Hello and happy, what is known among us shovel monkeys as, 'World Diggers Day'. A day, primarily facebook based, which celebrates all those who are out in a muddy hole in all weathers, scrutinizing bits of dirt and old rubbish, in order to understand the human condition.
It being such a momentous day, I thought this might be a good opportunity to explain what it is I do and that whilst you will see that I come to Greece several times a year, it is never a holiday, more's the pity because I could ruddy do with one!
I am actually doing a Ph.D in archaeology, in 5000 year old Greek archaeology to be more precise. Before this I worked for just over two years as a commercial archaeologist digging on a variety of construction sites around the country.
In that time I have worked on all manner of sites from quarries where I had to stop twice a day whilst another section of the site was literally blown up, to city center car parks uncovering Roman bathrooms and industrial crucible furnaces. I have often been mistaken for a boy, despite wearing pigtails and being quite slender (I blame the hard hat, hi-vis clothing and the manical shoveling); I have been genuinely offered work as a labourer and have been stopped in the street to be told 'you look reet sexy in them boots'; It has been so cold my hair has literally frozen, so windy I have been blown off my feet and so wet that the water has been up to my thighs. All this because none of us have really grown out of the 'playing in the mud' phase of our childhoods - the pay is terrible, three years of university education, £30,000 worth of debt for the princely sum of...(drum-roll please)... £7.50 an hour, but the reward of the job can be fantastic. You are standing there, in a field, having seen the sun rise, knowing you are the probably the first person in 1000 years to hold the ceramic bowl you are holding or to walk on the road you have just uncovered.
So in honour of the day and to show you the marvelous sites I have seen so far here in Greece here's a glimpse of how people lived 3000 years ago - they really don't build the way they used to:
The Lion's Gate, Mikines (Mycenae) I should add that these cyclopean walls are huge, I mean some of the stones are literally (guestimated you understand) 5 x 1.5 x 1 meters, that's like 200 tonnes, 1 stone, 1 flipping stone out of a wall of, well, lots of flipping stones!
Down towards the cistern - it got too dark and I didn't have a torch, how very un-Indiana Jones of me!
The Treasury of Atreus, tholos tomb with a mahooosive Greek cohort all nattering away at a million miles an hour!
You can kinda see why they came here, them Mycenaeans weren't daft.
Happy World Diggers Day!
