by Irma Havlicek
Powerhouse Museum Online Producer
Work days 2-10 – Wednesday 18 October to Friday 27 October 2012
Our main job over the next two weeks is to clear the site of the stones that stick up out of the earth and also the grasses and bushes (mostly full of thorns) which cover the site. This is so the geophysics experts can do their job (more about that in the next post).
The ground penetrating radar machine cannot be pushed easily over protruding rocks or tall grasses and bushes. This land clearing is a vast amount of work, and it is extremely time critical.
The first thing we did was to walk around the site to familiarise ourselves with it. We looked closely at the site of the temple and also some of the nearby buildings. It was the custom at the time of the Zagora settlement for the altar to be outside the temple; however the situation at Zagora is extremely unusual because the altar is found inside the temple – we don’t know why.
During the first two weeks of this 2012 dig season the site is being surveyed and decisions made about which areas indicate they may be productive if excavated.
by Irma Havlicek
Powerhouse Museum Online Producer
Work day 1 – Wednesday 18 October 2012
Breakfast was served at 6am, as planned, on our first full day on Andros – Wednesday 18 October 2012. My room-mate (Kristen Mann – take a look at Kristen’s Q&A to find out more about her) and I agreed on the tactic of setting an alarm for 6.20am (for those extra minutes of precious sleep), and heading down with our gear, ready to get straight into the van. We packed the gear we’d need the night before, so we just had to grab it and go.
by Irma Havlicek,
Powerhouse Museum Online Producer
Hi there and welcome to this blog through which we hope you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to be on a real archaeological dig. Our heading says ‘for secondary students’ but really we hope it is also for teachers and for a wider public interested in archaeology and learning about our past.
There probably won’t be too much on this blog for a few weeks, until we start preparing in earnest for the excavation at Zagora, scheduled to start on 17 October and go through until 27 November. For background on Zagora, check out our pages under the ‘Learning about Zagora and archaeology’ section of this website. It will continue to have new pages and resources added, particularly during September and October – so keep checking back to see what’s new.
What you can do straight away, is give us your comments via this blog. Feel free to suggest content you would like to see, or topics you would like to know more about – and we will try to cover them, either via blog posts before or during the dig, or by developing pages for the website.
We’re excited about this journey of discovery we’re about to take, and we’d really love you to share it with us via this blog. We’d like to reach as many people as possible, especially secondary students and teachers. Please let your friends and colleagues know about this website and blog, and invite them to join us.
by Wayne Mullen, Chief Operating Officer,
Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens
Zagora has been part of my life for many years. I don’t really mean that it’s inhabited every waking moment, it is a much more subtle thing than that. Zagora has been a presence, a memory and a dream. I’ve been working here at the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens since 1997, and even back when I started this job the Zagora excavations were long over, having come to a conclusion twenty years before, in 1977.
But the dig was always there, in the corner of my mind. Legends about its importance to Australian archaeology abounded and the hope was always there that someday an Australian team could return. Zagora, for me, was a book about the excavations lying on a library shelf, a box of slides in the storeroom, a plan here, a drawing there, a photograph, a story told by old team members.
And after so many years of dormancy and then behind-the-scenes work it has been wonderful to see the site and excavations side of the project slowly come back to life – first through my colleague Beatrice McLoughlin’s research about the large storage jars from Zagora, then with the plan to complete the publication of the original excavations…and now with the project to reopen the excavations on Andros themselves!
