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¬if_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.
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¬if_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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