Another week in paradise

The site of Kavos on the Island of Keros. You can an idea of the slope (extreme archaeology) and the trenches in which we work.

This was our last full week in the field, so things were very hectic. I am posting some images of the past week, including one wet and rainy day.

As many of you know, my job this year on the dig was to organize and run the field school. We had twelve student from the US and Canada, they were all awesome. This morning we had a "What I learned during my summer vacation" session - they all seemed to enjoy themselves although 3 admitted that the field school was as much field archaeology they ever want to do. This is an image of one of the students from UPenn, she has just inaugurated her trowel, using it for the first time to break soil - a momentous moment.

Here is another student from U Ottawa with a find from the wet sieve. We put all of the dirt we take out of the ground through mesh screens in order not to miss any important artifacts. We send 20% of the dirt to the Beach where the valiant wet sievers put the dirt in a contraption and let the sea water sieve the material. The remaining material is then dried and sorted. During this process we often find small obsidian fragments, small marble figurine feet and pieces of pottery.

Here I am in the Kavos area in Trench F2.

We are in the field on Monday and Tuesday mainly drawing plans of what we found. The majority of the students and archaeologists leave on Wednesday. I'll be here for a few more days doing some post-excavation wrap-up and then off to Naxos and Athens for post-doc research.