Today we went back to the Larnaka Museum. I realize that this is a big surprise, or probably not since that is what I do most of the days I am in Cyprus. I spent the entire day drawing, as did Brandon. Over the last two days we have completed 80 ceramic profiles – I do not know if this is good or not, so I will pretend it is. Yesterday I completed 11 profiles, today – 22. I also feel much better about doing this, I feel that I know what I am doing, or at least look like I know what I am doing. I must be doing better since Brandon moved from offering me basic advice, to acting like Yoda and saying things like – “To draw the pottery well, you must first endear yourself to the pottery.” Anyway, I was more careful of my posture today and avoided any more shoulder pain.
While we continued to draw, Dave and his students continued to catalogue the artifacts we had drawn, as well as wash quite a bit of pottery. Unfortunately, there is a ton of pottery still to wash from the 2012 excavation season (Bill and I washed pottery last year for about a week), so the large amount of pottery Dave and his students washed was not a huge dent in the total still to be washed, but was an appreciable dent – about 20%. During the day I also noticed several people using my magnifying visor, including Brandon. It is typical, I bring over something which people mock me for bringing, and then the device turns out to be very useful. This is the walkie talkies all over again. In 2005, I brought over a set of walkie talkies that I was immediately and loudly ridiculed for – but by the end of the season they were critical in helping lay out our grid. And a lot of fun on car trips.
The most intriguing thing today was the large number of basket handle amphorae we kept running across in the excavation units. These are storage vessels that are characterized by a large u-shaped set of handles. On the survey, we found a lot of handles (64), but no other parts [to the left is a handle from the survey Brandon drew in 2008]. During the excavation, however, we have found a lot of bases, and some fairly large ones at that. We spent a good part of the day drawing these bases/handles. The final analysis of these amphorae excavated at Vigla should be quite useful in helping to refine chronologies and typologies for this ware.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 