I hope I will be able to write about Samos and Ephesus in the blog, but I don’t know what type of Internet connection I will have.

I was hoping on this last blog to have an update to the kiln and a picture of the finished kiln. Unfortunately, I was not able to make it out there yesterday and so I do not have a picture. I did go and talk with Paniotis and Maria to say goodbye. Paniotis gave me some corpozi (watermelon). He is always feeding me something when I stop by. Here is Theo having some stuffed zuccini that he made one time when we stopped by! Yesterday he told me about finding coins. He has always been an antique coin collector. As a child he learned that after the rain he could go and pick out the coins that came to the surface. He has collected over a thousand coins. While he was collecting he also learned about them and how to clean them. Someday he may set up a coin museum in back of his pottery store.

He explained why he thought that was different than antiquities theft. Antiquities theft is like what I wrote about the tombs being looted. It is not like Paniotis finding and collecting coins. People actually search for treasure and then they sell it for LARGE amounts of money to dealers who eventually sell the pieces for millions of dollars to museums. This has happened to a lot of very important items from Iraq and has been happening with items from Greece. Many countries are very concerned about losing evidence of their rich histories. Recently there has been a crack down on museums to prove where they got certain items and to return what they cannot prove to the countries that they came from. You may have seen some of that news in the papers.

Here in Corinth there was a large theft of items directly from the museum. Because of good record keeping the curator of the museum was able to clearly identify all of the pieces that were missing and they were eventually returned to the museum, but this does not always happen. All of these items are now on display in a special part of the museum.

There is a big difference between collecting things that you find in your own area and keeping them and searching for things to sell for huge amounts of money. In the United States in many places this is an issue for Indian Tribes because people have found and collected things from their ancestors that have become valuable.

Here are a few stray dog pics to finish out the blog for today!

Joe Rife and Tom Tartaron, archaeologists from the United States are working with the Greek Archaeological Service on an ancient graveyard. In this particular area there are lots and lots of tombs. Each tomb has several big chambers for burial and smaller niches in the top where ashes or urns can be placed for cremation. The problem here is that there are lots of looters who dig around to find the tombs and then steal anything of value from them. There is a lot of money in selling ancient finds which sometimes even end up in museums. These theives find pots and jewelry, but leave the bones. Archaeologists also like to find these things of value, but they are even more interested in what they can learn from the tombs, so even though they don’t like the looting, they can go in after the looters and clean up what is left and make sense of it. The looters are not interested in the bones, so they leave them and lots of other evidence of what the tombs were like originally.

Would you like to go down this hole? It would not be my first choice of an activity, but since I was with other people I went down. All over this hillside there are underground tombs. Joe and others think that people built the tombs for themselves, their families. their descendents and and possibly for servants working for them. Right now they have only been allowed by the government to dig out the tombs that had already been looted. Next year they will be allowed to do their own excavation and hopefully find tombs that are fully intact.

Once you step down through the hole it is pretty nice inside the tomb. This tomb was painted all over the inside with beautiful designs. One part of it used a paint that was very rare called Egyptian blue. Most of the tombs were plastered and left white.

There were some really nice people working on the tombs that invited us to eat lunch with them. I asked them if they ever saw ghosts and unfortunately they had no good ghost stories for me. However, they did tell me two stories that are unique to their dig. They also had a mysterious discovery while I was there.

Story 1: Everyone who digs at Kenchreai gets a rash. They are not sure what causes it and people who are more sensitive seem to get it worse. Their main theory is that there are caterpillars that crawl on the pine trees in the area and they have dust in their hairs that drops onto the pine trees and then onto people. These people look OK to me. I don’t see any rashes. They might have been pulling my leg.
Story 2: This goat head is their mascot. If any of them gets a scratch that bleeds they must rub some blood on the mascots head or else, it is said, it will cloud over and rain and they will not be able to swim in the beautiful beach in the afternoon. This actually did happen to one of the girls who works there, so they do have some proof that it is true. The site that they are working on is up on a cliff, but right down below is VERY beautiful beach and EVERY afternoon after working hard all day they get to go swimming. Maybe it is not so bad being an archaeologist and climbing in those holes and digging up bones.

Mystery: At lunch there was a hole that I did not really want to go down because there were no stairs cut and I am not much of a climber, but several of the people working at the dig went down. When they got inside they found several picks and shovels and also a little booklet (from the USA) to help identify what type of rocks and soils there are. Where did they come from? Why were they in that hole? It was a tomb that they had done some work on last year and it was not changed, so no one was using the tools in that particular tomb, The tools could have been from a looter, but the book was something that scholars would use??? mysterious!? I would love to read your guesses on where these things came from.

When I wrote about traffic here one comment asked about bicycles. In the US more and more adults are using bicycles as a mode of transportation. Since I saw the question I have been looking around and seen VERY few bikes. I have seen kids on bikes.There are lots of motorcycles, but no adults on bikes. I asked someone and they said that it was probably because the streets are so narrow that it would be really dangerous to ride a bike here. Also, it is seen as something that children do and adults would much rather ride in a car or on the bus.

The walls of the basin and the stairs were covered with plaster originally. This picture shows some of the remains of the plaster.

A few days ago I wrote about the types of things that they find at the dig and I was asked after that if they ever find bones. They find lots of bones. They find both the bones of animal and of people. Here is a picture of what is probably an animal bone that is just sticking out, not excavated.

I wrote in October about Mr. Hook. If you look at the link below and go to the bottom of the blog you will see his picture. He was killed in a greusome way with this hook which was still buried with his bones. http://malahinitx.blogspot.com/2005/10/archaeology.html

Tomorrow there will be more about bones when I tell you about a visit I am doing today to a graveyard they are excavating in Kenchrea (about 10 miles away!)

p.s. I was pretty surprised when I walked into the archaeological house this afternoon and there was a package for us for our birthdays! Thanks Susie and Tim!

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.

One of the important things to find is a coin. When archaeologists find them they are happy. Coins have pictures and dates on them and you can tell a lot about the date of a location by what coins are found around it.

Here is a coin in the ground. I don’t think I would even recognize it and pick it up, but the archaeologists and workers at the dig know what they are looking for. When a coin is found it looks like this:

When a coin is found it is brought into the museum and a card is filled out with information about it and then it is given to a coin specialist. He cleans the coin and fills out more information about what type it is and when it was made. Here is the SAME coin after it is clean!

The other thing that can help to predict the date is the pottery that is found. Archaeologists have learned more and more about pottery and now it is even more helpful than coins in dating what they are working on. Even just shards of broken pottery can help because the materials and types of pots from different centuries were different.

Here are some other things that are found:

Walls

Wells

Drains

All of these things tell archaeologits about the history of an area.
Sean asked me about houses. It was unclear to me whether he wanted to know about modern houses or ancient ones. They have not found remains of ancient houses at Corinth yet, but in a week or so I will be going to Ephesus, Turkey and there are remains of ancient houses there. Sean, let me know what you are interested in and I will write about it.

I haven’t had many questions lately (except from Susie who asks great ones!), so I hope that all of you are thinking and will send me questions by clicking on comment at the bottom.

I was asked if the site will stay up during the school year. It will stay up indefinitely and I hope that it continues to be useful!

I am ending the blog today with a special picture of Norma, the dig dog.

Now they use tools like these:

Every morning they set up this survey equipment to measure EXACTLY where things are that they find.

There are workmen who use the pick to turn up about one inch of the soil at a time. They then use a hoe to move the dirt around to see if there is anything in it. After they have cleared an area they shovel it into a bucket or a wheelbarrow and then take it to the sifting table. The dirt is then sifted so that any small things are not missed.

I even saw people using a broom to sweep dirt and a plastic shovel to dig carefully with.

One of the most important things that archaeologists do is to observe in detail everything about what is happening. They have notebooks where they record information about each layer of earth that is dug. When they find something they draw it in their notebooks and do a sketch of the area where it was found. A very important person on a dig is an architect. The architect draws careful pictures of walls and other things that are found. They use exact measures and a plumb line to make sure that their drawings are accurate.

So, archaeologists today do much more detailed and slow work, but they provide the future with a much clearer picture of what they found. Sometimes it can be boring and hot and now and then they find really exciting things.

It was VERY hot today (I think around 100 degrees) so we went to the beach in the afternoon. Here are a few pictures of the beach nearest us. The beach has lots of pebbles, but the water was very pleasant. In the second picture the white you see is the city of new Corinth. The opening to the canal is just off the far left of the picture.

They had dolls

Babies had rattles.

They had toy carts.

and they had other toys. This is a picture of a tiny chair, a tiny dog and a top (you know the kind that spins). This top is missing some parts, but was painted hot pink when it was new!

Today I hope to take some pictures of modern toys to give you an idea of what kids today play with. If I can do that I will include it in tomorrow’s blog.

I just want to point out that in one of the comments it was mentioned that “The True Story of Alexander” will be on the History Channel on June 24th (Saturday) at 8 pm. I won’t see it here in Greece, so I hope that someone who watches it will comment on what they thought about it!
Susie asked about “the picture with the children facing each other, holding on to the front person’s waist. The two middle children have their arms held up like an arch and another looks like she/he is going under the arch”. Wasn’t that cute! They were the first grade students. The game that they played went like this. First two students formed an arch and all of the other students lined up and started going through the arch in a circle while they sang a song. When they got to a certain part the arms of the bridge went down and caught one of the kids. The bridge then asked them which side they wanted to go on. They said right or left (I think… it was Greek and I don’t know the words!) and then the bridge let them join. After all of them had been caught and chosen a side they played a tug of war where each side of the arch pulled their direction. I guess the winners were those who pulled the others the farthest??? I liked that one.
The other game “with one child in the middle and the others walking in a ring around him/her was a little hardert to figure out. They were also singing something and somehow a different person was chosen to be in the middle and the one in the middle went and joined the ring that was singing.

The Alien play had a script to it that the teacher had and so I am pretty sure that there is one “official” ending, but I think it would be a great idea to rewrite the play (or to write it as a story) with a different ending.

The Greek word for today is yassas. I hear it all the time. It means ‘hi’ and people that recognize me say it to me if I walk into a room or as I walk down the street and I say it back to them.

Steve and I were invited to eat out with some friends who have a car, so they drove us to this restaurant, which is at the west side of the Corinth Canal. It was a BEAUTIFUL evening and so we sat outside and watched the sun set and watched boats go through the canal!

First of all… I have never seen a bridge like this one. There are low bridges like this at either end of the canal. Instead of being a drawbridge that pulls up the middle when a boat goes through, this one drops the middle way under the water! Here are two pictures of the bridge with its middle down:

I was told that sometimes when the bridge comes back up there are fish on it and the man who operates the bridge runs out and gets them. A very interesting way of fishing! There were no fish on it that we saw last night.

Then there was the beautiful view of the canal itself and of the diolkos (the path where they transported the boats before there was a canal).

Can you imagine bungie jumping off of one of those bridges?

Then there was the beautiful sunset.

Finally, there was the food. Do you see that purple looking thing with tenticles? That is pickled octopus! I actually ate it! The other stuff is small fish and calamari (or squid). Others at the table said that grilled octopus is delicious. hmmmm… To me all of the food was OK, but I think I would rather have a giro J. The pickled octopus was not bad. I didn’t even feel the tenticles. Would you have tried it?

The kiln is built with three kinds of bricks. The first is a very hard firing brick. These are the yellow ones. They can withstand really high temperatures. The whole inside of the kiln is lined with these. The next is a similar brick that can withstand high temperatures, but it is wedge-shaped and will be put over the whole top of the kiln. The third type is the red brick with a honeycomb center. Because they have air holes they hold the heat in. They are good insulators.

In the picture you see wooden forms on the top forming an arch. These are just supports for the bricks and will be taken out when the bricks are all in place. This is a long oven. The pots are placed in the back of the oven and the fire is made in the front. It takes two days for the pots to fire in the kiln and two days for the kiln to cool down enough so that you can go and get the pots out. Once the pots are fired they are really hard. They can break, sort of like glass, but they will not just fall apart.

By doing this Guy and Phil are learning about the particular clay here in Corinth and the process used by potters to make all of the shards (pieces of pots) that they are finding in the excavations. Clay can be different colors and the clay in Corinth has sort of a yellow color to it. Archaeologists can look at a shard of clay and tell you where it probably is from! In the ancient world pottery was made in certain places and exported (taken different places in ships and sold), so you often find pottery from another location here in Corinth. The clay in Corinth is not the best quality. It was used for cooking pots and that sort of thing, but the more beautiful items were made somewhere else and imported here.
Susie asked how far the dig site is from normal civilization. Good question. It is interesting, but the village of Corinth that we are living in is actually surrounding the archaeological site, so it is about a 5 minutes walking distance from where we stay. I volunteer at the museum and actually am staying in a little house on the archaeological site. The elementary school that I visit is right across the street from the current excavation. Because they have been digging here for over 100 years there is a whole lot of area that was excavated in the past and is now open to visitors and tourists. I have made a map to sort of show you the layout here. It is not accurate and there are lots of details missing, but you can see where we are staying, the village, the dig, the museum and the school. It is all within close walking distance. The dig is called Panagea Field.

On the trip to Athens I crossed the Corinth Canal by train and I thought it would be a good time to talk a bit about the canal. It is only a few minutes drive from where I am staying. From here I can see the mouth of the canal easily. Sister Susie asked how it compared to the Panama Canal and also some very good questions about my comment on ships going over land rather than around the whole of the Peloppenese. I decided to ask Guy Sanders who is the director of the Excavation here at Corinth and I am so glad I did. He printed a whole paper he gave on it and told me that he will actually be featured on TV on the History channel sometime in the next year talking about it! So, you can keep your eyes open for something on the History Channel on the Corinth Canal (or shipping in the ancient world?) with Guy Sanders!

I am not going to give you the whole paper here, but just a few interesting tidbits to get you thinking. The Corinth Canal is very different than the Panama Canal although I think it was created for the same purpose. There was a narrow neck of land between the mainland and the Peloppenese for about 6 km (or 4 miles). It is about 80 m above sea level at the highest point (you will have to figure that out in yards), so there is a LONG way from the bridge to the water below in the canal. It is so far in fact that you can actually go bungie jumping there! . At the Panama Canal there are locks because the sea level at one side is so much higher than the other and the locks help the ship to “climb” to the higher level. At the Corinth Canal the sea level is the same or similar at both sides and the land is SO much higher thans sea level that locks are not needed.[picture of depth of canal from web]

In ancient times, before the canal was dug, there were war ships (triremes) cargo ships and smaller vessels that traveled the seas. We are mainly concerned with cargo ships and smaller here. It turns out that it was less expensive to drag the ships across the land (with their goods in them-I was wrong in what I said before). The shippers charged a tariff that was figured per ton per mile of transport and so the shorter distance really made a difference. Weather and safe sailing were also factors. The seas get too choppy for sailing between October and April and the land around the Peloppenese is rocky. There are many shipwrecks around the coast.
There was a specially designed wooden cradle in which the ship was firmly secured. It was on a rolling platform. The platform with the ship was then harnessed to teams of oxen. Guy Sanders estimates that it would take around 35 yoke of oxen to pull the 40 tons or so of weight repesented by the ship and the cargo. If there were 70 oxen pulling the ship I would guess that there would be many more men (slaves and workmen) securing the ship and caring for the oxen.

Over the centuries people thought about digging a canal here, but they did not have the technical ability to do it. In order to create a canal they had to cut the channel through rock. In Roman times (31BC-330AC or CE) emperor Nero used Jewish slave labor and unsuccessfully tried to excavate a canal. Finally in 1893 it was opened. The technology had developed enough to make it possible. Today supertankers will not fit in the canal and it is not as important for tranporting cargo, but it is an amazing sight and smaller ships regularly go through it. (Are you adding dates to the timeline as you go? I am!)

Well, enough about the canal. If you are interested in canals you may want to also check out the Suez Canal, which was completed about the same time as the Corinth Canal.

Today I am going to the elementary school (Demotico Echoleio) to learn about what games the kids play. I will take some pictures and I hope they will demonstrate for me. I am guessing that it will not be a day with a lot of work since tomorrow is their last day and it is a festival.

I think I should have started out this blog by mentioning that I did spend one month in Corinth in October 2005. If you are interested in reading more about it you can find my other blog at http://malahinitx.blogspot.com and look in the archives for October 2005. In October I was communicating with a 5th grade class in Missouri. You will find their picture somewhere there. I have learned a few words of Greek, but not much. I definitely understand much more Spanish than I do Greek. I heard a tourguide giving a tour in Spanish and understood most of what she said! It was a relief after hearing so much Greek and not understanding much beyond “good morning”. It is good that I can get by in English here.

This morning when reading my email I think I came across something interesting about my friends at John Muir School. If I am right they will be participating in the National Educational Computing Conference in their city (San Diego, California) ! Here is what I read. Maybe they can write us more about it in a comment!

Muir School International Projects: Global Schoolhouse and iEARN
[Student Showcase]
Be a global citizen. Share with international partners. Muir School
students demonstrate projects that change their perspectives forever.

Today’s Greek word is Amphora-this is a vessel for holding liquids, used like we would use a bottle. I will put a picture in tomorrow!