up, but have a workaround in place. I can receive in Outlook, but have to send using Yahoo. Have tried numerous fixes, all without success, but it appears that Microsoft Vista is indeed the pile of crap that everyone says it is.

After lunch, more research time. It might have looked like I was lying on a sunbed at the beach reading, but it was research. Honest. I’m certainly feeling a lot more familiar with the pottery than when I got here, and I’m happy that it is indeed all early Byzantine, broadly 5th – 7th century. More accurate dating will have to wait until we start digging. Interestingly, it turns out that a lot of the amphorae that we were getting at the Bay sites also turn up in really large quantities in Egypt, so that would seem to reinforce the suspected link between Dreamer’s Bay and Alexandria. We also suspect very strongly that they may have been making the amphorae on Akrotiri. It’s long been suspected there was a source of the type (LR1, pot-fans) on Cyprus, now all we’ve got to do is find it. Easier said than done, but another thing to think about.

The last hour before sundown was spent with one of our contacts off the base who reckoned he’d found some archaeology near the end of the main runway. We went and took a look, and indeed he had. He’d previously found Roman coins, and there was a steady scatter of Roman pottery and really good quality vessel glass throughout the scrub, but very little roof tile and no real sign of buildings. Odd. It’s very sandy there though as it’s very near the sea-front, so the whole thing may be buried under the sand. As it’s Roman, it’s not really our concern. We’ve probably already got about two centuries worth of digging with the Byzantine sites, so we’ll record the location of the finds, and leave it for somebody else, although we might stick a test-pit in at some point in the future to see how deeply it’s buried so the site can be managed properly in the future. It’s about 400m from a nice beach with a bar if anyone fancies it.

The Vets all went off to have a curry with the Gurkhas tonight, so the rest of us went out of the base to Akrotiri village and had a really nice Meze, finished off with a few Brandy Sours in the Sergeant’s Mess. Tomorrow will mainly be showing people around the sites, and hopefully getting the permissions we need for next year. All being well, I’m going to be back here next February for the next stage of work, for which we’re going to need a really good landscape archaeologist and a geophys team. If only I knew such people… :)

There’s a few photos to go with this on my Fabcebook page

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.762638453783628.1073741882.169284376452375&&uploaded=6

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Into the Neutral Zone

11/12/2014

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This morning I dragged myself out of my pit at 6 in the morning. Who knew there were two six o’clocks in the day? A very quick breakfast and into the minibus at 6.45am. An insanely early start to the day (for me, anyway), but the day promised to just a little bit special. Diarmaid had managed to arrange us a tour, courtesy of the UN peace-keeping force, of the ‘neutral zone’ in Nicosia. This is basically the area of the city which separates the Greek and Turkish halves of the island. Nicosia, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the only divided city in Europe.

After a 90 minute drive we arrived at the UN base, and were met by some lovely blokes from the Mercian Regiment, although they were all wearing the blue berets of the UN, who they were on secondment to, along with Argentinean and Slovakian troops. The Regimental Sergeant Major greeted us all and shook us by the hand. I think he only broke three bones in mine.

Though the security barriers and away we went. We wound our way through the streets of the ‘neutral zone’, now patrolled by the UN, which had basically been preserved pretty much unchanged since the Turkish ‘intervention’ of 1974 (diplomacy prevents it being called an invasion and, given the political upheaval that preceded the Turks coming in, it seems a fair description). Each place we stopped had its own back-story, some grim, some hilarious. There first place we saw had been a school, but became a Turkish strong-hold during some of the fiercest fighting. It’s estimated that around 2000 Turkish troops died defending the place, with the front and sides of the building still riddled with holes from what looked like heavy-calibre machine-guns. It’s now a memorial garden to the fallen over on the Turkish side. For security reasons, we weren’t allowed to photograph in some areas, as the border still has observation points with armed troops in them and they get a bit twitchy if they see people taking pictures.

At the other end of the scale are some of the antics after the cease-fire. There was a wall built by the Turks to seal off a roadway crossing the border. This was to built to an agreed height, and once that height was reached, the UN painted the top line of bricks white. A week or so later, it was noticed that the wall was considerably higher, but the line of white-painted bricks was still at the top. It dawned on the UN that every night since they’d painted the line, the Turks had come along, removed the top row, put on another row of bricks, then put the original painted ones back. The UN finally put a stop to this by painting a line of bricks 10 rows from the top, meaning the Turks would have had to remove 800 bricks to add another row.

Elsewhere, the Turks had fortified a position using old wooden tea-chests with their bases pointing towards the Greek side. This was also illegal under the peace agreement, because if the chests contained earth or concrete, they would count as new fortifications. The Turks claimed they were simply there to stop the Greeks seeing what they considered to be a sensitive area. An agreement was again reached, this time that the Turks would turn the tea-chests around to show that they were empty. Unfortunately, they forgot to include a time-scale in which the Turks had to turn the chests round, so the Turks, once a month, would turn up with a full military band, flags and banners and a senior general, and with great ceremony, one tea-chest would be turned around to face the Greeks. I did ask the young cavalry Lieutenant who was showing us around how they all managed to keep their faces straight when dealing with this sort of thing, but he just half-smiled and shook his head.

As we moved away from what had been the areas of fiercest fighting, we hit an area of what had been shops. In one big department store, one of the counters was still stocked with type-writer ribbons and ink, amongst other things, complete with the original 1974 advertising. We then proceeded down what had been Nicosia’s equivalent of Bond Street before the intervention, including an underground car-park stocked with brand-new cars dating to 1974, all with 40 km on the clock. They’d been driven there from the port in preparation to being placed in the show-room, but never got that far. Above the car-park was a shopping mall, complete with an impromptu museum which the UN troops had put together over the years, including some ancient TV sets.

We then proceeded back to the van, and off for a quick lunch in the UN headquarters, which was what was once the Ledras Palace hotel, in the 1970s the only 5-star hotel on the island, and a regular haunt of Elizabeth Taylor. I doubt she’d recognise it now. Back to the bus, and then to what was for me, the high point of the day: Nicosia International Airport. The airport is in the area which is the main base of the UN in the area, and scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict. It has remained deserted ever since. The terminal itself was only built in 1969, and was state-of-the-art, including such novelties as automatic doors. From the outside, it looks like something out of an episode of Thunderbirds. Inside was like the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. All the original seats in the lounge area were still there, as were the shop fittings the kitchen area, the duty-free shop and some of the original advertising boards, but everything was covered with a thick layer of pigeon droppings. Simply one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen.

After this, we were taken to see a plane that was still sitting on the tarmac, although its engines had been removed, and it was time to go, and back to base just as the sun was going down.

I’ll put a load of pictures of today on my ‘open’ Facebook page, I’d really recommend anyone interested taking a look, I’ve had what can only be described as a once-in-a-lifetime experience today, and the pictures probably do the place far more justice than my prose.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.762016040512536.1073741881.169284376452375&&uploaded=63

Tomorrow: Helicopters. Possibly.

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The Lost City of Akrotiri

11/11/2014

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The day started with me, after breakfast, watching a massive, black U2 spy plane taking off from the runway near the Sergeant’s Mess. It’s easy to forget that this idyllic area stuffed with fantastic archaeology is not very far at all, maybe 200km or so, from a war zone, and the base is playing an active role. Everyday we see fighter-bombers taking off and then later landing, sometimes with their pay-loads still attached, sometimes not.

There was a slight change of plan today as Elena, the Cypriot archaeologist who is running the monastery excavation, was unable to come to site today, so Jim-Bob was required to manage proceedings in her absence, meaning our trip to the Dump Site to clean up the possible plunge-pool had to be postponed.

I instead took to the road with Diarmaid and Mark to get some maps and APs (aerial photographs) so we could start plotting the GPS data we’ve been collecting over the last week or so. This is where things got a bit James Bond. We went to [undisclosed location], showed our passes at the gate and then parked up outside [undisclosed location]. We entered the building through a heavily fortified turnstile gate, handed in our camera and phones, passed through another couple of metal doors, and then we were in. The place were we’d arrived was essentially the British Armed Forces map room for the entire planet. If anyone from a platoon going out on patrol to a general planning an invasion wants a map, this it where it comes from. Despite its importance, the actual offices weren’t much bigger than a couple of large cupboards, with lots of central heating ducts running through it. The walls were lined with large, blown-up aerial photos of all sorts of obscure little places, mainly in desert locations, with the buildings marked as to their function. Having watched the U2 take off earlier, I’d guess the source of the pictures.

We headed back through the security barriers, retrieved our phones and my camera, and headed back to base. In the centre of the secure area, there is a large, undeveloped area of scrubland maybe 500m across. The edge of this is marked with yellow concrete bollards which is military-speak for ‘there appears to be something archaeological here, no digging holes or driving tanks through it please’. However nobody had really looked at it pretty much since the base was built, so Diarmaid thought it might be a good idea if we went and had a mooch about to see what was there.

As soon as we stepped onto the scrubland, we started to notice stone and bits of roof-tile, and the further we went, the denser the stone got, until we were walking on pretty much solid rubble and tile. And it just went on and on and on. There were visible wall-lines, and something that was either a baptismal pool or part of a bath-house. There wasn’t much pottery, but what was there seemed very similar to the sort of stuff we’ve been getting down at the water-front sites. The clincher came when we found a very fresh couple of sherds from a Byzantine pottery frying-pan lid, which is almost certainly 5th – 7th century, so the same date as the Dreamer’s Bay sites and the monastery the Vets are digging. A bit more rooting around, and it became clear the whole 500m x 500m area of scrubland was completely solid Byzantine archaeology. By the time Diarmaid had found a piece of a marble column base and I’d got a piece of a decorated glass vessel and a chunk of what looked suspiciously like a marble font, I was beginning to giggle slightly hysterically. We headed back to the Landie and had a bit of a sit-down. The pair of us agree, and I can’t see any other interpretation, that we’ve found the town that goes with the port(s) and the monastery. It’s located mid-way between the two, and is about 0.5km from both. And it’s smack in the middle of the base.

It was now time for lunch. Having found a lost Byzantine city which, even for this project, is not an everyday occurrence, we decided this merited a visit to the base beach-bar. There’s more archaeology to hunt for this afternoon, but, having been both James Bond and Indiana Jones in the same morning, I’m off to soak my aching feet in the briny for a bit.

As it turned out, we didn’t have much to do in the afternoon with the expedition to the Dump Site having been postponed, so lunch at the beach got quite extended. Ah well, them’s the breaks….

Later, we met up with Jim-Bob and Mark and took them for a stroll over what is now known as the City Site at the base. They were as impressed as we were in the morning. J-B told me they’d done a little experiment up on the monastery site today. One of the vets, Karl, who’s something like 90% blind with only pinpoint tunnel vision, was getting a bit bored sieving, so they decided to let him have a go with a trowel on site. Giving the bright sunlight, he was pretty much digging by touch. The result? One immaculately level trowelled area with any stones and bits of tile left in situ.

As ever, the photos to go with today’s shenanigans are on my Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.761579760556164.1073741880.169284376452375&&comment_id=761586203888853&offset=0&total_comments=1&notif_t=photo_album_comment

Tomorrow, we doing a bit of more up-to-date archaeology with a visit to the Green Zone, the abandoned ‘neutral zone’ controlled by the British which separates the Greek and Turkish sides of the island. There’s an entire holiday resort there which has been abandoned intact since 1974, so I’m off to do a bit of urban exploring. There’s also rumours of us getting our hands on a helicopter on Thursday. Fingers crossed.

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Back to Dreamer’s Bay

11/10/2014

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Last night, I discovered that Brandy Sours in the Sergeant’s Mess bar are 90c each. Oh dear. Let’s just say I was a bit slow getting going this morning.

Today, it was back to Dreamer’s Bay to do a bit more exploring and survey. Our first stop was a hilltop behind the bay, the Dump Site, which was the site of an excavation by an American university which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. We found it fairly quickly, and ‘hole’ would perhaps be a more accurate description rather than ‘trench’. Phil Harding would have had a fit if he saw the sloping, zig-zag section. Despite the dreadful quality of the ‘excavation’, it’s pretty obvious that what they had half-dug out is the plunge-pool of a bath-house, so it looks like Dreamer’s Bay had either posh ‘retirement villas’, merchant’s houses and/or administrative buildings on the hill behind the port.

Further down, at the bottom of the hill but set back from the bay, there were bits of stone-work poking out in the scrub, and, like at the water-front, a lot of pottery. Significantly, the pottery here looks a lot more domestic than that on the water-front, and we noticed a lot of African Red-Slip Ware, a high-quality table-ware not dissimilar to Samian Ware, but later in date. It looks like we’ve therefore identified a domestic zone set back from the harbour, perhaps where the inns, brothels and hotels etc. were located. Certainly, there wasn’t much Red-Slip Ware down on the waterfront, with the pottery spreads there mainly consisting of lots and lots of Amphora, large transport pots for wine and oil, and what you would expect to find in an area where warehouses and like are located.

I also did a bit of TV this morning in the form of a brief interview with a journalist from British Forces TV. The video should be up on the internet and some point this week, I’ll post a link when it appears. Then back to the mess for lunch. Chicken pie and chips. Just need a nice shady spot for a snooze now, but suspect that’s not going to happen….

Back on the road again after lunch and a flying visit to the new Akrotiri Environmental Centre, outside the wire and built for the Cypriots by the MoD as an educational facility for local school-kids. The centre overlooks the salt-lake and marshes in the centre of the island, where, in season, flocks of Flamingos gather to feed on the brine-shrimp. Sadly for us it was out of season, but we were more interested in the fact that the place has a lab, stores and a lecture theatre. One for a future blag for the project…

Back to Dreamers Bay and more poking about. More and more archaeology is starting to appear. We’ve found more stone buildings, including one wall with wall-plaster still attached sticking out of the ground, and an eroding sand cliff with the slope littered with brick and burnt limestone. Erosion is clearly the main problem here, and not just the cliffs with the tombs on that we were looking at last week. The harbour area site is sat on very soft mudstone and limestone, under which is a layer of extremely hard basalt. Despite being in the Med, the wind can whip the waves up and they break over the basalt and chew away the soft rock above, taking the archaeology with it.

We did a bit more searching at the area at the bottom of the hill back from the site and noted a lot more African Red-Slip Ware and cooking pottery in the form of frying-pan handles, which are very typically Byzantine. Curiously, the dividing line between the industrial area with its spreads of Amphora and the domestic area with the Red-Slip Ware is the track which leads down to the beach. We’re now beginning to suspect that the track that people use to get to the beach may have originally have been of one of the main roads through the Byzantine port!

As ever, the photos which tie in with today’s blog are on my Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.761143313933142.1073741879.169284376452375&

Tomorrow, we’re going to head back up to the Dump Site, get its location recorded via GPS and tidy up the mess made by the Americans who dug the probable plunge-pool, and maybe straighten out the section and get a photo of it.

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R & R Weekend

11/9/2014

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Saturday

It’s the weekend, so time for the digging to stop and a bit of sight-seeing to commence. We loaded everyone into the minibus, and headed off to Paphos. Paphos, nowadays, is a large city and a very popular tourist destination, but has been occupied since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, and probably earlier. It’s got a very large archaeology park, with the so-called ‘Tombs of the Kings’, which are some very well-preserved Roman rock-cut tombs (not that any kings were buried there), a Roman theatre and some stunning mosaics from some of the rich Roman town-houses. Naturally, with this in mind, we headed straight for the long row of bars and restaurants that line the harbour of the modern town. I’ve actually been on holiday to Paphos in the past and have seen most of the archaeology there, so no problem as far as I was concerned. We bar-hopped for a while then settled down at a nice bar right on the water-front and a bit of laid-back drinking and eating ensued. As the afternoon wore on, Jim-Bob and I were starting to get a bit twitchy as we’d gone an entire half-day without doing any archaeology, and there is a really nice medieval castle on the harbour bar at Paphos, which neither of us had explored. This also coincided with some of the crews’ attention turning to the cocktail menu, so we left them to it and went exploring.

The castle at Paphos probably sums up the medieval history of the island in one structure. The tower was one of two built by the Franks to guard the harbour in 1222, the curtain wall by the Venetians in 1373, and the whole thing was restored by the Ottoman Turks in 1570 after an earthquake. The other tower was damaged by an earthquake and then blown up by the Venetians. The Ottomans handed the castle over to the Brits in 1878, who used it as a salt-store until 1935. It’s a lovely little structure, with some fantastic views across sea and land.

We headed back to the cocktail drinkers and it was getting pretty messy, as they seemed intent on getting through the whole menu, and may well have done. We poured them back into the minibus, and headed off back to base. On return, a few of them disappeared off in the general direction of the American bar. I had a couple of beers and retired for an early night. I’m clearly getting old…..

Sunday

Up relatively bright and early, and into the minibus again. The cocktail crew were, perhaps unsurprisingly, noticeable by their absence. First stop was the castle of Kolossoi.

This was originally founded in the early 13th century when it was given to the Knights Hospitallers, and rebuilt in 1454, which is the building which stands today. It is basically a square English keep, but sat in southern Cyprus, although was largely residential through its history. It’s a very odd structure in that it looks very out of place, but all becomes clear when you see the long, low structure next to the castle. It looks like a chapel, but is in fact a very-well preserved medieval sugar factory. This area of Cyprus was mentioned by chroniclers as being a famous sugar-growing area, and also famous for sweet wine, so given the astronomical cost and rarity of sugar and the importance of the wine trade in medieval western Europe, one suspects that someone made a great deal of money out of it. I don’t know if there’s any other intact medieval sugar factories in Europe, but if there are, I haven’t seen one. Remarkable.

A quick break for an ice-cream and a fresh orange juice, and away, heading for Kourion, vast Roman city. Now as some of you may know, I’m not a great fan of Roman archaeology, mainly because most of the stuff we find is Britain is a bit rubbish, really, being badly preserved and not that great quality to begin with (although there are exceptions). In the Mediterranean area it’s a different kettle of fish. Kourion is vast and magnificent. It was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in the fourth century, which when you consider the fact that it’s sat on top of a 200-foot-high hill, is pretty mind-boggling. Apparently, the pre-earthquake deposits were covered in 50cm of sand and pebbles. Basically, the wave buried the place with the sea-bed and beach below. Most of the visible remains dates to the rebuild, later 4th – 7th century, and include a virtually intact theatre. There's and acoustic 'sweet spot' in the middle of the stage, marked by a hole, and when one stands on it and talks, the shape of the theatre not only amplifies the voice, but also gives it a very slight reverberation effect at about the same level as a modern vocal microphone. Astonishing.

Interestingly, for us anyway, it seems the city was abandoned in the later 7th century after another earthquake and attacks by Persian pirates, so it seems Kourion, the monastery we’re excavating and the sites we’ve found around Dreamer’s Bay were all abandoned at roughly the same time. This also coincides with Byzantines losing control of Alexandria, and it looks very much like the economy of this stretch of the south Cyprus coast simply collapsed in the late 7th century, and never really recovered until relatively recently. Definitely food for thought.

Talking of food, time for a late lunch, so down to the bottom of the cliffs to the beach and a beach-bar selling the most fantastic and inexpensive seafood. The barbecued octopus was just fabulous. A quick half-hour soaking my tired feet in the lovely warm sea, accompanied by Jim-Bob lying in 6 inches of water and flapping wildly every time a small wave went over him (he can’t swim). Back in the bus, back to base and time for the Sergeant’s Mess and some blogging and a few beers. A really fantastic day. And certainly better than looking at drizzle in Northampton!

As usual, the photos which tie in with this blog are on my Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.760687967312010.1073741878.169284376452375&&uploaded=9

Tomorrow, I’m doing my ‘bloke off the telly’ thing and doing an interview with British Forces TV, and, hopefully, starting to think about the pottery a bit.

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Monk-y Business

11/7/2014

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Last night, rather than spending the evening in the Sergeant’s Mess, we had a communal meal round at one of the houses, followed by Diarmaid’s Pub Quiz. I was on a team with the two James, with James E now rechristened ‘Jim-Bob’ to avoid confusion (he’s from Suffolk, so it seems appropriate). I’m glad to say our team, “Baldy, Beardie and Big-‘Ead”, was narrowly victorious, and claimed the no-expense-spared-whatsoever prizes (some t-shirts Diarmaid appears to have got from a drinks promotion somewhere). Jim-Bob was very proudly wearing his on site today.

This morning, my first visit to the excavation where most of the crew are working. The site is a small part of an absolutely massive monastery, run by a Cypriot archaeologist, Elana, who is doing a quite remarkable job on a budget of virtually zero. We also had a couple of high-profile military visitors in the form Colonel Roe, commander OPTAG who oversees all the training for service personnel deployed by British Armed Services, and WO1 Rafferty, the Regimental Sergeant Major for OPTAG. Elana gave the three of us a tour of the excavations. The site is huge, with the area which has so far revealed being just one small part of a massive complex which was in its hey-day in the 7th century. She showed us photos of the mind-bogglingly high-quality mosaics which cover most of the excavated area, which sadly (for us) have been temporarily reburied under gravel to stabilize them until they can get a conservation team in and get a roof put over the excavations. A lot of loose tesserae (mosaic tiles) are being found all the time, most of which are absolutely tiny, always a sign of very high quality. They’ve also found loads of very exquisite carved marble which almost certainly came from workshops in Constantinople, and it’s pretty clear from the size of the place and the quality of the finds that this is one of the most important sites in the early Christian world, arguably only behind Constantinople and Jerusalem in its importance.

The site itself is in a natural bowl in the hills, and is very sheltered, so even though the temperature today is probably only in the mid-high 20s, it feels a lot, lot hotter on site. At the end of the tour we were taken to the ‘saloon’, a little cluster of tables and chairs under a tree behind the spoil-heap, and given coffee and lemonade by the two relentlessly cheerful Cypriot ladies who do the finds-washing on site. The amount of finds is simply staggering; the monastery was abandoned sometime in the 640s after a major earthquake, and a some point not long afterwards, the roof collapsed. Consequently, there is a huge amount of roof-tile, every single piece of which has been washed by the cheerful Cypriot ladies, and carefully piled up into a huge, carefully-constructed heap. There isn’t actually much in the way of finds which weren’t part of the original structure, as they’re working in an area which would have been inside the building which during its period of use, and would have been kept spotlessly clean, but they have had coins and pottery out of the foundations and make-up layers which tie-in nicely with the historical evidence. The business end of the church area ("The Martyrium") has a series of five apses, which probably originally contained burial of holy relics and/or saints. Four of these were emptied when the place was abandoned and the relics taken to Constantinople, including a piece of the True Cross, but one was still intact and contained a burial that was either deemed not important enough, or was buried under rubble after the earthquake. The grave had a carved slab over it with a hole in it so people could pour oil in as an offering. It’s a truly awesome site, with about a century or so’s worth of digging left.

Work finished about one, and we all headed off for lunch. The afternoon trip today was to see St Nicolas’s Monastery of the Cats. For reasons which will become clear, we didn’t really get to find out too much about the history of the place, but its name derived from the fact that someone had established it to help rid the island of a plague of snakes. So, into the Landie and off we go. The monastery is a couple of kilometres outside the main gate, so the journey was a short one. We arrived about 2.45pm. The main entrance appeared closed, but the displayed opening times were 2.30pm in summer and 3pm in winter. A side gate was open, so we wandered in there. There was a small church ahead of us, with a definitely open gift shop next to it. One of our party went into the gift shop and asked if the place was open. The lady behind the counter assured him it was, and to let ourselves in and wander around, so we did.

Behind the church was a porticoed walkway typical of the average medieval monastery, and some reasonably well-tended gardens, and as the name of the place suggested, lots and lots of cats, in a bewildering range of size, shapes and colours. The monastery itself appeared to be medieval, but with bits of classical/Byzantine sculpture incorporated into it. I’m guessing that these came from a pile of rubble and bits of wall located in the courtyard in front of the church which looked very archaeological, but that’s about as far as we got as we began to hear very angry shouting coming from the far end of the garden. There then appeared an ancient nun who looked and sounded like a cross between the Mad Cat Lady in “The Simpsons” and Brian’s mother in “Life of Brian”. She was very, very angry with us indeed, and was gesticulating and shouting in Greek (possibly), which none of us speak. A small group of locals had wandered in at this point as well, and they also got the full hair-dryer treatment from her, so it wasn’t just us it would seem. Jim-Bob, James and I slid into the church to have a look and managed to get a few pictures of the beautifully-preserved medieval interior and the icons, before MadCatLadyBrian’sMum found us and began shouting at us, and very pointedly closing and bolting the church doors. We took the hint, and left. Someone went back into the gift shop and asked what was going on, and lady behind the counter just shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. So, we appear to have been thrown out of a monastery, although none of us has the faintest idea why. I reckon one of the cats grassed us up. Still, at least she didn’t throw any at us.

Again, I’ve put the pictures which go with today on my Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.759651124082361.1073741875.169284376452375&&uploaded=25

The weekend should see us going a bit further afield to do some sight-seeing. Unless we all wake up in the morning and find we’ve been turned into cats.

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Snakes And Adders

11/6/2014

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Day 3 and time to do some archaeology. I was grabbed at breakfast by the survey team (James E, James S and Steve) to be taken off for a morning looking around some of the sites that they were looking at. Into the Landie, and away we go.

First stop was the Firing Range, to the west of Dreamer’s Bay, the main focus for the field survey. At the reception area, staffed by some friendly locals and Ray the Dog, it was time for snake drill. Apparently, there’s a lot of Flat-Headed Vipers in the scrub and these are seriously dangerous. So, “Make lots of noise and beat the bushes with a stick if you’re walking through scrub and they’ll probably slither off. However, they are quite territorial, so may respond by standing their ground. If you see one, and they’re in a ‘S’ shape, get out the way quick as they’re about to strike. Jump sideways, not backwards, and they’ll probably miss. If they don’t miss, they’ll probably hit between the knee and ankle. If they hit, lie down and inform the rest of the party, and keep as still as possible. Get a tourniquet on about 4 inches above the bite, and get the rest of the party to carry you to the nearest hospital. Don’t try and walk as you’ll need to keep your heart rate as low as possible to give you the best chance of survival.” OK then, single file through the scrub with the lightest person at the front, which wasn’t me by a long chalk I’m glad to say for once. The rest of the local snakes are non-venomous, and the scorpions are largely not particularly poisonous. The range has only been used for small arms, so no worries about unexploded ordnance.

We drove over to the cliffs area in the Landie and parked up. I got out and looked down and the first thing I saw was a fragment of a white-slipped Amphora, probably Byzantine-era Egyptian. As we wandered around the scrub, there was a steady trickle of fragments of pottery, mainly red amphora of probably local manufacture. The main features appeared to be natural sink-holes, but some of these had been modified to function as hermit’s holes, some of which had large Juniper bushes growing next to them. Yet more evidence that ‘Life of Brian’ is a documentary. We also noted the existence of a single rock-cut grave, but not a lot else, so we headed down off the cliffs to the beach area.

Down by the sea, it was pretty obvious we were dealing with a harbour. We noted a few possible walls, but there were some massive pottery scatters, with the ground completely carpeted with sherds, again mainly bits of the red wares of probably local origin, but also the occasional white-slipped fragment of probable Egyptian stuff. Lots of amphora handles and bowl rims, and not a lot else. This is very typical of port areas of the Roman and Byzantine worlds, with oil and wine amphorae broken by the thousand at the point of landing. They appear to have simply emptied them then thrown them away. James and James were recording the positions of the hermit’s holes and pot scatters using a nice piece of portable GPS kit, although the technological impressiveness was somewhat undermined by James E having forgotten a note-book, meaning he had to write the co-ordinates on his hand. Hopefully he’ll transcribe them before he has a shower this evening.

Back to the Landie, and round to Dreamer’s Bay. Again, massive scatters of redware pottery, to the extent that it was impossible to walk anywhere without treading on Byzantine pot. There’s the foundation walls of several large warehouses about 20m long at the edge of the natural harbour, and we’re hoping ultimately to put a trench into them one day, but we need to get it all surveyed for now. I gathered up a small collection of pottery, which is beginning to make a little bit of sense now. There’s at least three different redware fabrics, maybe more, but at the moment there’s a fine smooth type, another with harsh inclusions, possibly calcite, and a fairly soft one with big pieces of rounded chalk or limestone. Middle and Later Byzantine pot appears to be virtually absent, although we noted a single piece of red-painted whiteware as well as the white-slipped sherds, and one piece of North African or Turkish red-slipped pot, so, my first guesstimate is the 5th – 7th centuries AD, but I’ve a LOT more analysis and reading to do before that’s definite.

By now it was mid-morning and starting to get hot, well, mid-high 20s, but warm enough for November. Back to the Landie again, and up on to the cliffs to the east of the bay. We knew from the initial survey and previous work that there are rock-cut tombs up there, but it became clear very quickly that there are far more than anyone suspected. In an hour or so we noted dozens of them, and it’s also clear that many, many more have gone into the sea. The cliffs are crumbling at a fairly alarming rate, with some massive cracks opened up in some places due to sink-holes, so we’re going to have to get the tombs recorded as quickly as possible, especially as some may still have their contents intact. In places it there were massive lumps of rock which had detached themselves already, but fragments of tombs were still visible on the top of them. It was very noticeable that there was an almost complete lack of pot in and around these tombs, so it seems very likely that what we are dealing with is the eastern cemetery for the Dreamer’s Bay harbour/settlement, more correctly called the Eastern Necropolis, or city of the dead, so no settlement activity.

It was getting towards lunchtime now and we were pretty much out of water, so time to head back to the base for a cold drink, pausing briefly to stop off at Lania, where there is a series of ?Hellenistic rock-cut buildings. One of these is absolutely massive and is either a Mithraeum or an underground warehouse, depending on who you believe. One of the most impressive things is that all this archaeology is within five minute drive of the base houses, and, Lania aside, all appears to be part of one massive settlement. This first year is mainly intended as a fact-finding mission, and I think the first facts we’ve found is that we’ve got a heck of a lot of work to do, and the site has got quite stunning potential. Right, time for a shower, a cold beer or two and some internet time down at the Sergeant’s Mess. I’ll put a bunch of photos of today’s meanderings up on my ‘open’ Facebook page in a bit, as there’s really too many to go one here.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Paul-Blinkhorn-Anglo-Saxon-Medieval-Pottery-Specialist/169284376452375?ref=bookmarks

Tomorrow, I’m off to the excavations at the Byzantine monastery.

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Passing Out (and Back In Again)

11/5/2014

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Had a bit of a wobble with the internet in the sergeant’s Mess yesterday, as it refused to let me connect to it. Was solved today by restarting the router. I did indeed try switching it off and back on again. Don’t knock it. So, the post I put up earlier was yesterday, here’s today:

It’s Bonfire Night and I’m sat here in glorious sunshine in shorts and a t-shirt. That’s definitely a first. The world certainly looks a better place than it did this time yesterday, especially after a decent breakfast, a shower, and clean clothes.

We eventually landed two hours late and it was indeed dark. Diarmaid met me at the terminal and it was straight off to the Sergeant’s mess for food and an unspecified number of beers and collapse into bed. Large (500ml) bottles of Keo (the local Eurofizz) are one Euro. God bless the RAF.

We’re lodged in two five-bedroom officer’s houses. The tell-tale signs of archaeologists being present are already here: random clothing and boots scattered around the hall-way, banks of black-boxes with flashing red or green lights plugged into every available wall-socket, stray power leads scattered around the floor, and the fridge contains beer, a bottle of milk, more beer, a box of chocolate biscuits and beer. There’s also a cuddly dinosaur on the living-room table. He seems to be the responsible adult when Diarmaid isn’t around.

“Responsible Adult”

Today should consist of a tour of the sites, particularly the probably Roman and possibly Greek and maybe later and-an-outside-chance-of prehistoric harbour. The site is apparently carpeted with pottery, as is often the case with these things, so the first thing we’ve got to do is formulate some sort of sampling strategy as we simply won’t be able to deal with the sheer amount present, unless I can get 20 assistants and live to be 200. There’s a whole series of warehouses there, and apparently rock-cut tombs in the cliff-face, some of which may not be looted. Access is only possible to those if you’re part mountain goat, so I’m leaving that to the young ‘uns, which is everybody else, as it turns out I’m the oldest person on the crew. The epithet ‘Granddad’ is surely only a matter of time….

I’ve already looked at my first piece of pot, the handle of a somewhat under-fired red amphora. Apparently the beach at the site pretty much consists of this rather than sand. Have unpacked the digital microscope and magnifying glass. Pot monkey is go!

Later…..

Well, we didn’t get the tour of the sites due to a slight case of military paperwork. I needed to get my pass for the base, which is a high security area. To get the pass we had to leave the base and go to the issuing office. We got there, and I didn’t have my passport (duh…) which was back in my room. So then I had to get a temporary pass to get back in to the base to get my passport, which I got and we then returned to the pass office and I got my pass. By this time the sun was getting low, so we decided to head off to Limassol for a bit of a look around. We got there, and it was shut. Half-day closing. Ah well. Back to the Sergeant’s Mess for a Bonfire Night Barbie and a few more of those lovely 1 Euro bottles of Keo.

I’ve also acquired an assistant. His name is Igor. Well, it is now, anyway.

More tomorrow.

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Epi(b)logue: Abroad Thoughts from Home

The Home Straight

And Now, The End Is Near…

Into the Neutral Zone

The Lost City of Akrotiri

Back to Dreamer’s Bay

R & R Weekend

Monk-y Business

Snakes And Adders

Passing Out (and Back In Again)

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