Digging in Corinth

I wasn’t supposed to be here in April. I wasn’t supposed to meet the 7 students who descended from Athens on April 5th. Originally, I wasn’t invited to take part in the actual excavations here. My invitation was to come to Corinth from January 18th to March 31st, leaving in time to make room for those who would come for the first session of excavations in April. However mid February James, upon deciding I was not useless, invited me to stay through the end of April and participate in the dig. It took me some time to decide whether or not I was up to it or even wanted to stay in Greece that long, but I eventually decided to stay through April 18th, the last day of my 90 day tourist visa.

To be honest I was nervous about how it all would go. Archaeology phD candidates with multiple years of experience would be heading up the digging, and I would be drawing any architecture that was uncovered, a skill I hadn’t even learned when the opportunity was afforded. I decided I would take a quick trip to Santorini, coming back in time for Easter, after which the dig would begin immediately. “How bad can it be?” I thought. Sure I might screw up, but after all it would be two weeks and I would likely never see any of these people again.

Well those two weeks have come and gone, and successfully I might add.

Excavation life is interesting. The first addition it brought to my life was a roommate, Mark, who I have been getting to know these past 3 months. 6:40 am and the alarm clock beckons us to wake, and 10 minutes later my feet finally hit the floor. Contacts, brush my teeth, dusty jeans, t-shirt, allergy meds, sunglasses, water… check. Now its off to breakfast, and there is no lingering smell of bacon to draw me in. I stumble to the breakfast table - its now ten after seven – and fill my cup with hot tea. Within moments a scrambled egg appears in front of me, lovingly prepared by one of the house ladies, and then a voice yells “TOAST!” I thrust my plate out just in time to catch an oddly shaped piece of slightly toasted bread hurling through the air. Butter. Jam. Eat. One shot of orange juice followed by chugging a glass of water. I wonder, “Why am I awake?” but because there is no time to cogitate on that I am up from the table and down the hall to collect my drawing supplies. Out the door, down the street, through the gate, and down the treacherous maze of scarps, planks, and stones into the trench. It’s time for the excavation to begin.

All in a line we make our way - hands full of notebooks, bags, and toolkits – five twenty-something Americans into the trenches where the Greeks await to be told what to do. It’s still cold in the morning when we arrive on site, with dew on the rocks and makeshift ramps. Until the sun reveals itself from behind the trees to the east, it will be. Things get going, but it’s not the noisy ruckus of commands ordered in foreign tongues that Agatha Christie has led me to believe. It’s actually fairly quiet. Around 10 am the air comes to life with the intermittent sounds of  the mobile fish salesman announcing his good, screaming school children competing on the playground across the street, and the whistle of the guard on the archaeological site below us, warning tourists to stay off of the monuments. With the sounds comes the sun, and when the sun comes layers of clothes begin to go. It quickly gets very warm. In a country where people on the street are wearing coats and scarves in 70 degree weather, seeing the workman getting down to t-shirts means it’s hot.

Two things characterize the sensory experience of the excavation… sun and dirt. As I stand over a tape measure triangulating points with a ruler and plumb bob, I can feel my farmers tan getting worse. Occasionally it gets so hot that I pull my sleeves up over my shoulders, also offering them an opportunity at the sun, but for the most part I have a very nice t-shirt line being reinforced day after day. Then beats down relentlessly, heating my skin and hurting my eyes, but because it’s difficult to draw looking through a shaded lens, my sunglasses spend most of their time on the top of my head. As much as the feeling of the sun on my neck is emblazoned in my memory, so is the taste and feel of freshly loosened dirt. By the time lunch rolls around my hands, clothes, face, and nostrils are thoroughly dusted in late antique dirt.

Some mornings are slow, and for me it is hit or miss. I help with the surveying and wait for something to draw. I’m here to draw architecture, so revealing a pit or cash of pots is somewhat irrelevant to me. I wait for something built to be uncovered – a wall, tiled floor, well, foundations, etc – and that’s when I strike into action. It’s actually entirely unexciting, but fairly interesting. The site architect, James, would normally be on site to draw these features as they are revealed, but because I am here he isn’t, which I’m not necessarily saying is a good thing. Every feature has to be accurately recorded - stone by stone, block by block, and cut by cut. It can be difficult at times with some of the trench leaders, who would rather keep digging then wait for the time necessary for things to be properly recorded, but as James told me the first week…. “Students don’t tell architects what to do.”

The time can really drag on, and it seems like an eternity before the mid morning break fondly referred to as “Bookman”. The origins of the term are disputable, but the workman love trying to beat the director by being first the yell it out, and once it has been, for 15 minutes the site is deserted. Those of us from the school go up to the area just south and above the excavation for tea, sandwiches and fruit, while the workman head off who knows where for cigarettes and beer most likely. By 10:30 we are all back to work, and so goes the day until 2:00pm when a vegetarian lunch greets me at the house.