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.
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.
RSS Feed
