Category: Interviews

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Week 4 Feature: An Interview with the Students of Rhodes College

This year we are joined by four students from Rhodes College. They have come all the way from Memphis, Tennessee to participate in their first archaeological project! They’ve dove into the work and been a great addition to our team. Here they share some of their thoughts about their experience on BEARS.

Brittany Ashley

Brittany standing above the Bay of Porto Raphti

Why did you decide to study archaeology and/or art history in college?
In middle and high school, I was on the academic team as the appointed “Arts and Humanities person” which meant I had to study a lot of painters, architects, composers, etc. Somewhere amidst all the memorization, I realized I had a genuine passion for art history and art museums. I especially loved the connections between movements and artists, as well as the impact of historical events on the art of the time.

What is your favorite part of the BEARS experience so far? Do you have a favorite moment to share?
I think my favorite part is best represented by the moment where Miriam Clinton showed us, the Memphians, what our work on Koroni looks like in the GIS program. We saw her connect the dots we programmed with the DGPS and create the structures we’d seen earlier that day in person right there on the screen. Seeing it mapped out like that helped me visualize our work on the surveys as well, how useful it would be to see the quantity and typology of finds as found in different areas, and how that data might be used to interpret the historical usage of this site.

What is your favorite archaeological site or museum that you have visited and why?
While I have a sneaking suspicion that my final answer will be Delphi once we visit, for now my favorite is Mycenae. The Lion Gate, a staple in all my art history textbooks, was incredible to see in person. It felt like stepping into one of those books and back in time in a way. Not to mention the tholos tombs, especially the Treasury of Atreus which we saw first, and the opportunity to be shocked and humbled by the sheer size of the structure. I’m also interested in the myths of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra, so to be at that site in person was cool for that reason too.In middle and high school, I was on the academic team as the appointed “Arts and Humanities person” which meant I had to study a lot of painters, architects, composers, etc. Somewhere amidst all the memorization, I realized I had a genuine passion for art history and art museums. I especially loved the connections between movements and artists, as well as the impact of historical events on the art of the time.

Izzy Brewer

Isabella and a graduate student using a dGPS

Why did you decide to study archaeology and/or art history in college?
As a kid, I would watch the History and Discovery Channels every Friday night with my dad, and so through that I was exposed to archaeology (or a very dramatized version of it) and casually maintained my interest in it until I started applying to college. I always knew that I wanted to study history but wanted a more hands-on educational experience, and art history and archaeology allowed me to understand history through the tangible evidence people have left behind. I believe working with individual artworks and artifacts that are a direct reflection of the thoughts of their creators is more revealing about the past than just reading texts or looking at history more generally.


What have you found most surprising/unexpected about archaeological fieldwork?
I think the most surprising thing about being in the field is how physically demanding it is, which made me extremely nervous at first because I have almost no hiking or climbing experience (we do not even have hills in Memphis). However, it has made every day in the field more rewarding when I look back and realize that I just climbed a mountain or, in a very specific instance, scaled the side of a riverbed while crawling through thorns and spider webs. The past three weeks have really pushed me out of my comfort zone and taught me that I am more adventurous by nature than I thought I was back at home.

What is your favorite part of the BEARS experience so far? Do you have a favorite moment to share?

I think my favorite part of BEARS so far has been working with such an amazing team of experienced archaeologists who have gone out of their way to help us learn everything from the basics of conducting a survey to which career paths we should explore based on our specific interests. Everyone has been eager to include us as a part of the group and celebrate even the smallest accomplishments. I have too many favorite moments already, but I would have to say that some of the best are when we are taking breaks and the field and everyone has a moment to talk about the day, share stories, or just quietly enjoy the view in each other’s presence. I am so grateful that this team has been so welcoming to us because it has made the experience so much more meaningful, and I hope that one day I can do the same for the next generation of archaeologists.

Avery Comish

Avery photographing a groundstone

Why did you decide to study archaeology and/or art history in college?
      From a very young age, I’ve always had a fascination surrounding art because of the people behind it. Ancient art especially intrigues me because although we can’t always be sure who created a certain piece or built a fortress, we still have a part of that person’s legacy today. Someone hundreds, or even thousands of years ago put time and effort into every piece of pottery or lithic we find. I believe art history, archaeology, and related fields helps form connections to these forgotten people and their legacies.
What is your favorite part of the BEARS experience so far? Do you have a favorite moment to share?
      I think my favorite part of the BEARS experience is learning more about the people that might have lived in the Porto Rafti area and (as a tangent to that) learning more about what they left behind. There is almost always something new to discover. For example, on Koroni Kat and I found and mapped a part of the fortress wall that researchers in the 1960’s thought was missing.
What has your favorite survey find been so far?
      I think my favorite survey find so far has been a button-like object (that may have actually been used for a loom) that I found on Raftis. I also have been having fun keeping track of the absurd amount of (modern) shoes we find in units. They are never pairs of shoes, just single ones or even just shoe soles? 23 have been found as of June 14th, but I am absolutely sure there will be more. We find them almost every day we’re in town.

Elizabeth Griffin

Elizabeth at Delphi

Why did you decide to study archaeology and/or art history in college?
Art and history have always been two of my biggest passions in life and when I was little, I was what they call an “Egypt kid”. When I got to college, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to major in because I was interested in several different things, so I took classes in English, Anthropology, and classics, and ultimately loved the AMS department at Rhodes. From there, I decided on a focus in material culture that has led me back to my two original loves, art and history.
What is your favorite part of the BEARS experience so far? Do you have a favorite moment to share?
My favorite part about BEARS so far is the people I’ve been able to meet and connect with along the way. Everyone has been so welcoming to us Memphian newbies and have gone out of their way on more than one occasion to talk through everything from grad school stresses to just generally showing us the ropes! Ultimately, the experience has really pushed me out of my comfort zone and helped me to grow into my interests. I’m super thankful to have this experience!

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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 14: Shannon Dunn

GREAT NEWS for blog readers – it is time for another instalment in the BEARS blog’s ongoing team-member interview series. Today we’re posting a riveting conversation with Shannon Dunn, a PhD student at Bryn Mawr College who joined the team in the 2021 season after getting pandemicked-out in 2020. Shannon was a stellar addition to our little mini-team this summer and brought a real modern panache and style to the group – she even uses the internet! Something most of us old BEARS fuddy duddies try to avoid as much as possible. Check out the full interview below to get a whole herd of hot takes on topics ranging from the civil war to ancient religious landscapes!

Shannon wields the Sharpie, a survey archaeologist's most valuable tool! (D. Buckingham).

SMD: Ah, my supervillain origin story! 

SCM: Yes, don’t hold back on the villain parts – that’s the best content!

SMD: I was one of those kids who had a Greek myth book, so that was something of a gateway. I also grew up in Virginia where I was surrounded by revolutionary and civil war sites and cemeteries, so I think history was just always around. Then I took Latin in high school, and that was a flashpoint for the ancient world. My teacher was really great, and also taught us the Greek alphabet, and then we also went to Greece!  She led a rotating trip to an “ancient” place every few years, and our year happened to be to Greece. I loved it immediately. Somewhere there is a picture of me in the throes of teen angst, just so mad, but inside I was just thinking about how to get back to Greece. Then I got the opportunity to go back in college. I actually didn’t do any archaeological projects in college, but I took classes during the summers in Greece and I did undergraduate thesis research there. I was an anthropology major, but our department was very Americas focused, so I also did a Classics minor. My thesis was joint for both departments. It was about different types of Greek museums and their relationships to nation-building and nationalism. I went on my first dig right after I graduated. That was Omrit, where I met Grace! We have periodically intersected during the last ten years.

Shannon and a fellow archaeology student at Mycenae in 2020.

Since then I have continued to do various excavations in the summers, or classes through the American School. Then I decided to pursue a graduate degree.

SCM: Wow, it goes way back with you!

SMD: Yeah, I have pretty much always wanted to be an archaeologist.

Communing with the ethereal spirits at Delphi in 2020

SCM: I love the Omrit connection! Joey worked at Omrit too. Such a small world. I would never have anticipated that there would be a BEARS–Omrit connection, but there you go!

SMD: Yeah, I think Joey went the year after me. It’s funny.

SCM: So, in retrospect, when you think back to your youth visiting Revolutionary and Civil War sites, how do they compare to Greek archaeological sites?

SMD: Hmmmm……. I’m less interested in them – obviously, I am not pursuing that history in a professional way. Also, maybe because I am more involved in that world as an American, I can see how much more they are manipulated into various narratives. Growing up I did not think about how it was weird that there were cemeteries for confederates especially. But then when I left the south, I realized it was…. a little odd…. what we were taught about that stuff. I took a class about the Civil War in college and we quickly realized that depending on where we had grown up we had completely different narratives about Civil War history. So, that may have fed into me thinking about how Greek archaeology is used in that way for my thesis.

SCM: I grew up as the child of a real Civil War “buff” and we spent a huge amount of time visiting different Civil War sites. We even went to the big Gettysburg reenactment one year.

SMD: I went to a LOT of reenactments. I had a friend in the fife and drum corp.

SCM: Yes! Fifes and Drums!

SMD: Eat some kettle corn, watch some battles. Delightful.

SCM: I was so short I could never see anything. All I remember was some puffs of cannon smoke, a hot field, and some fifes. I hated it. So, you could say I prefer Greece. But it’s also weird, as you say, to think about how we went to like pay homage to Robert E. Lee’s grave and stuff. 

SMD: Now that I’m thinking about it from a distance too it’s very interesting to think about what the culture was like – almost a little grand tour of people doing pilgrimages around to the sites, recreating the movements of the armies.

SCM: It’s such an ugly, awful part of American history – in a way perhaps it is good that we don’t forget what happened, but it’s weird that people kind of celebrate it rather than just visiting the sites and thinking about what a freakin nightmare it was. 

SMD: Yeah, and then there’s the fact that half the monuments were set up in the 1920s to 1950s when other anxieties were presenting themselves – and you realize, oh yeah, that has nothing to do with the civil war.

SCM: Right! Anyway, now we are getting off topic. But you reminded me of all the hours and days I spent walking around in hot fields in the south when I was seven and I was just thinking “I want an ice cream!”.

SMD: Yeah, battlefields, I’ve never found them very exciting wherever I am. Some people are into that in Greece to. What happened on this flank? On the other flank? That’s not my thing.

SCM: Yeah, that kind of “research” had a big day…but I don’t think it’s got a lot of legs in the current academic environment. Perhaps too esoteric. Perhaps too…pointless?

SMD: Agree.

Leuktra: A battle wuz here, the pigeons don't seem to respect it tho (S. Murray)

SCM: Okay, so I take it you are not researching ancient battlefields…. but you ARE doing a PhD in Classical Archaeology at Bryn Mawr. Where are you in the program and what are you researching?

SMD: I just finished my fifth year. I just started my dissertation work because my fourth year was the Regular Program at the ASCSA. I generally like questions about the relationships between religion and landscape – how people use spaces and negotiate the reality of traveling around but also how the landscape itself influences cult practice. I had been trying to identify something on which to apply those issues. I worked in one direction last summer and it didn’t really go anywhere, but then I was talking to professor Sylvian Fachard, and he said to me: “You know what needs to be done? A catalogue of these sites that we put in the category of ‘border sanctuaries.’” So, I’m working on that, doing an inter-regional thing that catalogs them and reevaluates them as a category, and hoping it will be a good resource for border people, religion people, and landscape people. I’m investigating how location impacts function, and whether ritual sites that we know were near a border were affected by those political boundaries. It’s a little frustrating to read the scholarship, because it often portrays these sites as liminal areas, but sometimes they are on main thoroughfares, so maybe they are more hubs or gateways. Or maybe people in the local community don’t see themselves that way at all! So, I am trying to reconstruct that as much as I can.

SCM: Sounds like a great project!

SMD: There is a lot to include – I am trying to do big picture stuff but also to give each place the attention it merits and allow the contextualized situation at each site come through. I don’t want to try to shove things into a model.

A striking Aegean ritual landscape at Palaikastro on Crete (S. Murray)

SCM: Well, you’re just starting out! The fun part about a dissertation is that it develops a life of its own – the scope and scale especially tend to mutate a lot over the course of the project.

SMD: Yes, that’s what my advisor said. She was very clever. She told me to start as wide as possible and then whenever I pull back from something, think about why I am doing that, and try to justify it. That helped me to define what I want to talk about and what is clearly beyond the scope of what I could even conceive of. So now from a big picture with frontiers and colonies and sort of the edges of the Greek world, I’ve pulled all the way back to the Peloponnese because it’s defined and seems manageable.

SCM: Wow! Good advising! It never happens! You’re very lucky.

SMD: Yeah, she’s great.

SCM: Okay, so you mentioned that you did the ASCSA regular year program. Tell me about that – how was the experience?

SMD: It was so great. A lot of the people who go on the regular year have never been to Greece or seen these things you have read about – and there is this incredible feeling of realizing that it is a Real Place, and to be able to see it in 3 dimensions. But I had been to some of the sites and kind of came in thinking “oh yeah, I know a lot of these.” But by the end I completely felt that I had known absolutely nothing before the year. The depth to which you explore these sites is just incredible. I don’t know how people can do a PhD without such a program. The time invested in getting to understand the country is so valuable – you see places beyond the normal tracks, for example, if you just work on a project and go back and forth to the same places. There is still a lot of Greece I have not seen, but I feel better than I did before about my experience of the country. I realized a lot about the breadth and depth of what there is to study – I had no idea how great the Neolithic is! And everyone was passionate and enthusiastic about a different thing.

Bliss at the Mycenaean Acropolis of Kanakia, on Salamis (with fellow BEAR Mel!), December 2019

SCM: It is such a wonderful program. I feel bad for these students who work in Italy – they have no equivalent program! But I guess it’s their choice. Go eat your pizza and drink lukewarm beers, Italy people! Okay, let me not get into my unpopular opinions about Italian food. Was there anything about the program that you didn’t like? 

SMD: My only complaint is that we did not go to all the places I wanted to go. We did not go to Cape Tainaron or the Mani, and we missed some parts of the eastern Argolid I wanted to see…and we didn’t see much of the islands. Some of the reasoning I don’t understand, but I know some of it was just logistics. 

SCM: I guess it’s tough. There’s so much to see! It’s not so bad if the worst thing is that there are too many places to visit and not enough time.

SMD: Yeah. I am very excited to go deep into the Mani – that is going to be my first stop when I’m back in Greece.

SCM: Okay, so I think one of the interesting things about talking to people who ended up being Greek archaeologists is that a lot of people have a similar story – not the same story! – but a same genre as your reason for having gotten into Greek archaeology, and I do too! I came to Greece as an angsty college student and completely then focused my life on wanting to spend as much time in Greece as possible forever. And I can never articulate to myself exactly why that happened to me, or why that is so common. I don’t think it’s totally normal. I worked in Italy a lot too, and I never felt the same way. What do you think? What is it about Greece that does this crazy thing to our psychologies and sucks us in, like a quicksand?

SMD: Agh, everything I say would be such a cliché. People talk about “the light” you know? I’m not inventing that! I don’t know. It’s some kind of vibe? I have tried to recreate what I like about Greece at home…you know, trying to figure out whether it’s that I’m just outside and active and stimulated and with friends? Archaeologists exist in a different sort of life when we are on a project, and we tend to be happy in those environments. But I don’t think that is it. A lot of it is kind of surface stuff. It is just so beautiful there! The only other landscape I’ve been so stunned by is Scotland, which is similar in that it looks small on the map, but it feels so vast when you are there. It has an endless coastline, these microregions, incredibly dramatic landscapes.

A gripping maritime landscape, Hydra, 2017 (S. Dunn)

SCM: Yeah, Scotland is cool! But maybe that helps us eliminate the landscape. Like, Scotland has an amazing landscape! But I never thought, okay, I need to dwell in this space as much as possible forever.

SMD: Right, it’s great, but I don’t need to inhabit it!

SCM: Well, it’s something that we cannot get to the bottom of! But I think this is an interesting aspect of Greece. It has a strange magical power! And I can stay it sticks with you. I am old now and I have been to Greece many, many, times, sometimes doing cool stuff, sometimes just sitting in Athens trying to write a book. But it doesn’t matter, I’m always just happier here. 

SMD: Yeah, I know what you mean. It smells better somehow…the food is better. It has almost a simplified color palette that is soothing to me, like a Wes Anderson move. Like with Italy, Rome – also incredible. But it’s too much!

SCM: Right – everything is like an art historically important piazza! It’s exhausting. Like, enough! Okay, okay, let’s talk about fieldwork. It sounds like you have done a lot of projects. Encapsulate for us your history as an archaeological fieldworker and your experiences prior to BEARS.

SMD: My fieldwork has been scattered and diverse. My approach has been to cast a wide net and try to figure out what I liked; I’ve liked all the projects I’ve worked on, but for some I didn’t see a big personal longevity in it for me, so maybe my CV looks a bit bizarre! I’ve done both excavation and survey, mostly in Greece, but also in Israel, Lebanon, and Scotland. One of the reasons I really love Bryn Mawr is that they are so supportive – I asked if I could go and do the Scotland survey to get a non-Mediterranean experience, and they completely agreed with that. Which ended up being wonderful – I got training outside of my usual paradigm, we learned a lot of GIS, stuff I hadn’t been exposed to before. It was interesting to see a slightly different side of the discipline. 

In Greece, I sometimes joke that I will only work at sites that have something to do with Poseidon. I worked at Onchestos in Boeotia and Helike in Achaia…I guess I like the water. 

SCM: Seems like a good strategy! Poseidon is cool – horses AND water…weird dude. What was the survey in Scotland all about? A particular period or region?

SMD: We were surveying along a road that was built during the Jacobite rebellion. During that period the Scots were becoming increasingly independent, so the English started building roads to get up into the highlands to monitor or suppress the rebels more efficiently, but then the highlanders just started also using the roads to do whatever they needed to do. There are a lot of layers of history that we were exploring, from the Jacobite stuff, back into prehistory, as well as later travelers who were walking these roads on their Grand Tours. The project was very landscape oriented, so we catalogued whatever we came across in the landscape, and the different stages of the road. We also did field trips to castles and things like that.

Near Blair Atholl, Perthshire, Scotland in 2017 (S. Dunn)

SCM: Cool! A very different experience than working in the Mediterranean.

SMD: Yeah, it was a very different experience, also in terms of the weather. It was freezing and raining all the time in July, so we were all bundled up and wearing high visibility stuff. 

SCM: I was in Scotland one June and I remember that the sun would come up at 4 or 5am, which was very disorienting. I remember waking up at 5am and it was bright as high noon and I was always very freaked out by that.

SMD: Yeah, it’s basically the arctic circle. I was going to Greece right after that project so I didn’t bring the right clothes. I knew it would be kind of cold, but I didn’t think it could be THAT cold…so I was just wearing all my clothes at the same time and it still wasn’t enough. Then a few weeks later I was in Greece and we’d finish work at 1pm because it was too hot, and we’d go to the beach.

SCM: Sometimes I have no idea what people who do archaeology in the UK are thinking. Between the cold and the mud, it seems like a very different proposition than what we get into in the Mediterranean most of the time.

SMD: Yeah, I could pass on excavating a giant trench full of mud.

SCM: We don’t have a lot of mud in Mediterranean survey, typically. What was your take on surveying Porto Rafti for the BEARS project?

SMD: It was great. As I said I enjoy working in coastal landscapes, so that was up my alley. Taking a boat to work was incredible. It was also probably the least remote town that I have ever been based in. That was a fun experience. Usually on a project you feel like you are going off into the wilderness. I mean, at Onchestos we stayed at Thebes…but that still is kind of the wilderness if you know what I mean. But from Porto Rafti you can just pop into Athens for the weekend; and you’re just in this resort town. So, it was kind of interesting to see that you can just be in a community and do archaeology. It doesn’t have to be this big bush-whacking adventure.

Very nice water views, from Koroni (S. Dunn)

SCM: Ha, yeah, I would always laugh when Denéa called the project an expedition this summer. I mean, we’re like 20 minutes from the airport in a giant concrete resort town…so….it seemed like a funny word to use for what we are doing out in Porto Rafti. Yeah, it’s very different from the normal project where you go to a little village with no internet and marginal mod-cons. In Porto Rafti we have it all – pizza delivery! Third wave coffee! Banks! Anything you want. 

SMD: It is another micro-region, too, though, that I didn’t even know existed before I worked on the project. I’d been to Brauron and we went to Koroni on the ASCSA regular year, but the whole world of the bay had not been on my radar. It’s a bit of a whole little archaeological ecosystem on its own that a lot of people don’t necessarily visit.

SCM: That’s a good point. I spent a lot of time in Greece every year since 2003, but I never went to Porto Rafti once until I thought about starting a project there in 2018. Which is sort of crazy.

SMD: It is funny that it’s kind of off the radar. It’s such a great port and in the middle of everything, so it makes sense that there is so much material there.

SCM: One thing I appreciate about Greece is that there is always more to see. Even after almost 20 years of traveling around all over the place, I continuously find new places and local cuisines and sites and landscapes I didn’t know about at all. Every time I visit I try to purposefully go to one place I have not been, and it’s always a total surprise in the most wonderful way.

SMD: Greece seems very dense. Even from little valley to little valley you often have so much local variation. I enjoyed working in Porto Rafti, even though it is not the most remote. Actually, it was kind of comforting, after not leaving the house basically for a year, to be in a place that was not all that remote or ‘intense’ in terms of a collective living experience. I’m not sure I could have gone from staying in my room all the time to some totally remote village with no internet. 

SCM: Right, like when you have a rescue animal that you’ve nursed back to health – you should introduce it back into the wild in stages, or else it doesn’t know how to forage for food or protect itself from predators!

SMD: Exactly. I thought about working on Crete this summer but then I thought – it’s too far! I’m not ready yet.

SCM: Okay, let’s do one more question. In all your travels and project experiences so far, what has been a zany or unusual adventure or misadventure that stands out?

SMD: In college, I took a class on the Odyssey in which we sailed around the Aegean on a boat as we read it – which has obviously shaped a lot of my interests when it comes to research and fieldwork! We had an assignment where we had to write about something that had happened to us during the course but in a Homeric style. So, everyone ended up with these sort of magical realist interpretations of little incidents. My story was about a sort of weird and somewhat concerning interaction with a German tourist when I was out walking alone on Milos. I had borrowed his snorkeling gear and swam out to a shipwreck and then he wanted to talk to me and go back to town, which I was not interested in. But for the assignment I turned it into a much more dramatic story with supernatural elements. I can’t think of a better one. I guess that’s not so zany. 

SCM: That’s okay – we are debunking stereotypes about archaeologists waking up unspeakable horrors of the undead and whatnot. 

SMD: You carry Ithaca inside you, as they say.

SCM: Profound words!

SMD: I think as archaeologists we feel more comfortable around the dead inert objects of the archaeological record and the landscape, so it’s sort of scary for us to deal with other humans.

SCM: That is true. It is always a little jarring when you think you are alone in some unused landscape, and then you realize there is another human there. 

SMD: There is no such thing as a pristine landscape where it’s just you and the god. These landscapes have been actively used forever, and they still are! We’re just guests there.

SCM: Yeah, don’t forget it! A good message for the faithful BEARS blog readers to close out this wonderful interview. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your experiences with us, and all the best for the year in Athens ahead.

Carefree wandering into the magical light, Nisis Pylos, 2020
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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 13: Isabella Vesely

For the thirteenth instalment of our BEARS team member interview series we are featuring Isabella Vesely, a member of the BEARS 2019 team who somehow escaped the blog interview trolling net during the “lost” spring and summer of 2020. Isabella was a star undergraduate under the tutelage of Catherine Pratt at Western University when she was on the team in 2019. She’ll be starting an MA in Art History at the University of Toronto in September 2021 and we’re very excited that she’ll be back with the team in summer 2022! In addition to her archaeological and academic acumen, Isabella is a gifted studio artist – you may remember her bears/BEARS drawings from the end of the 2019 season and she also did some technical drawing for the project that year, too. Read all about her experiences and what it is like to have so many talents in our interview below!

Isabella, Cassandra, and Taylor assess the survey finds from 2019's first unit on Raftis island (S. Murray)

SCM: Let’s start by talking about how you got interested in Greek archaeology and why you decided that this was something that you wanted to spend at least part of your life doing.

IV: Oooh, tricky, a multi-part question. I had a Greek myth phase as a child, which I think a lot of people go through. That got me headed in the direction of Greek archaeology in particular. When I was young I lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where there is a good natural history museum. I think visiting that was what made me interested in archaeology and the past and digging up the past. They don’t have as much of an archaeology focus there, but I think I was introduced to that kind of study very early on. I then took an ancient history course in high school and that got me interested in applying to a Classics program for university; I also took an anthropology course which I loved. At university, I started out right away in Classics and anthro courses, then at the end of the year I did the study tour of Greece course with Catherine Pratt. That was totally amazing, and then Cat recruited me to return to help with her project, and after that I just felt like I had to come back every year! 

tfw you are on a study tour in Greece and are having a great time and are pretty sure you never want to leave! (S. Murray)

Over the past year, being out of school and having everything turned on its head made me realize that I wanted to continue doing what I had been doing before. Having a year off to reflect was good, because initially I did not want to do a master’s degree. But this year reaffirmed what I wanted to do.

SCM: That totally makes sense! It is a weird year, but even in general I always recommend students take a year off before grad school. Okay, I wanted to ask about your career as an artist – and that is unusual amongst archaeologists, who usually don’t know how to make or do real things in the world. Has your practice as an artist affected your interests or research in archaeology? Or do you think it gives you any special insight, or that the two are connected at all?

IV: Hmmm, maybe not in a super obvious way. My archaeology interests aren’t so much in the area of ancient art. If anything, I’d say that archaeology has informed my art practice more, because that’s something that I find interesting and want to pull into my practice, for example in terms of materials – I’ve gotten into natural materials in the last 2–3 years because of looking at artifacts and objects and thinking about the processes that impact natural materials over time. In general, I think the momentum goes that way – from archaeology into art. I made this big stained-glass vase and I used different kinds of glass that reminded me of differential weathering on different pieces of pottery. It was inspired by working with Cat in the Agora, and trying to find joining pieces, which look different, but we know that they do join. 
Sherds/Shards (I. Vesely)

SCM: Oh, yeah, super cool! I saw the photo because Cat used it as the cover for a talk she gave for Toronto last year. I wish I knew how to make things; I can draw a little but mostly I am a terrible artist, but I admire talented artists a lot.

The Vessel! (by Isabella Vesely)

Okay, so you are about to start in the MA program at Toronto. What kinds of research interests do you have and what kind of topics do you hope to investigate?

IV: I’m very interested in craftspeople, and bringing in this thing I mentioned before about art and environment and natural materials. I want to think more about the experience of being a craftsperson – where do you source your materials, what does your immediate studio environment look like, different techniques, and that kind of thing. The general theme I guess is the relationship between people who make things and their environments, and bringing something about identity into it too: how a person’s identity as a craftsperson fits in with different social roles or identities, and how those things combine to form a three-dimensional persona in the world.

SCM: Very cool! I have been sort of moving in that direction lately too – craftspeople are infinitely wonderful people to think about. It’s a good moment to work on this lately, because the field has taken an interest not just in rich consumers and patrons but also the nature of craft production and the complexity of the people that did the making. It’s a good fit for the MACS program too, in a lot of ways. I’m excited to see what you come up with over the next two years! What drew you to Toronto in terms of a grad program?

IV: Actually, it was Carl Knappett who sold it to me when I was working at Palaikastro. I was there for about a month around the time that the program was being inaugurated, and he had a lot of positive things to say about it. And he was right – it is a cool program. Coming from a background of Classics, Anthro, and Art (I had three undergrad majors), it’s hard to find a program that joins all those departments, so it is a great fit for me. I do want to maintain a connection to all three of those in my research and what I do going forward, and there are not so many places where one can pursue such a diverse course of study at the grad level. U of T has a great reputation…I’m excited about all the events and guest lectures…I like that there is an option to do the MA and then continue into the PhD easily…. lots of stuff! 

Somebody made all these thingies after all!

SCM: It seems like a good fit indeed – also you are correct that Carl is a great salesperson. That is not to be underestimated. So, tell me about your work in the field – you’ve worked at the Agora and Palaikastro, and BEARS; what kinds of experiences have you had and what your impressions of archaeological fieldwork have been?

IV: Well, Cat has been the main person whose set me up with fieldwork, which I am grateful for! She invited me and Cassandra to come assist her with her work in the Agora. We were looking at Archaic transport amphoras and coarsewares from the old excavations in the Agora as a means to gaining more insight into commodity transportation and different trade networks in that period. I did that for two seasons – the first season was mostly looking at sherds, cataloguing them, going through old notebooks to try to figure out where they came from and the circumstances of their excavation back in 1915 or 1960 or whenever. We spent a lot of time trying to read these old notes so we could figure out where things were in the archive, which was fun. The second year was after I learned how to do illustration, so I took on that role and I drew everything that we found while Cassandra did more of the data entry stuff. We spent a month in Palaikastro on Crete after the first year in the Agora. There was supposed to be an excavation but that did not pan out, so we ended up doing a study season, which was great too. I did a lot of drawing there, too. I mentioned that I had experience as an artist, and that I could help with drawing, and Carl said, “well, it’s not really artistic drawing.” But I insisted that I wanted to try, and he let me take a shot at it, and I ended up drawing basically everything. So, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing since then, for Cat, and Carl, and in 2019 for BEARS. I suppose the main thing I took away from the PK thing was illustration, but we did other stuff…I can’t remember what that was right now!

Aegean loungin', archaeologist style (I. Vesely)

SCM: Who can remember anything from the pre-pandemic world? Such a hazy and distant land! I’ve never tried to draw pottery – tell me, is there something that distinguishes drawing pottery from other kinds of drawing? What is interesting or enjoyable about it from your point of view as someone who does lots of art.

IV: Well, essentially it’s just technical drawing. It’s very simplified and pared down. In my art practice, I am not much of a drawer – I’m more sculpture-based. But I like being able to draw something and not have to put all the artistic energy into it, but still being embedded in doing art. The main task is to draw the profile of the shape accurately, so if it’s a bowl it’s just a curve, ultimately with some shading or some surface detail depending on the object. I like how simple it is – you have to take this complex object and distill it just to the important information that you need. It has to be to scale, too, which is fun – I don’t know why, but I like drawing to scale. I suppose the technical aspect of it is very pleasant to me.

SCM: Sounds very Zen I suppose!

IV: Yeah!

One of Isabella's drawings of pottery from BEARS 2019 (S. Murray)

SCM: I can imagine that when you are making artistic art there is a lot of creative energy and maybe even emotional energy that goes into it; but with technical drawing it’s more like you have a task in front of you and you know what to do and you do it.

IV: Exactly – when I draw I just have headphones on all day and barely have to think about anything except for drawing. The normal next step is that you trace the drawing from the grid paper, which you use to get the scale right, onto a nice tracing paper and use a sharpie or a marker to ink it. But now mostly people just go straight to the digital inking step, using Adobe Illustrator or some other program. That part is more time consuming than the drawing, which most people don’t realize!

RAFTIS: the enigma, the legend

SCM: Interesting – I would not have guessed! Now, in additional to your experiences in the Agora and PK, you worked with us on the BEARS project for two weeks in 2019. Survey archaeology is a little different than lab research…what did you think about the work in the field in Porto Rafti?

IV: Maybe it was because there were more people around, but it seemed VERY exciting right off the bat, as opposed to our other projects, which were more low key. It was a whole different vibe: we had a whole team, and a whole big area to research…I started off the very first day going out to the island on the boat, and as soon as we got there we started finding soooo much material. There was so much momentum right out of the starting gate, it was exciting. The fieldwork was very different of course, vs. being inside studying. There is more connection to the land and the sites when you’re out there in the field and physically negotiating the space from which the artifacts come, rather than just trying to understand artifacts divorced from the physical context. I had a great time! The thing that I always remember and love to tell people about is when we were doing our collection on the island, and you’d kick a bush over, and then you would find 3,000-year old pottery with paint on it in pristine condition – just under this bush! It was amazing!

Hiking around the rough terrain in Koroni (I. Vesely)

SCM: Yeah, Raftis was crazy! This was sort of shocking and unexpected as a first day of survey for a brand-new project! Usually the first day you just sort of mosey around and map something…. but on BEARS it was just – BOOM – first hour, first day, painted Mycenaean sherds all in your face!

IV: Yeah, but you know I liked doing the mapping too! Later in the season and I was working on Koroni setting up grid squares. That was satisfying too – I grew up doing a lot of hiking when I was little, you know, the photos of the baby in the little carrier and parents out in the forest…so I love hiking! And working on Koroni was a lot like hiking, clambering around on rocks and stuff. I hope in the future to get more into the imaging stuff, too, which I am interested in.

SCM: Nice, there will be lots of that in 2022! We have lots of hiking and mapping and imaging that will happen in the future, so don’t worry. And that is honestly more of a core type of survey activity. BEARS is weird because we have these bonanza sites and you end up staring at the ground. Usually survey is more like a kind of scientific hiking. What did you think about Porto Rafti?

IV: It was different from both Palaikastro and Athens. Maybe more on the PK side of things, in terms of being a place people visit to swim, although with fewer visitors from abroad. It seemed to have a very Greek vibe. Since we were only there and working for two weeks and we were living a little outside of the downtown, I felt like we did not get a chance to explore it too much. I will be excited to get to know more of the town in the future. It is very beautiful there!

View to Evvia from the peak of Raftis (I. Vesely)

SCM: Porto Rafti takes a while to get to know – It took me awhile to really form an opinion about Porto Rafti, but I’m learning to love it! I will look forward to hearing your further impressions after some more time there. So, speaking of the future, what are you looking forward to the most about getting back out to Greece and getting out into the field?

IV: I ran out of my Greek olive oil recently, and that was very sad! 

SCM: That is a sad moment! Sad for cooking and sad symbolically.

IV: It was a big jug too! It is surprisingly hard to find Greek olive oil here, the Italians really rule the market.

SCM: I once read a big exposé kind of story about how this is actually a weird situation where Italian companies buy Greek olive oil from independent producers for cheap, then repackage it and sell it as Italian oil because they are shrewder/more ruthless businesspeople or something.

News flash: GREEKS MAKE GREAT OLIVE OIL TOO (S. Murray)

IV: Maybe! I guess the fieldwork is my favorite part. Athens is nice, but it’s just a city. What I really miss is the fieldwork itself rather than Greece as a destination. The pace of life is so different in the field, especially compared to being in school. To be in a different environment, spending more time outside and getting to interact with objects and artifacts rather than just reading all day, as a way of familiarizing yourself and learning more, is much more enjoyable for me than just traditional research. It’s not a vacation, obviously, but it’s such a departure from the normal routine. It’s very refreshing to have that kind of experience for a month or so. I really just want to get back out into the field.

SCM: Totally agree! Being outside and doing real things all the time is somehow more satisfying than going inside your brain and thinking about abstract stuff. Well, that’s pretty much all of the questions I had; anything else that you want to share with the BEARS blog readership?

IV: I had another fieldwork experience in Canada that might be interesting to share. I took a mortuary archaeology class at Western, and we did ground penetrating radar and magnetometry in the peripheral sections of a cemetery, where unmarked graves were supposed to be. The point was to expand knowledge of the area and about the history of burial practices around London, Ontario, but also to perhaps start identifying some of the areas that could benefit from excavation. That was pretty cool and a different experience from what we did in Greece – we did a publication too.

SCM: Wow, what a cool experience – that will definitely be useful in your career going forward too: there are so many kinds of methodologies and approaches in archaeology! It’s hard to learn ‘em all, like trying to catch all the Pokemons or whatever! Maybe we’ll eventually do some subsurface investigations in Porto Raft someday and you can help us out with that!

For now enjoy the rest of your summer – and thanks for talking to the BEARS blog! We look forward to having you back on the team in 2022.

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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 12: Melanie Godsey

Who can get enough zoom conversations these days?! After a long semester spent staring at/talking to my computer screen, I was feeling deprived of online meetings over the holiday break, so I dialled up UNC PhD student, intrepid BEARS Hellenistic pottery expert, and current locked-down Athenian resident Melanie Godsey for an invigorating interview about archaeology and other stuff. Like several other members of the BEARS project, Melanie came to us very highly recommended from the leadership of the Western Argolid survey (WARP), which grad student roster I shamelessly raided for talent when putting together the team. Alas, she wasn’t able to hang around Porto Rafti very much during the 2019 season due to other preexisting commitments, but she was pretty much the only person keeping me company in the Brauron museum for most of the 2020 ‘study season’ that took place this past August, when she heroically blasted through all of the historical pottery that we collected on the Koroni peninsula.  Read onward to find out more about her intellectual background, fascinating research on Ptolemaic interconnections, and recent exploits in Greece, including many tantalizing autumnal photos of “the Raft”.

Melanie hard at work on our BEARS finds in the Brauron museum in August 2020 (S. Murray)

SCM: What got you interested in Classics/Archaeology and why you decided to pursue a PhD in the subject?

MG: I definitely got here by accident, basically because someone told me I should do Classics. I showed up on the first day of college, and I went to the history department, where they asked me what I was interested in. And I told them, and they said I was in the wrong department – I should go to Classics. So I went to Classics, and it all worked out. But I still ended up double-majoring in history, too. I couldn’t really decide if I wanted to study languages or archaeology for a while, and I was really interested in the whole discipline. But finally I decided that archaeology was what I wanted to do based on my one summer of fieldwork and some other courses. From then on I was pretty into Classical Archaeology, and I applied to grad school just to keep it going. I wasn’t sure if I’d continue beyond the MA, but I kept enjoying the work, especially the fieldwork, and got the chance to work in Greece (at WARP! A popular choice among BEARS-ers) and that sold me on sticking with this forever (hopefully). 

Melanie writing something on a wall during the WARP project in summer 2017 (photo courtesy M. Godsey)

SCM: Cool! I can see why working on a fantastic project like WARP would turn a person into a lifer! So where are you currently in the program and what kinds of research are you pursuing?

MG: I am at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in the Classics department. I think I am in my sixth year (I think?); but who knows anymore! I am working on my dissertation now. I’m focusing on the social and economic relationships between Ptolemaic Egypt and Hellenistic Greece and how that plays out in material culture. I’m working mainly on ceramics – daily use stuff, fancy stuff, and also transport amphoras, to get a sense of how economic networks and long-term imperial goals may have changed and impacted the way that the two entities interacted: from both the Egyptian and the Greek side of things.

The Egyptian god Khnum hard at work on the potter's wheel in a relief at the site of Dendera, located on the west bank of the Nile near Qena, about 60 km north of Luxor (S. Murray)

SCM: It is a really great project – Ptolemaic sites in Egypt are out of control: it is just amazing how much pottery there is at sites in Egypt and how little people seem to care about it! So, I’m guessing that there is a pretty large amount of work that remains to be done on that kind of material….

MG: Yeah, it’s very niche! There is a handful of people that work on this kind of stuff, but it’s a pretty small community. Which Ptolemaic sites have you been to?

Piles of pottery litter the Ptolemaic harbour site of Myos Hormos on the Red Sea coast (S. Murray)

SCM: Let’s see, a lot: Dendera is one of my favorites: just a huge and crazy site with incredible preservation and fascinating reliefs, but also a bunch of other temple sites in the Nile valley. Also several places out in the deserts: Dimai north of the Fayoum, with mud-brick walls standing over 10 meters tall, some coastal and mining sites near Quseer and Wadi el-Gemal on the Red Sea, and several temples/forts in the western desert oases. The desert is crazy! For a surveyor anyway: the amount of pottery and preservation of it on the surface is one thing, but then you find all this other stuff: glass, big chunks of faience vessels, fishing nets (!), pieces of leather and cloth…..YEESH and the visibility is obviously 100%. And no thorns! As a surveyor at those sites I was kind of tweaking out a little bit. Not to mention the scale of the architecture alone.

MG: Yeah survey in the desert must be crazy! The opposite of Greece.

A sea of sand and sherds at the site of Qasr ad Dush near Kharga oasis (S. Murray)

SCM: Totally. So you’re researching this super niche topic, not your average dissertation area! Can you tell us how you got into this as something to study?

MG: I knew I wanted to do something with pottery/ceramics after my first year of grad school. I was really interested in the questions that ceramics can answer about trade, about daily life, and the mundane aspects and tasks of peoples’ existence. Pottery is the most common thing that you find everywhere, so I thought that was a good avenue into lesser-studied questions. With Ptolemaic pottery, it happens that my advisor is one of the few in the U.S. who work on Ptolemaic pottery! And it’s been very interesting to see how this operates, because Egypt didn’t export a huge amount of pottery, but there is a ton of other evidence for connectivity between Egypt and the rest of the Mediterranean. People will say, oh Ptolemaic pottery I’ve never even seen that!, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a ceramic result to these cross-cultural interactions. So that’s sort of how I ended up working outside of Egypt at least for my dissertation. I hope that will bring these two fields – Hellenistic Greek pottery and Egyptian Ptolemaic pottery – together a little bit.

Ignore the many wonders of Ptolemaic Egypt at your own peril! (S. Murray)

SCM: That is really interesting; and I am sure that the results will be super useful for the field, in terms of perhaps revealing these complex relationships that haven’t been discussed so much in new ways. Having worked some on ancient trade myself, but in a prehistoric context, I am always troubled by how we rely so much on pottery in prehistory to tell us the whole story of interaction and networks. But Ptolemaic Egypt is a really compelling case, because it’s clearly really connected and cosmopolitan, but the pottery might not show you that in terms of being spread around as a trade product per se. And I guess you could think about the iconography and architecture as sort of stealthy when it comes to serving as a proxy for anything about intercultural exchange or interaction too. It will be interesting to see, methodologically, and in terms of interpretation, how the results of your study play out and what they suggest about the whole bigger issue of interpreting cultural connections and networks through archaeological remains.

MG: Yeah, absolutely, and I think in the Hellenistic period the same thing happens; people are always looking for faience or something as this concrete indicator of exchange. But maybe something more nuanced can come out of my approach which is a bit more dialectic I suppose.

View of the waters around the site of Koroni, source of much Ptolemaic-era pottery (M. Godsey)

SCM: It sounds like you’re pretty deep into the whole dissertation project and obviously making good progress and getting into the trenches with that. Looking back on the earlier parts of your graduate student career, are there any particular experiences or courses that you remember fondly or that had a big impact on your intellectual development?

MG: Hmm, that’s a hard question! There were a couple of courses that really impacted the way I see and understand the field quite a bit. Two were archaeological theory courses – one taught in the Classics department and one in the anthropology department. Doing those both in the same year was really eye-opening, to think about how archaeology operates differently depending on where you work and the conscious decisions made in the data collection and data processing stages. Classical archaeology has a pretty unique approach, and there’s a lot that Classical archaeology can learn and draw from other approaches. The other class that I took was on context and assemblage theory – we talked about how all types of material culture are enacted and changing in different spaces all the time. It was really relevant to anyone who thinks about anything material across disciplines – there are so many ways to think about how we archaeologists interpret and create material assemblages. Those were definitely the most influential moments of my coursework in grad school.

Porto Rafti Saxo-Gnome thinks you should read more archaeological theory! (M. Godsey)

SCM: Wow, those sound amazing. I can hardly remember grad school at my advanced age. But I think I had kind of a similar experience, because my undergraduate education had taught me a lot about objects and stuff, like what temples look like or whatever, but then in grad school I actually learned what archaeology really is – not just memorizing words for parts of temples, but sort of a philosophy of how to understand the world. I basically never got any of that stuff in Classics, or not until I got to grad school anyway.

MG: Definitely!

Porto Rafti at dusk, as seen from the Koroni peninsula (M. Godsey)

SCM: Okay, so you’ve done a ton of fieldwork – let’s hear about your range of fieldwork experiences and the kinds of work you’ve done in your career as an archaeologist so far!

MG: Sure thing! My first field school was in Italy, at an Etruscan site called Cetamura excavated by Florida State University. I really enjoyed working there, but my next project was a field survey (WARP!) with a totally different set of goals and research questions and methodology of course. It was really fun to do that so early on in my graduate career and get experience with two totally different sorts of field archaeology. Since then I’ve done a good mix of excavation, survey and (more recently) a lot of finds processing – mostly from Hellenistic sites in Egypt (French Archaeological Mission of the Eastern Desert and Abydos), Cyprus (Pyla-Vigla), and Greece (Corinth, Sikyon, WARP, among others).

Melanie working at Corinth in the South Stoa Excavations of 2015: very ahead of the trend with that mask! (photo courtesy of M. Godsey)

SCM: Yeah, it’s very much to your credit to be seeking out all of these different opportunities in a kind of omnivorous way. I think that’s kind of ideal for a grad student, to flit around and check out a lot of different projects to see how things are done differently in different contexts, and get a sense of the range of archaeological approaches to fieldwork. I’m sure that exposure will serve you well going forward. If you had to choose one aspect of work in the field that’s your favorite, what do you think you’d pick?

MG: Oooh, hard one! I don’t know! Despite my love for ceramics and how much time I spend with pottery, I do prefer being outdoors doing something. The range of possibility is pretty open-ended, but generally I prefer to be outside, even if it’s just at a pottery table outdoors; anything that gets a person outside and active.

SCM: I totally agree. I would always rather be outside.

MG: Especially in the Mediterranean.

SCM: Right, maybe different rules would apply in Greenland.

MG: Who knows? It sounds cold though.

Porto Rafti all aglow in gentle October evening light (M. Godsey)

SCM: Okay, so one thing that I often think about when it comes to archaeological research in Egypt is, of course, the risk of awakening or disturbing Lovecraftian horrors of the undead, activating ancient mummy curses, and having other various terrifying/exciting adventures related to the Very Extra nature of the Egyptian archaeological record. Now working in Greece, I’ve never experienced such adventures, but I’m guessing that you must have. 

MG: Actually no! I’ve not had any undead encounters or fracases with animate mummies. Do I even have any crazy stories? I think crazy things happening to me has been limited to plans for the day being totally derailed by whatever – a really nice farmer who wants to get you drunk on raki because you were walking near his field early in the morning and you hang out at his house all day and don’t get anything done; or something really exciting happens at a nearby site so you take the day off to go check that out. It’s always exciting when something cool throws a wrench in those plans and you get to experience some entirely different thing that’s happening in the world. 

SCM: Oh yeah, the 9am raki drinking break! I’ve definitely been there. I generally find it hard to be very productive after a big karafaki of raki before noon.

MG: Quite a challenge, yeah!

That feeling when you've had too much raki at 9am and are trying to proceed with survey units nonetheless (S. Murray)

SCM: I’m also kind of heartened to hear that I’m not really missing out on a lot of encounters with the undead just because I don’t work in Egypt.

MG: Hasn’t happened to me yet – but there’s still time!

SCM: Yes, indeed, perhaps something to look forward to post-pandemic. Now, you’re currently in Greece and have been living there more or less for the last year and a half. How has that been, COVID times notwithstanding?

MG: My intention when I moved here more permanently last fall was to do the regular year program at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, which was wonderful. We almost beat the pandemic: it just caught us at the end! Nevertheless we went to a ton of archaeological sites and talked about archaeological problems on the sites where those problems came to be known; that was definitely the most memorable experience that I’ve had; just getting to travel around in this bus and going to so many beautiful places in Greece. We were based in Athens and really got to know the city quite well and meet people living in different parts of the city and all that kind of stuff. This year I am back in Athens, but I also spent a month in October in Porto Rafti, which was wonderful! I got to know old Porto Rafti in a new way, since I hadn’t been around there too much before this year. Unfortunately, right after that we entered the lockdown again, so I’ve just been kind of working in a sedentary way for a while. But it’s been really nice; much better than a lot of places I could be right now. I feel really lucky to be here and to have gotten to spend so much time in Athens and Greece lately.

Evening loveliness along the seaside of Porto Rafti, with the notorious silhouette of Raftis island in the background (M. Godsey)

SCM: Amazing! I’m really jealous; I never lived in Greece for more than a few months at a time in grad school, which I really regret. I hope that the lockdown ends soon and that there will be some more months of fun stuff ahead!

MG: I hope so too!

SCM: But thinking back about better times in the fall, tell me about your glamorous October on the Porto Rafti Riviera.

MG: It was fun! Surprisingly it was still really crowded on the weekends all the way through October, even though there was a pandemic on! Apparently, nothing can stop Athenians from going to Porto Rafti on the weekends. But during the weeks it was pretty mellow, and you could walk around pretty easily, which is not always true, since it is not the most pedestrian friendly place. It was still possible to swim in October too! I spent a fair amount of time wandering through the area and climbing up out into the surrounding hills.

SCM: Did you discover any secret best favorite bakeries or restaurants or cafes that you’d like to share with those of us who might spend some more time in Porto Rafti in the future?

MG: I went back to Fyki Fyki, which is definitely on the favorites list. I did test out all of the different coffee options along the water, and I can report that all were very good, so you can’t go wrong with a freddo around there.

Porto Rafti beach vibes, October 2020 (M. Godsey)

SCM: Good to know! Aside from Porto Rafti, do you have a favorite place or site in Greece, as a place to live/hang out or in terms of the archaeology?

MG: I really love the site of Messene in the Peloponnese, which is in a really beautiful location, but I also like the way that the site has been set up for visitors. You can walk most of the fortification walls, which is really cool, and the Hellenistic stuff there is really great, so it really appeals to me in terms of research as well.

The fortifications of ancient Messene (M. Godsey)

SCM: Great choice! I haven’t been there forever, but the landscape is definitely very choice in that area; in the notorious “DEEP Peloponnese” generally. And the fortifications are super cool. For now, I guess we can’t really go see any sites in Greece: do you have big plans for after the lockdown? Places you’re going to head in Greece once it’s allowed?

MG: I’m most excited to get back to fieldwork, basically of any kind. Not necessarily in terms of pursuing research questions or the thrill of discovery, but mostly for the camaraderie of the field team, which you just can’t recreate in any other context. It will be nice to get to travel beyond Kolonaki and Pangrati too! I now inhabit a very limited circle of Athens, so getting beyond that will be quite nice.

Evening in Athens: always beautiful, lockdown or no lockdown! (M. Godsey)

SCM: That makes sense – I am dying to have a beer with a friend somewhere, anywhere, again; the incredible camaraderie of fieldwork is kind of more than a a person can even begin to imagine after a year of hardly seeing anyone. Hopefully this summer! But who knows. For now, I’ll let you get back to wearing ruts in the sidewalks of Pangrati and Kolonaki – unless there’s anything else you’re dying to share with the BEARS blog readers!

MG: Not in particular – but I am excited for BEARS 2021 and I can’t wait to see everyone over here and meet the whole team.

SCM: Me too – I’m gonna try to do everything I can to make it happen; and now you’ll be famous, one of only three people who were a part of the extra exclusive BEARS 2020 team! Thanks for the interview and good luck with your work the rest of the winter!

So much for glamorous Aegean views: for now it is winter hunkerin' time (S. Murray)
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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 11: Matthias Kalisch

Over the holiday break I had the great pleasure of virtually sitting down on the old zoom unit to catch up with a couple of stellar BEARS veterans. Now that grades from the fall have finally been submitted and everyone is hunkering down for a delightful winter’s stay-at-home order, there is, at long last, time to get around to filing the latest pair of BEARS interviews here on the blog. First up is a conversation with Matthias Kalisch, who bravely represents the continental European student contingent on the project, putting up with myriad Canadian micro-aggressions along the way, no doubt! In 2019 Matthias joined us from Tübingen, and our interpretations in the field benefited a lot from his great expertise on and experience with survey methods, roof tiles (based on many years of work at Olympia, great land of fancy tiles), and coins. Take a seat by the fire, pull up an electronic device of your choosing, and check out what he has to say about a huge range of topics, from archaeology to musicology, not to mention a bunch of great photos from Greece and Porto Rafti that Matthias was kind enough to share for this post!

Maeve, Matthias, and Taylor enjoy a lunch break on Koroni (J. MacPherson)

SCM: How did you first get into archaeology and how did you decide to pursue Classical archaeology as a career?

MKK: I was always interested in history and archaeology. As a child for me it was very interesting to look around in Germany because you had all these castles and places which had this long history which is kind of forgotten sometimes. In most of the forests you can walk inside and find the remains of all kinds of castles and things like that. At first I was really into the medieval era, but then when I went to school I got more and more interested in modern history. So that’s what I started studying at first. I don’t know exactly how it works in Canada with the undergraduate program, but in Germany you go to university and you have to know already what you want to do. I started out studying history and musicology. History is still something I really like and am interested in, but at some point, the way that history was taught made it seem like a field I didn’t really want to continue in and a place that I didn’t belong. In my second year, I changed my major from history to Classical Archaeology. I got into Classical Archaeology and the work with this material was really very appealing to me, in comparison with working just with textual sources.

A castle in a forest that is familiar to BEARSers, but not quite on the level of medieval Germany (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Right, I see – now tell me a little about the musicology thing! Where did that emerge from?

MKK: Music was always a big deal for me because I play the drums and percussion, and I have been playing in an orchestra now for nearly twenty years. This is also not possible at the moment, which is really sad, because during Christmas time it’s such a cool time to be in an orchestra with all of the Christmas markets and we have a big concert on the 25th every two years. So music was kind of something I was always interested in, and I was especially interested in the history but also in the structure of music: what is music, how is it constructed, that kind of thing. I decided to start musicology because compared to studying an instrument, it’s a very theoretical field, which I liked. This is something cool about music – it was the only ‘mathematical’ thing I ever really found appealing. In Tübingen musicology was very focused on Mozart and the so-called “Wiener Klassik”; we have a very Mozart-focused faculty. But that changed when I was there because a lot of the faculty retired to be replaced by younger professors who had different interests and energies. What I really enjoyed studying was dodecaphonic music, like 12-tone music, because it’s something unpleasant and weird to listen to, but it is a really interesting field of study in musicology, in terms of how that music expresses ideas that other types of music can’t express as strongly.

Some potential drums lingering in the pot-washing area of the BEARS project at Brauron (M. Kalisch)

SCM: That is fascinating! I know very little about music. Did you know that Taylor, fellow BEAR, is a talented clarinetist?

MKK: Yeah, we talked about that when we were living together in Porto Rafti!

SCM: Next year you should make a little BEARS band, and you guys can play for us in the evenings.

MKK: Usually I take my ukulele to projects, but I couldn’t last year because I didn’t come to Greece straight from Germany. But I definitely will bring it next year.

SCM: YES. I am going to make it a requirement!

MKK: Okay!

Some potential future members of the BEARS band? (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Okay, so back to archaeology I guess…. What are your main research interests these days? Are you working on anything in particular?

MKK: Because we were not able to go on projects this summer I was able to finish some articles I have been working on and planning to submit. One was a numismatic paper, which is a field I’m very invested in. The other one was about climate in the Ionian archipelago, which was something I didn’t have much experience working on, but which was really exciting to learn more about, because I think that climate has been generally disregarded in Classical Archaeology so far. This is something that prehistoric archaeology deals with a lot, with excellent results, but nobody really deals with it in Classical Archaeology, so I think there is a lot of room for growth there.

The climate in Porto Rafti, June 2019: good (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Yeah, good point. In prehistory lately there has been a ton of work on the climate as a driving force in change, but not so much on the historical periods. Cool stuff! Now, returning to the numismatics issue – this is a topic that many archaeologists think of as quite unexciting, or even boring. Can you explain to us – explain to the world! – what’s so wonderful about numismatics as a research topic?

MKK: Ha! What to say? Look, numismatics might appear to be a boring topic at first glance, and I know why it has this reputation. Numismatics is often regarded as the study of something totally unconnected to the whole site or the bigger picture of the project. People assume that you do it in a small chamber in the basement with your magnifying glass, just identifying the coin by emperor or city and being totally isolated and pedantic. Of course, if you approach numismatics this way it is very boring! What I think is that coins as an archaeological source are very interesting and very important. There are several problems you might find when you try to use coins as an archaeological source, especially in terms of documentation. The research I did for my bachelor’s thesis was on the numismatic material in the four Panhellenic sanctuaries, and the point was that there is no publication of this material! There are coins from the sites, but everyone has basically ignored them. There is a fair amount published on Nemea, but the coins from Delphi and Olympia have barely been dealt with. From Olympia, maybe 500 out of several thousand coins have been published! That’s very sad, because when you look into the material closely you can find the same things you see in other studies of artifacts – patterns in history of use in coins, change in the use of parts of the site over time, etc. So that’s what I am trying to do: to approach numismatics from a different standpoint. In my opinion, it makes it more interesting than old-school numismatics. But it’s also very hard to do this work, because you oftentimes have issues with poor recording of the archaeological contexts for coins, which you can’t really fix, no matter how sophisticated your analysis.  

A coin from the survey on Raftis island (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Amazing! I’ve never been so interested in coins! I also had no idea that there were sooooo many unpublished coins from Olympia. What a cool project to resuscitate meaning and interpretation into a big body of evidence from such important sites!

MKK: Yeah, and it’s not just Olympia. Lots of sites have coins in the depot that are just forgotten, moldering there.

It is said that coins are more plentiful than sherds in the Olympia storerooms! (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Do you have a favorite coin or coin-insight that has come from your careful studies of these assemblages?

MKK: From an artistic standpoint, I think the coins from Aegina are really interesting: I really like the turtles! But also very interesting are the early coins from southern Italy, because they look really different than coins usually are supposed to look. They don’t have relief on both sides, they have relief on one side and then the negative/incuse form on the other side. Nobody really understands yet why they did things that way locally in the region. When I started out with numismatics I thought, okay, it might be the same in Sicily because both areas are closely connected with colonization, but that’s not true. Sicily minted coins in the normal way, but southern Italy had this very special form of coins. I find this quite interesting in terms of the arbitrariness of what seems like a pretty instrumental technology. 

A display about coin production in the Antalya Museum, Turkey (S. Murray)

SCM: Nice! I am learning so much about coins from this interview! Thank you for sharing your expertise and insights! Now, clearly you have a ton of experience in the field, both in research and working on field projects. Tell us about the kinds of projects that you’ve worked on and the range of fieldwork that you’ve had experience with up to now?

MKK: Most of my fieldwork has been in survey and landscape archaeology projects, so similar to the BEARS project. My first project in Greece was in 2015 on the Olympia survey project. By the way, that’s why I know how many coins there are at Olympia: because I saw them I the depot! The project did a survey in the surrounding area around the sanctuary. For me this was very interesting because, in my opinion, Olympia is maybe one of the most studied areas in all of Classical Archaeology, with tons and tons of publications, but none of them really address the area around the sanctuary! We worked for several years, and covered a lot of the area around the site, and it’s just impressive how much information you can get out of these surface assemblages. The question is still how people who came to the games or to the festival in Olympia were managing – where did they get their water and food? – and nobody has really looked for such details in the archaeological record. The survey was trying to address that kind of thing, and it was really impressive: some of the stuff that we found in the survey had been documented in maybe a single sentence somewhere from a casual traveler; but having a close look at all of these things really helped us to understand the bigger dynamics of the region around Olympia.

I also went to two projects in Italy, because Tübingen has some more Italy-focused research areas. We conducted a survey around Cosa (north of Rome, a big Republican site), also carrying out a program of magnetometry to make clear the plan of the site without excavating, especially the area of the settlement, rather than the acropolis and other fancy stuff. What was very interesting, and kind of the opposite of the survey, was also going to an excavation at Pantelleria, which is a small island between Sicily and the coast of Tunisia. Tübingen conducts an excavation on the acropolis of the city, and working there you get a really good impression of how digging works in comparison to survey fieldwork. The material is certainly different. In Cosa, we did not actually collect any material, but in Olympia most of what we found were roof tiles or scattered ceramic sherds. In the excavation, of course the material is much more well-preserved and voluminous. Although as you pointed out in Porto Rafti, the survey material on BEARS is sort of more like an excavation would produce.

Elliott, Taylor, Herakles, and Grace count tiles after surveying a unit on Raftis (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Do you have a preference for certain kinds of projects, say survey work or excavations?

MKK: That’s a good question. I like both kinds of work, even though there are so different. On a survey, I like to be in different places every day, and to cover a large area, also orientating yourself every day in a new way. On the Olympia survey we actually were in different areas every day: we drove somewhere, got out, took out our maps, and had to locate ourselves, the place you wanted to survey, and everything around you. That was very intense sometimes, because sometimes you realized you actually had no idea where you were! Which was not good…. but it happened! And that’s different on an excavation obviously because you work on the same place sometimes in the same trench for a month! But I guess it’s just two very different approaches in archaeology, and I like the diversity in that. It’s also what we found in Pantelleria, it was so interesting: there were architectural structures, in the year before I was there the project excavated an assemblage of cannonball-looking spherical stones, there was also a leg or arm of a statue in there too. As we continued to excavate the room in the year after, we actually found more of the projectiles and the remains of an ancient siege engine. So there are things about both approaches that I like, and I think it’s important to attend to the complementary value of the data they each produce.

pseudo-selfie of Matthias riding around with goats near Olympia (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Such a diplomatic answer! You’re playing both sides of the aisle! But of course, you’re right that both approaches are valuable and produce useful information. I like your description of the fun part of survey being having to figure out where you are all the time and occasionally getting lost. That is something that I kind of dislike about the BEARS survey actually, that it’s sort of impossible to get lost around Porto Rafti, and that we go to the same few places every day. I’m not sure how to categorize what exactly we’re doing out there!

Now, turning to a more controversial question: do you prefer Greece or Italy as a place to live and work on an archaeological project?

MKK: Definitely Greece. 

SCM: Interesting! You seem very sure! Why? (By the way, I agree with you!)

MKK: I don’t know! I mean, I do know. The first time I went to Greece was 2015, and before we went to the project, we did a student trip with our department there and basically covered the area around Athens and Delphi, then the Peloponnese, for about two weeks. The experience being in Greece and the opportunity meet the people, in comparison to Italy, was just kind of more intense. This might have been the product of the fact of the circumstances at the Olympia project, but I felt much more connected to the people and the landscape of Greece for whatever reason. I love the sort of mythological sphere of the landscape…I have that impression much more in Greece than in Italy. And I still have a lot of friends from the Olympia project and usually try to visit them when I am in Greece, so I have a strong connection to that area.

Olympia as seen from the Kronos hill above the site (S. Murray)

I also really like the food in Greece quite a lot. People really like Italian food, and I do too, but sometimes, especially on excavations, it’s mostly pizza and pasta. I know there is more to Italian food, but in terms of the food you get on projects the diversity that you get is much greater in Greece. 

SCM: Yes! This is something that I often get into debates about with my colleagues who work in Italy. They are always arguing that Italian is so much better than Greek food, and I think the complete opposite!

MKK: Exactly!

Greeeeeeek Foooooooood being enjoyed by our very own Dr. Rob, Crete, December 2009 (S. Murray)

SCM: I think people just don’t understand Greek food. All they ever order is souvlaki and salad. But there’s so much more; it’s such a rich cuisine, even if it’s not as famous for a bunch of expensive cured meats and cheeses and stuff. But the people who work in Italy are so chauvinistic about Italian food! Anyway, I am glad we agree!

MKK: On the Olympia project we usually had dinner all together, and I think in the entire five weeks we were there, there was only one time that we had the same meal. We ate at a great little taverna run by an older woman and man cooking in the kitchen, and they were making super traditional, old-school Greek food. And I think that’s what people mostly confuse: there is Greek tourist food and traditional Greek food, and the two are very different. So most tourists think that Greek food is mostly fried, but that is absolutely not the case at all. Like you said, the cuisine is really diverse internally and the spices are much more interesting than what we get in central Europe. I can definitively say that Greek good is far superior to Italian.

Yummmmmm (S. Murray)

SCM: Preach! I agree with your earlier point about Italian food on excavations – my one project in Italy served us only meagre portions of pizza and pasta and it was totally boring and repetitive and we all felt kinda malnourished at the end because of the lack of protein. 

In terms of the landscape and cultural environment, I guess I would say that of all the places to spend time in Greece, the modern town of Olympia is not necessarily my favorite. You know, in terms of a place to live. Probably most people would say the same about Porto Rafti – not exactly an idyllic traditional Greek village. But aside from that maybe Porto Rafti and Olympia don’t have too much in common – did you live in the nice secluded German house in the forest at Olympia? Or what was it like to live there amidst the cruise ship tourists for five weeks?

MKK: We actually could not live in the German excavation house, because it was too small for our group. Also, the excavation team lives there, and we were just the survey project! We stayed in one of the hotels in town, but it was really more like a hostel with shared rooms and bathrooms and that kind of thing. I’m pretty sure we got a special deal, so it was cheap for the project to put us in there for five weeks.

Olympia and Porto Rafti are both tourist areas or destinations, but Porto Rafti is a Greek destination, where people from Athens come for vacation, or just the weekend, but in Olympia you have tourists from all over the world. The town is just one big street with the hotels and the shops on it. Especially on the weekend and on Sunday when we had free time there were just buses everywhere because they were bringing in tourists and they were carrying out tourists…all day long! In the first year, we would walk around the street and everybody would bother us or ask us to eat at the restaurants, and we kept telling them that we weren’t tourists and ate somewhere else with the team. Then, after two weeks, the restaurant workers started recognizing us and stopped harassing us about eating at the restaurants, but we’d get into small conversations instead, like about the weather or whatever. And after three years we had developed these relationships with the people, like neighbors greeting each other every morning. So that was a very interesting experience, because we went from tourists and foreigners to something else. I enjoyed Olympia and staying there very much, but I definitely see that it is not the typical Greek village that you might stay in on a project!

A forest of tour buses in the Olympia parking lot (S. Murray)
The main drag of Olympia at night (M. Kalisch)

Porto Rafti is similar in the sense that you don’t have the village center with a church or a kafeneio or a bakery where you could sit around the whole day drinking a frappe and seeing the village life go by. The geographical layout of the town is even less conducive to that than Olympia, because the distribution of the houses is quite confusing; there doesn’t seem to be much of a logic to the town and everything is really spread out.

SCM: That is super cool about Olympia – that you and the team were able to delve behind the tourist façade and actually hang out with the people who live and work there on their own terms. 

MKK: Yeah – for example, in the hotel where we were living a vase-painter was actually working out of the basement. He was basically our weather channel. Every morning we would ask him how the weather would be before we packed for work, and we’d take our raincoats or not based on what he said!

Local charm off the beaten path in Olympia (S. Murray)

SCM: That is amazing! The basement craftsman/weather station. You’re right about Porto Rafti, too. I think it seems pretty clear that the people that come from Athens aren’t super interested in ‘the community’ so much as they want to go into their big concrete compounds and hang out alone in their beach houses. So, it’s definitely a bit of a challenging place to try to engage with a local community, whatever that would mean in an Athenian beach resort town. Anyway, let’s do one more question! How was your experience on the BEARS project overall – any impressions of the work or the people or strong memories that you want to share with the blog readers?

MKK: I really enjoyed the project a great deal! The people were wonderful, first of all, and I really enjoyed meeting the team and working with them. At first, I was not sure what to expect, in a way, since it was the first project I’ve worked on which was so international. At Olympia, we mostly spoke English because we also had Greek people working with us, but you always had your group of Germans where you could speak German if you wanted to. On BEARS of course most of the people were English speakers, which was a new situation for me. But I really enjoyed it, and everyone was really nice and friendly. In terms of the work, I definitely loved sailing to Raftis. I really like the sea, so going out in the boat was really lovely. Obviously the finds we had were incredible, on Raftis especially. Usually you just see stuff like that in a museum! To pick up things like that from the ground and hold them in my hands was so amazing. 

Another thing that was interesting to me was the amount of digital technology that we were using, for instance collecting data on iPads. On my other projects we’ve always taken notes on paper and then had to spend a lot of time transferring the data to the computer. So it was interesting to see the purely digital recording method and to find how much time that opened up in the afternoons and evenings because of the absence of data entry.

Working the survey of Pounta around Porto Rafti (M. Kalisch)
Good times on the commute to Raftis (M. Kalisch)
Team members visit Sounion on a free weekend (M. Kalisch)

SCM: Yeah! It all worked out pretty well. I was kind of nervous about it, because a lot more can go wrong when you rely on technology, in a way. But I was super glad that we did not have to do any data entry! Which was always my least favorite part of fieldwork. And hopefully we’ll get you back out on the boat in future seasons, too. Speaking of the bright future, what are you most excited to get back to doing next time you are able to return to Greece for fieldwork?

MKK: Hmmmm. I would say the food! Just going to a nice fish taverna by the sea and sitting there in the evening after a long day of work…I really miss that feeling of enjoying a long evening at dinner and relaxing after a very tiring day of work. It’s not the kind of feeling you get in normal life, and it’s also never the same to have Greek food in Germany. You need the smell of the sea and the air and the sun and the particular ingredients. I am definitely looking forward to that.

SCM: Great answer! I look forward to such evenings in Porto Rafti sometime soon, too. Meanwhile enjoy your holiday preparations, and thanks again for taking the time to do this interview!

Sign for a seaside taverna on the island of Samos (S. Murray)
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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 10: Elliott Fuller

As the semester really gets rolling along here in Toronto, the epic saga of the BEARS team member interview series continues! This week we’re bringing you a conversation with one of our founding graduate student team members, Elliott Fuller, who is also a PhD student in Classics and the Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization (MACS) program at the U of T. In fact, Elliott is a foundational member of that program: a member of the inaugural MACS cohort, and the first Toronto Classics student to pursue his PhD with a research focus on the Late Bronze Age. Such pioneering bravery is to be commended, but Elliott is also well known as a master of all things Classics – he made the MACS faculty proud by absolutely crushing all of his Greek and Latin language exams, etc., over the last several years, and continues to prove that sometimes Bronze Agers are just better at everything. Speaking of superlatives, in last summer’s field season Elliott was unanimously voted “Best BEARS Beard” and also got the prize for finding the largest ‘sherd’ of pottery I’ve ever seen come from a survey project. He currently resides in Victoria, British Columbia, but I recently managed to catch him on Zoom for a chat about all things BEARS, archaeology, and pandemic hobbies.

Elliott amongst the maquis on Koroni last summer (I. Chorghay)
Elliott's torso and a torso-sized sherd on the Pounta peninsula in 2019 (G. Erny)

SCM: You are currently pursuing a PhD in the Classics department at the University of Toronto. Can you tell us what got you interested in Classics and why you decided to pursue a PhD in the subject?

EJF: When I was starting university, I thought I wanted to do anthropology, so I had signed up for intro courses in that, but I had some electives, so I took Latin as well. I had a really great Latin teacher, I was also very good at it , and I liked the challenge of learning a different language. It was also wonderful to learn about Roman culture through the language.  But what really sealed it for me was that summer, after my first year, I went on a study tour of Greece  Traveling in Greece for 4 weeks and seeing all of these sites and eating the food, was amazing. That was definitely what convinced me to do the Greek and Roman Studies degree at UVic.

The 'treasury of Atreus' at Mycenae, one of many exciting sites that tend to get a student excited to study Ancient Greek archaeology (E. Fuller)

SCM: Very understandable! And you decided to continue on to the PhD for similar reasons?

EJF: I definitely had it in my mind that if I went on to grad school I could continue learning about this material that I really love and am interested in. And there is also continued potential to keep going to Greece and continuing to do archaeology. Then of course the dream is to eventually, not get paid to go to the Mediterranean, but at least get your expenses covered to do that continuing into the long term.

SCM: Yeah, I feel like we are on the same wavelength. I was certainly very motivated by the idea of spending as much time as possible in the Mediterranean when I veered towards academia/archaeology as a career. Now, you said that your entrée into the field was with Latin, but now you are doing something very different from studying Latin literature! What kind of research are you working on in your program, and how are you doing in terms of progressing through grad school at Toronto?

EJF: My research at the moment focuses on trade in the Aegean Bronze Age; that’s the broad topic. More specifically I am interested in trying to reconstruct the role of traders in Late Bronze Age society and looking at the role of coastal sites in exchanges and interactions that occur through commerce. I’m hoping to explore those things further in my major field exam, which is what I am working on right now. I’m currently making my way through the reading list for that. I’m hoping to also bring in some evidence from the eastern Mediterranean, including the texts from Ugarit, which deal a lot with merchants and traders. In general, I’m also very interested in what’s happening in the eastern Mediterranean. 

Winter evening light on the site of Kommos, one of many important coastal nodes in networks of exchange in the LBA Mediterranean (S. Murray)

SCM: Interesting! And how did this come about, that you went from being good at Latin to getting bogged down in the crazy mixed up scholarly world of Late Bronze Age trade in the eastern Mediterranean?

EJF: I think it goes back again to the study tour I did in Greece with Brendan Burke. He works on the Aegean Bronze Age, specializing in textiles. He took us to all kinds of sites, but I think he had a particular passion for the Bronze Age sites, like Knossos and Mycenae, and that definitely impacted  my interests. Something about seeing Mycenae and knowing how old it is but seeing also how monumental it is, that was really exciting to me. I ended up doing an honor’s thesis with the same professor, which was more on Iron Age material, on burials; but then I did an MA thesis on Bronze Age mortuary rituals. I also completed a program at the British School on Linear B, and wrote a short paper on inscribed stirrup jars, which is kind of how I got into the whole trade issue. In that paper I was looking at how these jars circulated and how some of them seem to misappropriated or end up not where one would really expect to find them. And that’s a direction I’m still going in my major field. I guess it’s kind of a convoluted trajectory.

One of the inscribed stirrup jars at the center of Elliott's research (E. Fuller)

SCM: All good research trajectories are convoluted! What would be the fun in knowing where you are going to end up when you start a research project? To me it seems extremely strange when people actually end up working on what they said they would work on three years ago or whenever. To me that is just not the right way to do it! 

I suppose you are now reaching the critical moment of academic life, when you will never be in a formal class again, or take many more exams. Looking back at the more formal stages of your program, what would you say has been your favorite or most valuable course or experience that you have taken in the program so far?

EJF: The initial stages where I was taking Greek and Latin prose comp and studying for the Greek and Latin exams were really intense and stressful, but that was also really productive. I  learned Greek and Latin really well! That was  an initial trial by fire – not so pleasant but very good to have done.    Definitely one of the highlights was the MACS program and the seminar. That’s one of the things that drew me to Toronto, was the potential of studying the Mediterranean as a unit, and also from so many different perspectives and archaeological approaches. and then of course also the fieldwork component  was obviously great – the BEARS season was amazing. So, I’d say definitely the entire MACS program has been the highlight of the PhD so far.

SCM: I hope you’re not just saying that because you think that’s what I want to hear! 

EJF: I know, it sounds like flattery! But it’s all genuinely true!

Elliott enjoying life with friends on the BEARS project in 2019 (I. Chorghay)

SCM: Well, it’s good to know that things went okay – you know you were in the very first year of that program, so you were the guinea pigs! But I’m glad you didn’t necessarily feel that way. Now, time to indulge your interviewer’s inane curiosities: you are a transplant to Toronto from the West Coast. I am still relatively new to this wonderful culture called Canada. Can you tell me the main differences that you see between West and East Coast Canadian culture? Are there clearly different cultures? Or is it just basically the weather?

EJF: Hmmmm, well, I think it’s definitely the weather, but there is also just a different feeling. Perhaps they’re related. Maybe the weather out west makes people more relaxed . But I’m not sure – there is something more than that. People in Victoria are really friendly and relaxed in a way that…. well, there are definitely people that are friendly in Toronto, but it seems like people are much more stressed and more career-driven . The weather in coastal BC is kind of Mediterranean. It’s hot and dry in the summer and then cool and wet in the winter. So, you don’t get the extreme cold temperatures in the winter, or these winters that seem to drag on forever, that make people with Seasonal Affective Disorder miserable, that kind of thing. Another difference is that in Victoria you are always really close to parks and lakes and the water, so it’s very easy to get out and be somewhere beautiful if you are stressed out or just want to escape the concrete jungle. Toronto has a lot of parks, but it’s a different scenario.

Scenes from western Canada: quite distinct from downtown Toronto (E. Fuller)

SCM: You have to be a little careful, because people might call you an environmental determinist! But, yeah, I hear what you are saying. Endless urban winters can drive anyone a little nuts. It’s an interesting answer too because it sounds a lot like what people would say to a similar question about east and west coast cities in the US. So maybe that is a vote in favor of your environmental determinism position. Same on both sides of the border. Now, you have also worked and traveled quite a bit in Greece: how about the major differences between Greece and Canada?

EJF: That’s somewhat tricky.  For some reason whenever I land in Athens I am immediately filled with this sense of profound well-being.  Maybe it’s related to the fact that when I am in Greece I don’t have the normal responsibilities that I have when I am home But it’s almost  like an entirely different sensory experience. There are different smells and sights that you don’t have in Canadian cities. Everything in Athens seems more vivid somehow – stronger smells, louder noises, just more in general. In a good way! I think being in Greece is just generally amazing – the weather, the food – everything is so good. And you are so close to the water all of the time, there are beautiful beaches everywhere, and you have access to these remains of the ancient past. You can see and feel the long-term history of the place more immediately than you can here. Obviously, Canada has a long-term history, too, it’s just not as visible. I guess Greece just seems like a better place to be for any human in ways that are hard to describe.

Greece: It Is Good. (S. Murray)

SCM: It is a feeling as much as anything; it is always challenging to articulate what a place really ‘feels’ like in a different place. I like your point about the smells. My favorite thing is when you are walking through a plateia early in the morning and there is a bakery nearby, and the smell of the wonderful things emerging from that bakery is so strong and so good. I love that smell so much. Someone needs to open a Greek bakery on my street in Toronto. My quality of life would increase immensely.

EJF: Yeah, totally! And there’s also this factor of having so many good and happy memories associated with those senses and smells too.

Mediterranean bakeries are one of The Best Things. This one is in Sfax, Tunisia (S. Murray)

SCM: All of the best things seem to happen in the Mediterranean; that has been my experience! I think there is this other factor of people around you being happier, too, which tends to make one happy. I love that it’s okay to go out and sit for a coffee with your friends for 4-5 hours in the middle of the day and nobody is worried about it. In Toronto, I feel like peoples’ heads would explode!

EJF: Yeah, I love the way that life really circulates around socializing with friends and family there, rather than people molding the time for those human connections around and in between whatever arbitrary work tasks that we think are more important. In Greece, I think people are better at taking time to relax and talk with people they care about. I think that’s something we should probably do more of.

Mellow times among friends at a cafe in Chania one December long ago (S. Murray)

SCM: Even as something of an obsessive workaholic, I totally agree with you. Anyway, Greece is the best – unfortunately this summer most people in the field were not able to spend much time there, and certainly most actual fieldwork was canceled. However, last summer, of course, you came and worked on the BEARS project in Porto Rafti. What did you think about the BEARS project? How about the town of Porto Rafti as a place to live? 

EJF: Well, in terms of living in Porto Rafti, one thing to say for sure is that our accommodations were amazing. I have been pretty lucky on projects to always have a roof over my head; I’ve never had to live in a tent or anything. But the BEARS houses were by far the swankiest place I’ve ever gotten to stay on a project, which obviously makes life more pleasant! Porto Rafti is a bit unusual compared to other Greek towns I’ve stayed in, just in terms of the way that the streets are organized. There aren’t a lot of sidewalks. We had to dodge a lot of cars sometimes. But the town itself is very beautiful and it is in a very beautiful place.  I didn’t really get to know the place or explore it as much as I wanted to. Even though we had a very generous stipend, we mostly stayed in and cooked meals at home. I’m hoping that when we go back I will get out and see more of the scene in Porto Rafti. That’s the plan for 2021. 

In terms of the experience, it was my first time doing survey, and my impression of survey was that you slog through fields and you maybe find a few battered sherds, and that is considered a victory. But BEARS was not like that! We were finding so much amazing pottery  on the surface all of the time. Every day we would make a new spectacular find. That was obviously pretty exciting and very good for morale! It made for a really interesting and constantly surprising field season. I thought it was very cool that we had these sites in the same region, but each was from a totally different chronological time period and the assemblages of each were totally distinct from one another. It was fascinating to see how this one little corner of Greece had been used in so many different ways over this huge period of time. That to me is really interesting.

The Afroditi at sea in Porto Rafti bay on a calm morning (E. Fuller)

SCM: That is a good point! We have a huge diachronic range on these sites, but each site is totally distinct in how the landscape is being exploited and the types of artifacts that are abundant. So, everyone has a different strategy for dealing with a physical container that was pretty much the same through time, which must turn on different ways that people reacted to that landscape.

EJF: Yeah, and of course the big mystery is the whole situation with Late Bronze Age and Late Roman on the island. It seems like the two assemblages are pretty different from one another, but I wonder if the two groups were doing the same thing living out there.

SCM: I have some theories about that! But they shall remain secret for now. How about you, since you’re a Bronze Age scholar, what’s your best idea about how to explain what’s going on out on Raftis in the Bronze Age?

EJF: I don’t have the answer! It is really interesting, because the prevailing narrative, that this is a refuge of some kind, does not really make sense with the finds. It’s right after the collapse and people are fleeing, and they are hiding in these marginal environments…okay, but what is happening on Raftis does not seem to fit that. Because if you are fleeing for your life you would not have so much fancy cooking pottery and so many varieties of fancy painted pottery and ritual vessels. And the finds from Perati are quite dissonant with the idea of a refuge settlement too. I was just reading an article by  Shelley Wachsmann arguing that the Pylos rower tablets refer to an orderly evacuation of the palace in boats, which I don’t really agree with. But one of the things he says is that nobody would take pottery with them in such a situation because it is just not so valuable. I guess by that logic if the people on Raftis were evacuating someplace else, then it would be strange that they had so much fancy stuff. Anyway, the point is that whatever is going on out there, I do not think these people fit into the normal definition we have of ‘refugees’ or the destitute escapees of some palatial disaster. Maybe there is an attempt, like at Tiryns, to retain some degree of the symbolic prestige of palatial life after the collapse, but obviously with Raftis they are moving to a completely new and typologically distinct physical space. It is all very peculiar!  

Raftis! The Enigma Continues (S. Murray)

SCM: The enigma of Raftis continues – we’ll have to keep chewing on it through the next several years of work! Now, one major bummer of 2020 was that we couldn’t go to Greece to continue working on Raftis, but there have been many other ways in which 2020 has been very challenging/depressing. How about the flipside of that coin – are there any ways in which the pandemic or related restrictions have improved your life lately?

EJF: Actually, yeah. One thing that I found initially was that the situation led me to develop a very healthy routine, which I did not have before. I was running and exercising at home and doing things on a normal schedule. For example, we have a grocery store right across from our house, but instead of going there every couple of days to grab whatever, we would do one big shop once a week. I think that also helped us save money. In a weird way I think the lockdown made me a better person! Besides that, I have been getting a lot of knitting done – I have made a lot of new knit items, which has been good for my mental health. And it gets us ready for winter.

Original textile products, courtesy of pandemic knitting (E. Fuller)

SCM: Wow, good for you! Talk about keeping a positive perspective – time for a healthy routine and a productive hobby. Sounds like you should start an advice column for those of us without such a great strategy. Let’s end on that positive note, I guess: thanks so much for talking with me today, and good luck with the knitting and reading!

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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 9: Kat Apokatanidis

The very limited BEARS 2020 study season (population: 3) in the Vravrona Museum has been full steam ahead over the past several weeks, but comes to a close tomorrow. A brief report on our activities and new insights will appear here as soon as…I have put out the fires of the upcoming start of the semester and have time to sit down and write it! Meanwhile, below is the ninth in our series of BEARS team member interviews, this time featuring known blogger of archaeological profundities and BEARS 2019 team member Kat Apokatanidis. Kat is a PhD student in Classics at the University of Toronto who recently switched from Philology to the Mediterranean archaeology/ancient history track in the department. As a result, I am now lucky to have her under my supervision!  Kat was a first time fieldworker last summer, but took to archaeology like an octopodi to beach rock, and demonstrated her keen eye for spotting vegetation-obscured artifacts (a surveyor’s most important tool!) throughout the season. We recently chatted online from separate ends of Greece about all things ancient and especially BEARS related – keep an eye out for a brutally honest Greek’s eye view of our modest seaside project home of Porto Rafti.

Kat on Raftis island in 2019 (K. Alexakis)

SCM: You are currently a PhD student in the Classics department at the University of Toronto. Can you tell me what got you interested in Classics and why you decided to come to Toronto for a PhD in the subject?

KA: We are taught Classical texts in junior high school and high school in Greece, so we always have this connection to the texts from very early on. Ancient Greek is compulsory from Junior High school. Usually we use a text, as well as a textbook with grammar. So we start very early on learning ancient Greek literature, which is considered a crucial part of the upbringing of Greek children. So from a young age we get a familiarity with those texts. They’ve always seemed really interesting to me. 

To be honest I guess the reason that I got into philology in the beginning was because of life circumstances really. I was not good at math – or maths, rather! I can’t even say it correctly…and so that really limited my options for university. In Greece we have Panhellenic exams, which are basically entrance exams, and everyone takes them, because universities in Greece are public institutions. Everyone has the chance to get in, but you have to pass these exams with a specific grade, depending on which subject you want to pursue for your BA. So you have to know really early on what you want to do in your life! You go through a 2-year intensive training into the specific material for the exams and then, hopefully, you get into what you want to do. Fortunately, in my specific experience the exam was very closely tied to what I wanted to do. People who want to go to law school in Greece, e.g., go through the same material – Greek and Latin – and then never do it again! So maybe it’s not ideal as a system. But for me it was great. I did Aristotle and Plato and stuff like that in high school before even getting into philology. 

Then I got into philology and I loved Classics, partly because it was the hardest and most challenging of the courses. In Greece there are 3 specializations, where you do linguistics, medieval/modern Greek, and then the ancient languages. You do 2 years of everything and then you specialize in one of those three. I was choosing between linguistics and Classical philology. I chose ancient Greek because I wanted to become a Homerist. 

After that I just never got it out of my system. It depends on if you like what you study for your BA, but if you like it, you realize that you always want to learn more, and there is basically an infinite amount of material to learn. So I kept on and did a first Master’s in Durham – I wanted to do epic poetry at the time – then did another Master’s degree at Waterloo. I just loved the texts so much, I wanted to keep going with school and I didn’t want to let it go. I had the idea that I wanted to do Academia…so I guess that’s how I ended up in Classics and doing a PhD. I love learning! I’m a nerd!

My old grad school pal James demonstrates: Philology! (S. Murray)

SCM: I think that’s a good point, that at some point you realize that no matter how many degrees you get, you will never have learned everything! And if you like learning you could just keep on getting degrees! Barring certain practical concerns, of course. What about Toronto – why did you come here for the PhD.

KA: Well, I’m a Canadian citizen, so Toronto was always at the top of my list. It’s in Canada, and I have extended family in Toronto, so I wouldn’t be completely alone on a different continent from my family. So it was a less scary option than something in the States or wherever, coming from Greece. It’s also a really big program, so it has a lot of specializations, which is good because you can keep your options open.

I went into philology thinking I wanted to be a Homerist, as I said, but it’s hard to find something new or original to do for Homer! So that’s why I thought that going into a larger program would give me a chance to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, since I suspected it would be challenging to identify a good, new topic on Homer. 

But then I ended up realizing that I really liked archaeology, so I’ve switched into a new track now – and I think it makes sense to me, because I had always approached ancient Greece from an anthropological view rather than a literary one. I’ve always had issues with finding something to say. Even though I love the texts, I always found it challenging to identify an original argument about a literary text. So for me moving into archaeology is exciting, because everything is about the cultural context and I think it’s a bit easier to find new ways to contribute.

Kat and the team, probably discussing sophisticated anthropological ideas, on Raftis in 2019 (K. Alexakis)

SCM: Right, so officially you have now come over to the dark side – switching from philology to history/archaeology in terms of the streams in the program. Where are you exactly in progressing through the PhD and what kind of research are you thinking of pursuing?

KA: I am entering my 3rd year in the PhD program, and I switched streams last year into the MACS specialization. The reason was partly my experience working in the field on BEARS, but I also realized that this stream gives me an opportunity to do something that I really wanted to investigate but felt I couldn’t before – that is the bigger cultural and anthropological context of ancient texts. I’m now starting a research project on the Orphic gold tablets, trying to position these texts as material objects rather than just philological objects, which is how they have been approached before. I first encountered the tablets in a course on Greek Epigraphy during my BA. I thought they were really cool already then, and that they were quite unlike most other texts – a more direct connection to the divine, especially, given the mortuary context. While the texts have been translated, they haven’t really been treated that thoroughly archaeologically in their cultural context, so I thought it would be interesting to give that a try.

An inscribed tablet (NOT one of the Orphic tablets, but a mortgage agreement between two women from 2nd century Corfu, but it is the only picture I had of an inscribed tablet so cut me some slack) (S. Murray)

SCM: Super cool – I think it is a promising angle. Generally, there are lots of fresh, innovative things that can done with objects, and although there has been a lot of archaeological research, I think that ground is at least somewhat less-trodden than the textual evidence. Anyway, I am biased, but I support this decision to switch specializations!

A question I often ask people is about their favorite text or object from the ancient world. But now I already know that you love Homer, and that this is a longstanding passion – what is it about Homer that you like so much?

KA: Honestly my choice as a favorite wouldn’t necessarily be Homer as we have him, but one of the cyclical epics that we don’t have! And also, the Orphic theogonic text to which the Derveni papyrus refers to, but, in its entirety.

Orphic free association/speaking of masterpieces.... (S. Murray)

SCM: Okay, okay! So what is it about early epic that gets you?

KA: Apart from the fact that the narratives are so original and gripping. I was watching a tv show on Greek television awhile back, and I remember that a point was made that if we were to lose Homer, there would literally be nothing like it ever produced again! I thought that was a good point – these epics have an odd form because of the oral nature of the composition and original circulation. It’s also amazing that they can really inspire anyone even to this day. Every time I read Homer I get so many original ideas and thoughts that can be explored creatively. Aside from their merit from a literary point of view or the cultural insights we get from them, I always think that these early Greek texts have an amazing quality of fertile ground for personal inspiration. They make me think about things differently. Only Homer has done that for me, and I read a lot. Then I wonder about those stories that inspired the Homeric epics – the lost nostoi and the other stories! Maybe they were even more inspiring…

SCM: Or maybe they were terrible and super lame! We’ll never know!

KA: That is what people have said…but I bet not. 

Some friends maybe rocking a nostos, in Nicosia's Cyprus museum (S. Murray)

SCM: It is definitely a great point that Homer is amazingly poignant even so many thousands of years later. I never cry in life, really, but I always get really sad when I read the Iliad. Maybe close to crying sometimes. But don’t tell anyone I said that. I have a reputation to maintain! Anyway, I definitely never feel that way when I read…Livy or Virgil or whatever. Maybe there is someone out there that cries at Livy.

Now, returning to the topic of archeology, last summer you came out for BEARS, and this was your first time working on an archaeological field project. You already wrote some great posts about BEARS on the blog, but I wanted to see if you had any other general impressions or comments about work on the project to add to those profound reflections?

KA: Well, BEARS was, in one word, amazing. It was so, so different from what I am used to. I had no idea how much I wanted to do something like that, until I did it. I knew I always wanted to do something like what archaeologists did, but I did not really know what that meant. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it what the experience is like. It is really awe-inspiring to uncover or find these things from so long ago, or even to visit an archaeological site. But really being an archaeologist is an experience beyond this kind of awe-inspiring idea, that everyone gets. Doing BEARS was very satisfying to me because in archaeology you go out into the world and really DO something, which was not the same as my experience in philology. You really see a place and try to understand the real lived experiences of actual people and societies. Then you take the data and build an idea around that information. I did not understand the nature of that process until working in the field. Even though I was really new to this kind of work, and I still have a lot of catching up to do, I just really wanted to be a part of this process and to think of things in a cultural context instead of just a text as its own special thing, independent of the people that surrounded it.

Archaeology: putting your hands on stuff! (S. Murray)

SCM: Interesting, yeah, I guess I’ve never been even close to thinking like or being a real philologist, so I’ve never really thought of it from that perspective.

KA: I don’t mean to throw shade on philology!

SCM: I mean, I think that everyone has their own deal – and it’s good that there are lots of people that like to do all kinds of different scholarship. 

KA: Yeah, I find I really like having the more hands on work.

SCM: Then I think you will definitely get more of that in archaeology. We put our hands on a lot of stuff! To put it in a very concrete way. Speaking of concrete, I often ask students about their experience of living in Greece, but of course you have lived most of your whole life in Greece, so that would be a silly question to ask! How about Porto Rafti – give me your honest impressions of our BEARS home town!

Porto Rafti as seen from the mountains to its southwest (S. Murray)

KA: Okay, you asked for a Greek point of view, and I am going to give it to you!

SCM: Give it to me straight!

KA: I mean, the whole town is very totally illegal! The way it’s built…no, no no! There is no structure, people just built whatever they wanted wherever they wanted. These were decisions made back when Greece was governed by a dictatorship and we are still paying the price. But, I mean, other than that, it is a “charming seaside town”….but I mean…the driving! Why? Athenians, man, I just can’t with the way they drive in Porto Rafti. Again, just doing whatever they want. What rules? But that’s kind of home for me, so I’m not really complaining too much.

SCM: I have seen at least 3 collisions in front of Giorgos’ house just this summer in Porto Rafti! But I kind of love the chaos about Porto Rafti. Somehow it is refreshing compared to all of the rule-based rule-following Canadian lifestyle that is characteristic of life the rest of the year. I like to do whatever I want whenever I want, so I guess maybe it’s a personal thing.

Illegal building is a POPULAR choice in the Porto Rafti area – this gargantuan specimen is just to the south in Kaki Thalassa (S. Murray)

KA: There is a certain harmony in it. 

SCM: It reminds me of when I was much younger and rented a car in Naples. And the car rental guys told me absolutely under no circumstances should I stop at a red light or a stop sign, because nobody would expect it, and you would cause a bunch of accidents. So the rule was that you had to not follow the rules! I was pretty terrified by this advice – I was quite young then and hadn’t driven much in big European cities – but, you know, there was a harmony in the unruliness that somehow worked out.

Nothin' wrong with a little anarchy from time to time! (S. Murray)

KA: You just have to hone your reflexes! I am a much better driver because of my experiences driving in Porto Rafti. But for me it was just good to be home all summer. Obviously, Porto Rafti is not my home, but still, all of Greece kind of is your home when you are Greek. For Greeks, at least the way I see it, wherever they are doesn’t matter too much, as long as we are in Greece. We are sentimental about our country.

SCM: I would be, too. It is the best place. What do you miss the most about Greece when you are in Toronto?

KA: The sun! Not a hard question – definitely the sun. Toronto is not the best when it comes to sunlight. And just the climate in general, and the mountains.

SCM: I hear that. Toronto is very, very not mountainous. 

KA: While Canada does have mountains, Toronto does not have them. I miss looking out at the landscape, and seeing something: a body of water, or topography. Even though Toronto has the lake, nobody can afford those views. In Greece, almost everyone has a view of something nice. In other places it’s like some kind of commodity. Here we are poor, but we get to see the mountains every day.

Peaks of Mt. Olympos, which Kat even climbed this summer! (S. Murray)

SCM: That is a great point. You have to be pretty rich in Toronto to see anything nice from your window. Otherwise you just look at trash and sewer drains and concrete. But Greece is democracy for views! I never thought of it this way.

Well, unfortunately, the team is not  experiencing the many joys and pains of life in glamorous Porto Rafti this summer. What are you looking forward to the most of getting back out into fieldwork in 2021, presuming that we can?

KA: For me the best part of the fieldwork is the anticipation and the process of finding actual things. It’s very satisfying. It’s hard to describe the feeling. I also enjoy the way that all of the hard parts – climbing and being hot – fade away in your memory after that day: you only remember the excitement and the amazing views – which we had from everywhere we worked – and how great the experience is. I think I miss everything about working there, and that being ‘the work’. I have had some terrible jobs in my life, and when this is your ‘job’ for the day, to go into this amazing landscape and look for ancient stuff, I mean, give me a break. I miss that feeling.

SCM: Well said! Let’s leave it at that – thanks for your time and enjoy the tiny remainder of the summer!

Apokatanidis out! 'til next time (K. Alexakis)
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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 8: Irum Chorghay

After a relatively lengthy hiatus for summer vacation, the BEARS blog is making a late-August return to life with the 8th in our series of team member interviews. This time we are featuring a subject well-known to faithful blog readers, Irum Chorghay, who already provided a series of captivating posts documenting life on the BEARS project in 2019. I have been happy to be pals with Irum since fall of 2017 when she was a student in my introductory Greek and Greek history classes, and have worked with her in many contexts since, including several other courses at U of T, a Jackman Humanities Institute summer research program, and a co-authored research article that she worked with fellow BEARSer Jenny MacPherson and myself to publish in the January 2020 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology. It has been a real privilege to get to know Irum over the last several years, and we had a great conversation about all things Classics and BEARS related, which I am sure you will enjoy reading! Be sure to check back soon for an update on our tiniest of 2020 study seasons, and more riveting interviews, in the coming weeks.

Jenny and Irum enjoy the boat ride to Raftis island with Captain Vasilis at the helm (S. Murray)

SCM: As you told me the other day via email, you are just finishing your degree at the U of Toronto this summer and taking some summer classes to wrap that up: how has it been taking classes this summer and what does it feel like to be entering a new phase of life after graduation?

IC: Classes this summer have been going really well! Right now I’m taking a course on the politics of girlhood. I’ve never really looked at children from an academic perspective so it’s really fascinating material, as well as really relevant to modern circumstances, such as the adultification of black girls…it’s very interesting to think about girlhood. Girls are so powerful! I think I might want to keep up with what is happening in girl studies going forward. 

This is obviously quite different from what I’ve been studying in the Classics department, where the connection to modern times is not so straightforward. I guess it’s a nice way to end my degree because it brings things back to reality in a way. Otherwise, I’m not sure how I’m feeling about finishing my undergrad! I am definitely not processing a lot emotionally right now, it’s been a “go go go” kind of situation. I think maybe 4-5 years from now I’ll start unpacking everything that happened this summer, so then I’ll really know. 

But I’m honestly excited. I’ve been in school for so long, it’s going to be nice to not do that for a while and see where it takes me. Also, kind of scary! But I think I’m ready for a new challenge.

Life is full of difficult challenges! (S. Murray)

SCM: Awesome! You’ll be great, no matter what, I am sure. Let’s cast an eye backwards, then, on your glorious career at the university of Toronto. You did an incredible amount of excellent work at the U of Toronto – a double major in Classics and Philosophy, is that right?

IC: Well, in my last year I realized that I had accidentally pretty much finished the Classical Civ major, so I ended up doing that alongside the Classics (Greek and Latin) major. I feel like my entire undergrad was very much me denying that I was trying to be a Classics major, because I just kept doing Classics courses, but then being a Math major, and then a Philosophy major – literally it was only at the very last minute in my fourth year that I actually clicked enroll. Now I am a double major: Classical Civilizations and Classics. 

SCM: Ah ha, I see! A reluctant Classicist, but you couldn’t escape it as hard as you tried, like falling into a swamp. Despite this circumspect attitude, I recall that you were very active within the Classics department since I met you: you were the president of CLASSU, even. How was your experience with the people and the environment in the department, even as you tried to keep the major at arms-length?

IC: I think a big part of why I ended up in Classics even without actively pursuing was because of the professors I had, the friends I made, and generally the people I met. At the end of the day, I knew I wanted a degree, but it didn’t really matter to me what it was in. I wanted to follow where I felt I was growing a lot and having a good time in a lot of ways. And I felt like Classics really did become that for me. It wasn’t really until second year that I started getting involved in CLASSU events, then in third year I became really involved on CLASSU. That’s when I started making many of my friends and feeling like I was really a part of this community – Classics really brought me that. My peers will always bring up Professor Wohl in particular, how she remembers you, your name. I can’t imagine many other professors, particularly in first year, really doing that. And at a huge campus like UofT, it is really remarkable to have a professor remember, and I really respect that. More generally, CLASSU was a genuinely safe space for me to explore who I am in ways that unfortunately other places on campus don’t really encourage, so for me that was really an important part of my experience here!

Happiness/Classics (S. Murray)

SCM: That’s really cool to hear, actually, from a faculty point of view. I guess my impression is that this kind of thing happens a lot in Classics departments, maybe because they are small departments, so you tend to have a community of people that are really excited about the material but also it’s not some major of hundreds, so you see the same faces in a lot of classes. And the same situation with the professors – our classes are pretty small and we tend to build actual relationships with the students, which makes it easier to see students as individuals, you know, with a name and everything. I sort of ended up as a Classics major for similar reasons – I felt totally alienated as a first-year student but then some Classics professor actually remembered who I was and seemed to think I was smart. That was totally crazy and exciting to me at the time!

I suppose it’s also encouraging to hear that Classics, even though it does not necessarily have a universal reputation as the most open or welcoming discipline I guess, can provide this kind of safe and fun environment when you’ve got the right people around. 

IC: Yeah, I am sure that other people have had different experiences! I’m sure not everyone has had the same positive experience in the department…but for me the timing was good. I think in the last few years CLASSU has been really consciously trying to be open and welcoming to all kinds of people, and that has been working.

THE FOP ABIDES (drawing from the Germain Archaeological School's Dörpfeld archives, courtesy P. Sapirstein)

SCM: That is super cool, and a major credit to you and the organization. I think CLASSU is an amazing asset to the department, and we’re all really thankful for your amazing work! What about the discipline or the work itself? Is there anything particular about the material that kept you coming back again and again despite your attempts to gravitate elsewhere?

IC: One of the first things that really drew me in was Catullus. I am a poet and I love poetry. With Catullus in particular…I guess you just end up seeing him a lot. He’s such a funny guy, and he’s got such range, too. One minute he’s cursing his friends out, the next I’m crying over his brother’s funeral. But to take up some of his crudest stuff in a university classroom was just so exciting and bizarre to me.

Sappho is, of course, another one of my favorites. I read Anne Carson’s essay on Eros the Bittersweet and that just tugged at my heartstrings (I am a really sentimental person). I guess it would be fair to say that the poetry is what really drew me in. Then my indecision is what helped me stay, because I got to do philosophy and literary analysis but also history and archaeology. Yeah, I basically can’t make up my mind, and Classics gave me a chance to do a lot of things. I think that’s why a lot of people end up doing Classics.


Eros in Athens (I. Chorghay)

SCM: Yeah! That’s the whole model of liberal art’s education, right? You learn how to flex a lot of different muscles in your brain instead of just focusing on one thing, and Classics gives you a good opportunity to do that: lots of different work but within a single theme. It’s good that students still value that kind of education! Do you have a favorite text or object from the ancient world that you return to again and again? Or that always makes you very excited no matter how many times you encounter it?

IC: Ugh, hard question! I don’t know if this is exactly the ‘best’ thing, but I will always remember reading Seneca in Sex and Gender with Chiara Graf (A U of T grad student). That was a really good class – we incorporated critical theory in class, which was the first time I had done that. We looked at a passage about a character called Hostius Quadra. The whole text was super strange and very orgiastic and just generally fascinating. It felt quite random, being that it was in a scientific text, and that really stuck with me. It really showed me the range of Classics. I guess we always have this perception of fancy Englishmen wandering through fields and being all classy in Classics, and this is the exact opposite! This is what they are hiding! This is what they don’t want you to see! It felt very much like the underbelly of Classics, which was cool to see.

The underbelly? (I. Chorghay)

SCM: Right! That’s why you have to read the actual primary sources – the stuff you find out about in the textbooks or see in more general introductions is usually the fancy Englishman foppery – so you have to get in there and find the underbelly yourself! The stuff that doesn’t fit the model is usually the most interesting. Returning to the future, how do you think what you learned and encountered in university is going to contribute to your experience or growth in life? Are there particular skills or perspectives that you think will stick with you as you go forward to function in the world at large?

IC: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think one of the biggest things is that when you study a society from afar, you train yourself to be as objective (okay, with an asterisk) as possible, but you also learn all of these skills to try to remember our place in relation to what we’re studying, so that you remain aware of your own biases even as you try to come up with an objective analysis. That’s been a big focus in these last four years. I think that is really relevant in our day to day lives, because it’s so easy to take everything around us for granted. When we step back and look at ourselves as an object of study, then we can really become active contributors and better citizens of the world. That is probably the biggest skill that I think I’ll take away from my education – being super critical of myself and my role in society.

I also think the multidisciplinary nature of Classics is really pragmatically useful – being able to read, write, and think critically is huge. Also just being interesting? People want to work with interesting people…and thanks to Classics I know tons of random facts that I can tell people, should they wish to hear them.

SCM: Wise words! I think society would be much better off if more people were good at critically evaluating their own role in sophisticated ways. Now, to your last point – let’s say we’re at a cocktail party and I want to know an interesting fact: what’s your go to!?

IC: ……….Oh boy….I guess I set myself up for that one! I shouldn’t have said that!

SCM: You totally did! I’m putting you on the spot!

IC: I don’t know why, but when anyone says “interesting fact” for Classics the first thing that comes into my head is pederasty, and I always want to steer away from that….

Reliably naked Greek fellers on a stele in the Larisa museum (S. Murray)

SCM: Yeah, I gave a guest lecture in a fashion history class at Ryerson University – the teacher asked me to come and give a lecture about why the Greeks were naked all the time – and I was explaining all of these complicated theories that scholars have put forward about athletic nudity, and one student raised her hand and asked “Isn’t it just because they liked staring at naked little boys because they had sex with them a lot?” And I said that was a very logical conclusion to draw! Anyway there were tons of questions. These kids could not get enough of dissecting the naked Greek dude imagery complex. So, I think this is definitely something that, if you bring it up at a cocktail party, people will want to talk about!

IC: I also really like the idea of the Herms, which we talked about in your Greek History class. 

SCM: Also something that most people don’t necessarily think about when they imagine Classical Athens!

IC: And another thing that makes you question why people love Classics so much…

SCM: Depends on your perspective! The weird stuff is kind of the best part, to me – I think people come and start in Classics because of some fusty idea about the Parthenon or whatever, but the more you get into it, the more you realize there are all kinds of wacky and bizarre things going on that are really fascinating. 

Another thing that you can bring up at cocktail parties is the fact that you’ve traveled to Greece and done archaeological fieldwork. Last summer you were in Greece working with BEARS, and I know you did some traveling around before the project, too. How was your experience of Greece and how did that fit into your career otherwise? Were there any favorite memories or sites that particularly stand out?

Gratuitous glamor shot of Porto Rafti bay (S. Murray)

IC: Going to Greece was definitely the highlight of my Classics experience! I think it’s kind of wild how you can study a place for years and then it’s so different when you are actually there and you’re seeing where things happened, and you understand why, say, this war happened this way, because the geography kind of determines that. It was a very rewarding experience. 

Okay, I don’t love change, so I tend to dislike travel. I get so overwhelmed and really nervous, so this was very much me going out of my comfort zone – all of last summer was out of my comfort zone for me. But because of this same reason, it was an incredibly rewarding experience as well. I definitely felt a shift in me when I came back. I also didn’t really love the outdoors so it was incredible that I was able to do all that fieldwork. But now I’ve grown quite fond of spending time outside; I don’t fear creepy insects and stuff anymore. Once you’ve seen so many spiders that big, everything else is a joke! I’m so glad I went, and really grateful that I had the opportunity.

We did travel around before the project. It was so wonderful. I am wary of romanticizing Greece too much but I will say that one of my favorite things was the graffiti in Athens, which is really, really good. Definitely still think about it now.  

Athenian graffiti (I. Chorghay)

SCM: Oh boy, I totally didn’t realize how much you were uncomfortable with travel and being outdoors when I asked you to come and work on the project!! I shouldn’t have tortured you and subjected you to all that! 

IC: No, no it was really great! It made me stronger.

SCM:  Okay, okay. I’ll try not to feel guilty about being so oblivious to your discomfort. That’s an awesome point about the graffiti…it is really good! Students never mention this…you obviously have a keen eye. I was just wandering around Athens in July and it was totally empty and like a giant open-air graffiti museum. You would have loved it. 

So, working on the BEARS project was probably very different probably than taking a course on say, Ancient Greek history or literature. You already wrote about your experiences of fieldwork very eloquently already on the blog, but I wanted to see if you had any other more informal thoughts about being out on the project and the whole situation? Any favorite or least favorite parts?

IC: Doing work with your hands is so underrated…that was really satisfying, to actually be productive with your body instead of your brain, which is not what happens in a classroom. It was also so cool to touch things that have been made by humans and sitting in the ground since forever. There is something very spiritual about that, it feels like you are connecting with something from very far away, which I thought was inspiring. I also thought obsidian was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen or dealt with. It’s also a great word for poetry, and now I feel like I have more authority to use it, so thank you! I guess the negatives would be maybe that you get hot and hungry and sweaty, but you don’t even remember that once the day is done because you are just excited about what you found. There are very few cons. I just felt so lucky to be able to do the work.


Work. Is. Good. Elliott agrees (I. Chorghay)

SCM: Yeah, that’s true, it’s a special experience! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

IC: We had a great team, too, and everyone took care of each other, so we didn’t really have any problems. I also think we were very well looked after by our director.

SCM: My main goal was for everyone to have a good time and not get hurt, so I’m happy to hear that was mostly the case. I also agree that obsidian is amazing! I find it to be inexplicably seductive! It is clear that we are on the same page.

IC: Wait, there are people who don’t care about obsidian? What’s the con?

TFW you find so much obsidian in one project! (S. Murray)

SCM: Good question! I guess everyone’s got their own thing. I mean, it’s so shiny!  I would like to sleep in a bed of obsidian, even if it would be uncomfortable, just so I could be around it all the time. How about collective life on the project? Any memories or impressions about living with the crew in Porto Rafti?

IC: I was nervous coming into it, because meeting people makes me anxious, but honestly it was so much fun and I had such a good time. I really miss the people this summer. I guess because you are spending so much time together and living together it can go either way. But I think it’s never in the middle – either you really love these people or you really can’t stand them, and we definitely fell on the love each other side. It was all new people, but because we were mostly from Toronto we had something in common to start from. We had a nice family vibe going. There was lots of bonding, being silly, drinking, there was a Dora the Explorer doll in the house that I really had a special connection with. It was just a really good time. 

SCM: It sounds like fun was had! I wish I had lived with you guys! I was just boringly checking data and dealing with dumb management stuff the whole time…lame! 

IC: My favorite part of the day was always right after we came home after work and my shoes would always be full of those little bur things and we were all emptying our shoes out on the porch and sitting, relaxing, making coffee, chatting about our day, in the beautiful yard. Those were just really nice moments, to be together and connect. And we always had things to say, since we always found exciting things.


LOOK AT THESE HAPPY PEOPLE! (I. Chorghay)

SCM: Such an idyllic scene…I love that feeling of good exhaustion after the end of a hard day of work too. Especially if you can share it with your friends. Now, obviously we’ve all had to find something else to do this summer and it’s been a bummer to miss all of those moments of human connection. What were your strategies for surviving the spring and  summer of pseudo-lockdown in Toronto?

IC: Mostly I just tried not to think about it. Is that too depressing? It honestly feels like such a blur. I did summer school both semesters, so I did another course early in the summer a cinema course, so I watched a lot of movies. That’s basically all I did, watch a lot of tv and movies, read stuff, cry. And try to accept my new phase of life in very strange circumstances. I guess for me things really got turned on their head. I was going to move out of my apartment building in April, go to Greece, be away from home and explore things and have a spiritual awakening or whatever I expected to get out of it, and then come home and spend time with my parents and then move out. So the way that I had allotted my emotional capacities completely turned around. That was a challenge; it was pretty upsetting, but in the end, I guess it’s all fine!

SCM: I can’t imagine going through this at such an important inflection point in your life. I would be a total mess. But you’ve already picked up the pieces and have a job lined up starting next week! How about further in the future? I think you have basically infinite potential, but what are your visions for, say, five years from now? 

IC: I’ve been watching finance videos in preparation for the real world, so one thing is that I want to have an emergency fund – or maybe in five years even more than that! I can see myself going back to school for a Master’s degree, so by five years from now I should have done that. Otherwise, I’d like to have a job and be able to afford an apartment in downtown Toronto. I also want to finish learning how to swim, which was interrupted by the pandemic, so by five years from now I want to be able to swim.

SCM: Simple like that! I guess in times like these it is good to keep things simple…my new objective is to quit my job and find a way to live in Greece and swim in the Aegean everyday – if I succeed you can join me for a swim once you take care of that goal. Thanks for a super insightful and fun interview…for now good luck with the new job and stay in touch: at the very least I will check in with you on these goals in about five years.

A Five Year Plan! (I. Chorghay)
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Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 7: Cassandra Phang-Lyn

Our seventh in-depth BEARS participant profile of the season highlights the experience of Cassandra Phang-Lyn, a graduate student at Western University and protege of Catherine Pratt since her undergraduate days. The University of Toronto tried its best to recruit Cassandra into the MACS graduate program a couple of years back, but she could not be convinced to come over to the dark side, much to our faculty’s chagrin! Fortunately, we were still able to retain her services for the BEARS project, to which she brought many years of fieldwork and lab experience. Amid a busy schedule of fighting off recruitment offers, studying the ancient past, and taking care of two energetic dogs, Cassandra recently sat down for a BEARS interview to share some of her archaeological experiences of the past and plans for the future.

Taylor and Cassandra en route to Raftis island on BEARS day one in 2019 (S. Murray)

SCM: Aside from being a member of the BEARS project, you are currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in the Classics department at Western. Can you tell us what got you interested in Classics and why you decided to go on into grad school?

CP-L: I was always interested in myths as a kid, and I read all of the Percy Jackson books, but I never really thought more of that interest until I applied to go to university. Once I decided to go to Western, I was choosing classes, and I needed one more credit to fill out my schedule. I was looking around to see what I could take for fun to fill it in – and I saw Classics 1000, an intro class on Ancient Greece and Rome. It fit into my schedule and it looked really interesting, so I thought, “why not!?”. I took the class, and it turned out that this was also the first year that Western was running its study tour to Greece. I’d always wanted to go, and I was fortunate enough that my parents were willing to help me out with the costs, so I went ahead and did that. Once I was in Greece I just fell in love with everything, and was amazed by the idea that I could actually study this stuff and do research on ancient material rather than just visit as a tourist.

I’d also always been interested in archaeology, but the main thing that drove me to archaeology was talking to Catherine Pratt on the trip. I made a point of asking her what I would need to do to get into Classical Archaeology. She laid it all out for me, and I was totally convinced, so I kept on doing Classics in the fall and the rest of my time at university. I went and worked at the Vindolanda field school with Beth Greene and Alex Meyer, I went on the study tour to Rome, and I’ve been projects with Catherine Pratt in Greece as well, basically just trying to get my hands in any sort of fieldwork experience that I can. It is something that I really do enjoy, so I do want to continue into the field as a career. That’s why I decided to start with the Master’s degree, and work from there.
tfw you are on a study tour in Greece and are having a great time and are pretty sure you never want to leave! (S. Murray)

SCM: That sounds not too dissimilar from my experience – I went to Greece somewhat randomly on a study abroad thing, and thought it was totally amazing and that I needed to spend as much time as possible there for the rest of my life – like a mostly irrational love-at-first-sight sort of thing. You can tell that I am an excellent and mature adult decision maker! But that’s neither here nor there – where are you currently in the program and what kinds of research are you pursuing?

CP-L: Sure! Right now, I am finishing up the first year of my Master’s at Western. In our program, we have a full-year course that all first-year graduate students take. It’s a broad overview of the history, literature, and archaeology of Greece and Rome. It’s very compact! I was saddened that we did not spend as much time on archaeology as I would have liked. But it was a good course, a useful overview of a lot of things. It was nice to hear different perspectives from the other students, too. Then, obviously, I’ve been doing the required language courses, and I also took Catherine Pratt’s course on the topography of Athens, and a course on the Roman household with Kelly Olson, which covered a lot of social history, which was quite fun.

Currently, for my summer research project, I am working on Mycenaean figurines. My current plan is to do quite a lot of background work on the figurines and understand the palatial types and their use and context, then also try to dive into the postpalatial period, although I haven’t quite gotten there yet. My impression at the moment is that there is less postpalatial material, which is not so surprising. 

Jolly figurines on display in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum (S. Murray)

SCM: That sounds quite promising – surely there’s plenty to be said about Mycenaean figurines and their evolution after the palatial period that hasn’t been said yet. But you’ll have to let me know what you find out! Now, aside from these figurines, do you have a favorite text or object or category of material from the ancient world? And what is it about it that gets you really excited?

CP-L: Oh, that is a really tough one! I’ve always been really fascinated by wall paintings. I took an ancient painting course with David Wilson when he was still at Western, and I was so enamored of that material. The paintings are just beautiful and it’s so cool how well some have been preserved over many thousands of years. I like the Roman paintings, but I was able to go to Akrotiri and also Knossos, and I really love those Minoan paintings especially. They are just awesome.

The notorious blue boy fresco reconstruction in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum (S. Murray)

SCM: That’s a good choice! I find that those paintings do portray a kind of psychedelic natural world that really draws one in. Although I do not envy the people that work on them! I do not think I could do all of that painstaking jigsaw work of conservation and reconstruction. 

CP-L: For sure! Let alone trying to figure out what they mean, which seems so difficult.

Conservation of fragmentary wall paintings in progress at the Thebes museum (S. Murray)

SCM: Totally – and then for Knossos you have to also un-think all of the made up stuff that Evans imposed on the material, which is an additional challenge! Speaking of different types of analysis we do as archaeologists, it sounds like you have had a lot of fieldwork experiences all over the place and have done all kinds of things, from excavation to lab work – it’s hard to keep track. So give me the rundown!

CP-L: The first experience I had was the Vindolanda field school up in northern Britain. That was really cool because I was in the trench – on hands and knees, shoveling dirt, opening new trenches, all that stuff. The year I went (I wasn’t in the trench where this happened) they found a bunch of writing tablets, and I got to see them coming out one by one as they were getting rushed down to the museum and the lab to be conserved. That was a really fun experience. And it’s a cool site up there because there are so many volunteers from around the world – you talk to people from all over the world and of varying ages. They are also very serious about the tea breaks. When it was the afternoon, the trench leader would be very concerned that we get cleaned up and ready for the tea break when it was our turn, because the team was so large that we had to split the tea into shifts, and we did NOT want to miss our shift. 

SCM: Priorities! British style.

Turk-tea-time is also often a priority (S. Murray)

CP-L: Yeah! So that was one of the more physically intense projects I’ve worked on – there was a lot of shoveling barrels of dirt, that kind of thing. It was a fun challenge to try to get the barrel up the plank and out of the trench without any accidents. 

SCM: That’s not the kind of thing that your usual schoolwork trains you for – getting the barrel up the ramp without squashing someone! That’s some real-world type of experience.

CP-L: Exactly. Then the following year I started my work with Catherine Pratt in the Agora of Athens, which was more like working through old archival material. We were searching through the old catalogues and figuring out how the system works, and thinking about what we wanted to find and how we would organize our data. It was really interesting to see how this kind of process worked – analyzing things that you didn’t necessarily dig up yourself. Then I did a month with Carl Knappett at Palaikastro. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to dig that year, so we were doing post-processing of material that had been excavated a year or two before – organizing and cataloging. That gave me a lot of experience looking at pottery and identifying clay types and all that kind of stuff. Then last summer, I started on the BEARS project, which was my first experience surveying, and that was good, too. It was fun to be out in the field and looking at the landscape, and I liked getting a different view of the many facets of fieldwork that I didn’t even know existed. That is one thing you learn as an archaeologist as you go through your career – just how varied the work is.

Isabella, Cassandra, and Taylor assess the survey finds from 2019's first unit on Raftis island (S. Murray)

SCM: Yeah, that’s a great point – there are many, many ways to be a practicing archaeologist, even though the popular ‘type’ is usually someone digging holes in the ground or whatever. And it’s really a testament to the quality of the program and your mentors at Western that you’ve already been able to experience so many kinds of methods and have participated in work behind and in front of the curtain, so to speak. Thinking back on my fieldwork career, I’m pretty sure I didn’t get much of a view of that behind the scenes work that people do in a lab until very late in grad school, so you’re way ahead of the game in that sense. So far, what would you say is your favorite type of hands-on work and what do you like particularly about that?

CP-L: Another tough question! I think being in the trench for me was the best experience so far. Just being down in a trench carefully – or sometimes maybe with topsoil not so carefully! – exposing something you don’t know will or will not be there, and then finding something. That’s just so satisfying and rewarding. I’ve not dug in Greece yet, though, so maybe I’ll have a different view after I’ve dug in more contexts! But I really liked excavating a lot.

Photo of a photo of excavating a very un-survey find in Kerkyra back in the 1980s (S. Murray)

SCM: Of course, we both know that there’s much more to an archaeological project than just the work! As you mentioned before, when you go on a field project, you’re thrown into this strange life situation, usually with people from around the world and all different backgrounds. From all of your various experiences in the field, do you have any crazy stories or random things that have happened that stand out as memorable or unexpected?

CP-L: One of my favorite things from Vindolanda was that if we didn’t get a ride down into the town to go grocery shopping, we had to walk through farmers’ fields, which is totally allowed up in Britain. Now, in those fields, there were some horses. And I LIKE horses, but those were some nasty looking horses! They did NOT like us walking through those fields! There was an electric fence separating us from them, but even so, they were very mean-looking horses and this caused a lot of concern. That was something that I was not expecting or anticipating that I would encounter in my fieldwork project. There was much hurrying to get over the stone fence and get outta there on the grocery run.

No images of the mean horses, but here’s an image of one of the many friendlier horses from my time at the Vindolanda filed school (courtesy of C. Phang-Lyn)

SCM: Haha – usually I think of horses as friends to the human, rather than a terrifying and aggressive predator!

CP-L: Yeah, every time we would scout it out and check if the horses were there, and if the coast was clear we’d basically run through the field.

SCM: Did you try to make friends with them, like bringing them some snacks or something?

CP-L: I thought about it, because I like horses, but everyone else was very nervous and I figured it was best just not to mess with them. I didn’t want to get everyone into a panic!

SCM: Perhaps there is an obscure northern English proverb about this: ‘nasty horses eyer be panicking gentyl archyologistes’, or something like that. I don’t think I’ve ever met an aggressive horse, but perhaps it’s a local Vindolanda thing.

CP-L: Yeah, it was weird. I did not expect that. But these horses definitely did not like people. Or they didn’t like us anyway.

Horse incoming, run and feare! (S. Murray)

SCM: Anti-archaeologist horses! Cool. That is definitely not a story I’ve heard before, dangerous attack horses. Other than perilous livestock encounters, what is your feeling about life on an archaeological project?

CP-L: I love working on field projects. It’s always so fun to either meet a new group of people or go back to see people that you know from previous seasons. It’s wonderful to be surrounded by people that are interested in what you are interested in, and everyone shares their stories from the day over beer at the end of the day, which is so much fun. You get to find out what’s happening with the other teams – of course sometimes you do get a little jealous when another group finds something cooler than you did! But, in general, I really love the camaraderie of projects the most.

BEARS-style boat camaraderie in summer 2019 (S. Murray)

SCM: Right, it is always great to have a cohesive team working together to do something relatively unusual and living together in relatively unusual circumstances. Speaking of going to far-away places, you mentioned earlier that one thing that got you into this career originally was going to Greece and immediately wanting to spend a lot more time there. What is it that gets you about Greece specifically?

CP-L: It’s so hard to pinpoint any particular thing…I just remember that when I first got there, I had this feeling – ‘this is a good place.’ I guess it’s more the vibe of it more than anything else. Life feels much more laid back and less rushed than North America, which is very inviting. It’s also just so incredible to be surrounded by all of this material that I’ve read so much and thought so much about. It always amazes me how the modern and ancient worlds are so integrated together. Sometimes you are just walking down the street in Athens and the glass under your feet is covering over these ancient ruins. I think that is just really cool.

SCM: Not so much of that going around in London Ontario!

CP-L: Nope, not so much!

SCM: Jenny made that point too – how it’s kind of mind-blowing for a North American that you can get a coffee at a café then walk across the street to an ancient temple that’s thousands of years old.

CP-L: Yeah, and after a while it seems like a lot of people don’t even notice that stuff anymore. Like you’re just wandering around and there’s the acropolis but you don’t even look at it! How could that happen?

Cafes and columns at close quarters in Athens (S. Murray)

SCM: I think I’m totally at that point with Athens – it’s just another part of the city that I don’t even think about too much when I’m there. Although probably after all of this pandemic stuff I will have a new, fresh appreciation of the many wonders of the Mediterranean and how lucky we are to spend so much time there. Meanwhile, what have you been up to during the lockdown and how have you been staying sane over the last several months? And here, really, I’m just looking for advice from people who are doing a better job of staying sane than I am!

CP-L: When I am home with my family I can go out for walks with my dogs, which has been really helpful – just to make sure I have one outing per day. But now it’s actually too hot for them to go out except early in the morning or in the evening. We are talking about a Boston Terrier and a Bulldog, so very short faces – very hot heat, they cannot do that. Other than research and stuff, I’ve mainly been reading books and playing video games. I actually reread the Percy Jackson series because I found them in a box at home, and I figured that since I wasn’t going to Greece I might as well read about a fantasy adventure related to Classics!

Cassandra-eye view of Walking on a trail with her dogs Lea, the black Boston terrier, and Quinn, the brown bulldog (C. Phang-Lyn)

I really do enjoy video games, so that’s been a good way to pass the time. I have a lot of friends that play similar games, so we’re online relatively frequently playing together, and that’s also a way to talk to my friends and catch up with them.

SCM: Video games have an incredible ability to suck you in while entire days pass without you even noticing. As a tweenager I went through a phase of playing days and days on end of the original Civilization. I eventually had to quit because it was like destroying my life from playing so much. Since then I have tried to stay away from video games, especially now because I’m supposed to be a productive researcher and work all of the time so I can keep my job!

CP-L: I actually have been playing CIV 6 lately! It was available for free somewhere. Yeah, you don’t realize how many hours have passed and you just keep thinking ‘Well, I can do one more turn. Just one more!’

JUST. ONE. MORE. TURN! (S. Murray)

SCM: And then you keep going until eternity! It’s not something I feel like I can allow myself to do, or anyway, best not to go there at this point in my life. But you should enjoy it while you can! You are young and free! Speaking of freedom, anything you’re super excited to do in the coming months as restrictions lift in Canada and elsewhere?

CP-L: Aside from going back to Greece, which is number one on the list, I’m honestly just excited to get back to school and be in class and have my routine again. I would like to go back to a more structured lifestyle. I’ve tried to make myself a routine at home, but I’m excited to get back to something that feels more real and productive in terms of a daily framework.

SCM: Yes! It is strange to have a bunch of days all piling up on each other, with each one more or less the same as the next. It will be nice to have an actual schedule and things to be done in a concrete way. Only a couple of months left! Meanwhile, I will let you get back to the video games and the dog walking. Thanks for taking the time to do this interview – and hope to see you back over in Greece one of these days!