Boat Building and Assorted Other Things
by jfriesen
Luke asked me how they made boats. I decided to write just a little about the Athenians because their boats (triremes) were very important to them. In the Classical period there was no state of Greece like there is now. Instead there were cities that had their own governments called city-states. Athens was one of them. They were very powerful because of their triremes. I am putting a timeline back in so you can look at what time I am talking about. It was a long time ago. Remember that on the side of the blog there is a link where you can download this same timeline in Excel format and change it or add to it. If you find out something that should be added please let me know! 
I am going to give you a few URLs to look up to find out more if you are interested. That is what I would do to find out more than I know now! If you find anything interesting PLEASE write it as a comment on the blog!
All of these pages look pretty good, but since anyone can put anything up on the Internet look at more than one to be sure they are accurate (three that agree and don’t refer to each other as references are a good number)
Wikipedia Article on Triremes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme
The Classics Pages
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/trireme.htm
Official Trireme Page (modern rebuilding of trireme)
http://www.atm.ox.ac.uk/rowing/trireme/
Coventry Boat Builders (build replicas of wooden ships. This page tells exactly how they did it.)
http://www.covboat.demon.co.uk/
How was a trireme built?
http://home-3.tiscali.nl/~meester7/engtrireme.html
I have a few other pictures that I have taken and wanted to share sometime, so here they are:
An orange tree-right now there are lots of orange trees with fruit around old Corinth. When I was here before there were a lot of pomegranate trees full of pomegranates. Right now you can also see grapevines that are full of grapes (green ones), but they aren’t ripe yet. We are eating lots of fresh cherries and apricots.
While walking to the dig yesterday I was thinking about how it can be that so much stuff is left for archaeologists to dig up. It seems like our houses are so solid that it is hard to imagine them falling apart. How do you think that a house, like the picture on the left becomes a dig like the picture on the right? 
One other picture I took was of a place called the Demeter Sanctuary. This was a site that was excavated many years ago. It is up on Acrocorinth. The archaeologists found lots of small dining rooms, sort of like a restaurant, but this was a special one where they came to sacrifice to a god (Demeter). They ate on couches lying down. Maybe my friend Al can write a bit more about it, since that is about the extent of my knowledge! 
Today is the last day of digging. Next week is clean up time. The excavation season usually lasts from 6-9 weeks and is usually in May and June because that is when students can come to help dig. The rest of the year there is time to catalog all of the things that were found, put the pot shards together, and write articles about the new information found.
June 24th, 2006 at 3:31 am
I am making you do the research because I am just up late trying to get work done and I want to go to bed. Does Triremes translate to anything in English? Tri usually means 3. I thought maybe 3 sails, but in the picture I only see two. The answer is probably in one of the links, but I am too tired to look for it myself.
The only thing I can think of that would make houses into pieces is natural disasters-volcano, Earthquake, Tsunami. Or human created ones- war, bombs, terrorist attacks (no more twin towers in New York). But how do they get so far under the ground?
You are almost done in Greece and I haven’t heard anything about chocolate yet. And that made me think of factory tours. Do they have any factory tours in Greece?
How are you traveling to Turkey? How long will it take to get there from Greece?