Digging through Byzantium

Don't count me out yet - I may yet find my walking shoes again and set out to the Attic hinterland, my knapsack on my back, next weekend. But last weekend I decided to take it easy once more, and limited my traveling to walking the few blocks down the hill from Kolonaki to the Byzantine Museum. Who can blame me? As a member of one of the foreign schools, I again got in for free. And the museum itself was quite a treat, despite what I think of the era it commemorates, and of being asked to dig through its debris for the past month.

For a start, the Byzantine Museum is not the Byzantine Museum. It's the Byzantine and Christian Museum, and covers everything from the permanent division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western spheres in 395 AD, past the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, right down to today (or at least to 2004, when it was last refurbished, in time for the Olympics). As a result, it's surprisingly large - it took me a good two hours to get through it all, even though my stomach is now conditioned to rumble at 11:30, in time for the weekday lunch break.

The museum doesn't limit itself in the information it presents to Athens or mainland Greece. In fact, you can get a good idea of the total history of the Empire - which stretched, at its greatest extent, from Gilbraltar to the Eastern shores of the Black Sea - just by reading the introductory displays in each of the rooms. (I was happy to revisit the stunningly vivid green mosaics of Theodosius' church of San Vitale in Ravenna, present here in some excellent photographs.) At the same time, the artifacts are drawn mainly from Athens and its Attic environs.

Of course, Athenian history doesn't end with the suppression of the democracy by the Macedonians in 322. (Arguably, even the history of Athenian democracy doesn't end in 322, but that's another story). It continues, through Athens' flourishing as a university town in the Roman Empire, to her conversion into a Christian bishopric. Many of the great pagan temples were transformed into churches, chief among them the Parthenon (Greek for virgin), which was turned into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. The Byzantine emperor Basil II, after smashing a Bulgarian army in 1018, dedicated his victory to the Virgin there, just as an ancient general might have done.

Just East of another impressive ancient site, the ruined hulk of the Olympaion, are the traces of one of the most important early churches, the Illisos basilica, some of whose mosaics are on show in the museum. It was dedicated to Leonidas, a Christian martyr who was killed during the persecutions ordered by the Roman emperor Decius around 250 AD. The museum also houses extensive remains of chapels taken from the monasteries that grew up around nearby Mount Hymettus in the early middle ages. Plato and Aristotle's philosophical schools were shut down by imperial decree in 529; Athens and the world were moving on.

Edward Gibbon (author of the monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) made it de rigueur in the late 18th century to denounce the Byzantines as decadent and vicious, painting a picture of the upper and lower classes alike as perpetually mired in uneducated stupor until some palace intrigue or drama at the chariot-races stirred them into frenzied riots. The scholarly fashion lasted a surprisingly long time, but is now itself regularly denounced by historians, who see in the Byzantines a resilient culture spanning the ancient and modern periods and productive of much beauty.

I'm not entirely convinced. Certainly, every age has a story to tell, though for my money the highly urbanized and egalitarian city-states of the classical age have more of interest to say to us than the exploitative and rural empire that followed them centuries later. In the end, of course, scholarly specialties come down to personal preferences. If I had as long to live as the Eastern Roman Empire (395-1453), I might spend more time scraping through 11th and 12th century layers of dust. As it is, I've now been rotated to a deeper trench, and spent some of the morning dusting off one of the interior walls of the Painted Stoa. And that may just put enough of a spring in my step to get me walking again this coming weekend.

On the embassy

This week things finally heated up. Rupert Murdoch's empire - and David Cameron's reputation - both came under increasing pressure; Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy decided on a managed Greek default; and meanwhile, in the Agora, it just got hotter. After a mild summer, it finally got as hot as I dreaded when I signed up for this dig, pushing past the 40 degree mark in the sunlight. Luckily, this year a grand tradition was revived, in which all our excavators are invited to a party at the pool in the official residence of the American Ambassador to Greece. We lazed around in the cool lawn next to the well-tended garden and the tennis court; beyond the gates, a wave of debt-inspired distrust was spreading outward from Athens over all the capitals of Europe.

It's hard for me to see how the story of phone-tapping at The News of the World has been receiving pride of place in the British press in the past few days. One part of an enormous media conglomerate broke the law; a Leader of the Conservative Party once hired a former editor of that newspaper; it doesn't seem to follow from these facts that it is likely or even desirable that the multi-national be disbanded or that the Prime Minister be forced to resign. All the same, the persistence and aggressiveness of the recent attacks on Cameron have reminded me how hated he is by many of my English friends. Hated for many reasons - but only one is relevant here, and that is the most important.

Many people despise the current conservative government because among its first acts in power was to enact a sweeping program of austerity measures, cutting or freezing the budgets of virtually all administrative departments (though health was ring-fenced, and overseas aid was actually increased). Here in Athens, a lot of people hate the Socialist government of George Papandreou for identical reasons: austerity measures mean painful cuts to valuable government programs. Many of them come to Syntagma to demonstrate, hurling slogans across the road at Parliament. It might seem hard to disagree with them. And yet the austerity measures pushed through by Cameron and Papandreou, Berlusconi and Zapatero - politicians from both sides of the ideological divide - make sense. They may not be right, or even the best option, but they make sense.

I don't think we need Aristotle to tell us why such policies make sense, but I'm a classicist so I'll bring him in. 'Increasing income is one way to become wealthier', this Athens-based commentator tweeted through time, 'Another is to reduce expenditure'. This kind of economics - from the Greek oikonomia, household management - is understandable to anyone. If you're living beyond your means, you have two choices: get more money or spend less.

Of course, economics at the national level is in some ways more complicated. One complication is added by the notion that the government can stimulate the economy during economic downturns by injecting liquidity into the market. Such policies, championed by the British economist Keynes, have become very popular of late, and for good reasons: Roosevelt's use of the idea helped get America out of the Great Depression. But in the most recent round of global recessions we were reminded of an inconvenient truth: governments, like individuals, only have so much money, and they can only borrow so much more before others start to wonder whether they will ever pay it back.

The countries of the rich west, after the first dip in the current crisis, that sparked by sub-prime mortgages and fueled by the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, decided to spend large sums of money stimulating their economies. That was reasonable enough. But now someone needs to pay for the cost of the stimulus packages, as well as all the admirable government programs that various nations have been running. And we are back to our basic law of household management: you can have more money by getting more, or spending less.

The Conservatives in Britain and Italy, and the Socialists in Greece and Spain, have opted for the second option: spending less. Their policies make sense; but they are not necessarily the right option, or even the best option. The other option - to get more money - may be better. Getting more money would mean raising taxes, though in practice a lot of the money could be obtained by levying higher taxes on the super rich and collecting them effectively. The British government has retained a temporary 50% top tax bracket, but even Labour has been shy to suggest tax raises as a solution to the nation's financial woes. No wonder - what politician in any Western democracy isn't aware that raising taxes is electoral suicide?

As simple as the principles may be, the structure of global finance has become almost incomprehensibly complex. A runny nose is one part of the system quickly leads to ful-blown epidemic a continent away. If European leaders wanted to avoid default, they would have had to take measures years ago either to increase income, or reduce expenditure. Instead, the single currency created a single interest rate for Germany and Greece, meaning that Greeks were offered the temptation of easy loans that were suitable only to central European manufacturers. They took them - like the Irish, the Spanish, and others - and now they are trapped with interest rates to high for them to borrow their way out of a mess.

After a day at the ambassador's house we wandered back to

Kolonaki and stopped for gelato at a sweet shop. My friend lent me a Euro - we get paid tomorrow, and I was into my last lefta. I looked at the owl and olive-branch motif on the reverse of the coin, one of the symbols chosen by the Greeks for the common currency. It goes back to the sixth century BC, when the Athenians chose it as a national symbol to replace the coats of arms that powerful aristocrats had placed on previous coins. The olive is for peace, appropriate for the peace that the Union, so many European think, has secured for their generation. The owl, of course, is Athena, goddess of wisdom and foresight. I flipped the coin in my hand, wondering if I was witnessing the fading of a dream - a noble one, perhaps, but a dream nonetheless.

Cycladic encyclical

After the (mis)adventure on the Road of the Towers, I decided to have a quieter weekend, and get some reading done in Athens itself, as well as taking in a museum. As excavators in the Agora, we were all issued with free entry passes to museums and archaeological sites owned by the Greek state. Except, that is, for those of us (like me) who already had a free entry pass from being past members of the American School, who simply brought last year's pass with us (they're valid for three years). The stipulations 'owned by the Greek state' can be important, as I learned on Hydra, where I was denied free entry to the local private historical museum.

The staff at the Cycladic Museum were happy to let me in for free, even though it's also a private institution: set up in 1986 to house the collection of the businessman and art enthusiast N.P. Goulandris, it continues to receive funding from his foundation. The Museum of Cycladic Art is its official name, and also something of a misnomer. The first floor is indeed full of the simple yet haunting figurines that can be found in the small Cycladic rooms appended to the Greek collections of major institutions such as the British Museum. The second floor, though, holds a fairly representative selection of all the major periods of Greek art, with a bias towards Athens in the classical period (which I won't be complaining about). The top floor is devoted, surprisingly but pleasantly enough, to antiquities from all periods of the Cypriot past.

The museum is well laid out, has some splendid individual items, and also features video presentations on how red- and black-figure were manufactured that are so good that I was actually convinced I understood it until I tried to summarize the process to some archaeologists. But the focus of most visitors will be on the Cycladic figurines, which project a kind of unapologetic naïvety that used to be called 'primitive' and that proved inspirational to modernist sculptors such as Giacometti. The Cycladic Museum has a floorfull of them, and - if you believe an American archaeologist that I heard lecture last summer - three quarters of them are forgeries. The issue is that there's no record of where most of the figurines were found. Many were simply acquired from the antiquities market, which obviously had an incentive to produce them. Their graceful simplicity may not have helped, making them relatively easy to fake.

Whatever the truth of that archaeologist's claims - he also claimed that Schliemann forged parts of the artifacts he discovered at Mycenae - there are other issues that often come to mind when I visit Greek museums. (I visited rather a lot of them last summer, as a member of the American School.) In general I have to say that I'm usually extremely impressed: I've been to a great number of large, clean, air-conditioned museums where the antiquities are treated and displayed in an exemplary way. All the same, a large number of these expensive-looking museums I've been to were in out of the way places, and it sometimes seemed when we got there that we were the only guests that day - or maybe even that week.

The Greeks have clearly demonstrated beyond any doubt that they can take care of antiquities, and make them accessible to any tourist who wants to come see them. It may seem churlish in that context to raise some further questions, but a couple that spring to mind are, 'How did they pay for all this?', and 'How are they still paying for this, with all that's been going on here?' Certainly, if my own experience and what I've heard from others is anything to go by, the deepening financial crisis and the austerity measures it has necessitated have led to fewer staff at many national museums (meaning, for example, that I was unable to look at archaic Athenian coins at the Numismatic Museum, something I am complaining about).

In many cases, museums proudly display signs with a circle of stars against a blue background declaring that they were constructed with, and continue to enjoy financial support from, the EU. (I always notice EU flags in Greece, since they're so common here and comparatively so rare in the UK). At other times (as in the case of the Cycladic Museum or the similarly enjoyable Benaki Museum a stone's throw up the road), the museums are privately funded. A few high-profile projects (such as, if I'm not mistaken, the impressive new Acropolis Museum) are funded solely by the Greek State; though of course, receiving outside funds for some museums makes it easier for a country to bankroll others.

In the context of the debate about repatriating certain ancient Greek artifacts, it would seem only fair to point out two facts. The first - already stated, it bears repeating - is that Greeks have clearly possessed the expertise and reverence necessary to protect and display classical monuments for quite some time now. The second is that they have done so partly due to subsidies by the wealthier countries of the EU, chief among them Germany. This is not necessarily to say that classical artworks should not stay in Greece, or that they should not be returned from other EU nations. But it is to stress that Greeks will either need to make their museums fully independent of EU funding, or come to think of the great works of the classical past not as jealously guarded national possessions, but as the common heritage of all Europeans. What the Greeks certainly can't afford - and what may not be particularly popular among the younger generation in any case - is a narrow-minded cultural nationalism. Once again, the economic structure of Europe can be seen to be dictating its politics, and perhaps even its culture.

A typical day

This blog started out as a way of telling my friends and family about my experience working on an excavation in central Athens as the Greek economy collapsed around me. Friends from Greece and elsewhere were quick to send me links to articles about the crisis, and as a result I haven't talked that much over the past month about archaeology. But since this is what I'm engaged in for at least seven hours every day, and since the protests have died down (there are places to pitch a tent in Syntagma available now if anyone fancies a camping holiday), I thought I might provide a picture of a typical day in the Agora.

My day starts at 6am, when I wake up. It may start a bit earlier than that on some days, since my flat-mates (and nearly everyone else on the dig) get up considerably earlier than me, and sometimes they wake me up. They have breakfast at home, buy coffee at the McDonald's in Syntagma, and go down to the Stoa of Attalus to hang out until work starts. (The Stoa is one of many porticoed buildings which would have surrounded the ancient Agora. It was given as a gift to Athens by Attalus II, a King of Pergamon, in the 2nd century BC, destroyed by the Herulian barbarians in 267 AD, and reconstructed by the American School in the 1950s. It houses the Agora Museum but also acts as our base and store house for finds.)

After a breakfast of yoghurt and croissants, I head down to the site, usually by the quickest route, which leads me past the yellow-stone national Parliament, through Syntagma with its protest camp, down the shopping street Ermou, through Monastiraki with its tourist shops, and down Adrianou past the restaurants with their tables set out to look over the ancient Agora. The streets are usually empty when I walk down, except for a few street-cleaners wearing orange T-shirts with 'Demos Athenaion' written on them (in ancient Greek, 'the Athenian people', but now just 'City of Athens').

I go to the whatever trench I've been assigned for my two-week rotation. There is one enormous trench split into two parts and two regular sized trenches, making four in all. For the whole of the central month of the eight-week season I'm working in Beta Theta, the extra large trench, which is to the right of the modern road Adrianou, with an entrance between two restaurants built over parts of the ancient Agora (more on that later). Another trench, Beta Eta, is around the corner, behind one of the restaurants, below James Joyce' Irish pub, which is popular with some of our diggers. The remaining trench is Beta Gamma, and it's across Adrianou, between the modern road and the railway line that runs through the Agora. We aren't digging at all this season in the part of the Agora that's been converted into an archaeological park, and where most of the important monuments were found; we're focusing now on the area around the Painted Stoa, where there's still a lot of digging to do.

When I get to the trench I go to the area where the equipment is kept and pick up a pick, a trowel, a wicker brush, and a metal dustpan, as well as a zambele (a bucket for dirt), and take it to wherever I was digging the day before, to be ready to start work when the bell of the nearby church rings for 7 o'clock. The day invariably starts with sweeping. The Americans are very keen on this; on the first day they told us that its importance couldn't be exaggerated, since if you don't sweep loose dirt away you won't be able to see what you're digging. (I've heard that Italians don't think so highly of sweeping, suspecting that it mixes up different contexts; there's also been a lot of envious chatter about the Germans using vacuums on their sites.) We usually sweep with a wicker brush, but are sometimes handed paint brushes if an area needs to be especially clean for a photograph.

After sweeping, a supervisor or an assistant supervisor will usually come over and have a look at my area. If the earth has changed significantly and it's a new level in the stratigraphy, they'll 'open a new basket', handing me a bucket with a tag on it making clear which cell in the grid plan of the site I'll be excavating. I'll then start doing a 'pass': working from one end of the area to the other in rows, chipping earth away with my pick and then sweeping the loose dirt into my pan. I'll then sift through the dirt in the pan with my fingers, putting any bits of pottery into bucket, and any bits of bone into a zip-lock bag. (Any glass or coins I'll take up to the supervisor immediately.) After I've finished my pass I'll sweep the whole area again, tidy up the edges of the area I've been digging (the scarp), and call for the supervisor. They'll then decide whether the earth has changed enough to 'close the basket', in which case I'll sweep it again, the supervisor will take photographs (digital and polaroid), and I'll be handed a new bucket with a new tag. If the earth hasn't really changed, I'll be asked to do another pass. And so on, ad heatstroke.

About twice a week I'll be sent away to an area beside the Stoa of Attalus where we do pottery washing. Groups of us will huddle around bowls of water with buckets full of pottery sherds (and pieces of tile and stone that diggers have mistaken for pottery sherds), cleaning the sherds with toothbrushes and placing them in an empty bucket. Others will then take the buckets of clean sherds and dump them out on trays, where they'll arrange them by type (fine versus coarse), colour (black versus red), and size. At the end of the day the supervisors will take a look at them, getting an impression of the chronological story they tell, counting and cataloguing them, and deciding what to throw away and what to keep.

At 9 o'clock a supervisor will hand around orange slices (like at half time in a school rugby match). At 11 we get a lunch break. A lot of diggers queue up for gyros; others eat what they've packed. (I usually have a hunk of bread an tzadziki.) At 11:30 we start work again. This year the temperature has been pretty mild, so it's normally not uncomfortably hot till now, but the afternoon session is often tough. At 1pm we get a water break, where we sit in the shade for 15 minutes and drink water and moan. Then there are only 45 minutes till the end of the day at 2, not a moment too soon for us, who then tromp over to the Stoa with sweat pouring down our brows to wash our hands, go to the bathroom, or just get our stuff before going home. On Fridays we get paid; when it's someone's birthday the director brings out a cake and several cases of pop.

The rest of the day most of us have off, though the supervisors stay behind to catalogue pottery and other finds for a few more hours. There are usually drinks in the James Joyce on Tuesday afternoons, and elsewhere on other weekdays, though the decrepit, boring grad students among us will tend to forego such merriment for the American School's renowned Blegen Library. I usually eat a Greek salad as soon as I go home, and may supplement that with entire boxes of chocolate cookies. Then I sit for a bit, read things for my dissertation or write this blog. I'll go to a cafe around 6 to read Demosthenes, whose speeches I'm working though this summer. After dinner around 7:30 I don't have much time before I collapse into bed at 10.

On Thursday nights the director invites us all to his house, where he gives us pizza and free beer. We eat and drink on his rooftop patio, with Mount Lycabyttus behind us, while he sits downstairs and reads or plays cards with his family. By Thursday night we are all exhausted, broke, and very grateful for the free food. Some people get a little tipsy before wandering back home; we wish we didn't have another day of digging to do before we get our pay packets and start the weekend. Our muscles are tight and cramped and our backs are aching; our stomachs are full of pizza and beer, and our minds with images of decrees on marble, the heads of statues, and silver coins, that might be buried under the dust right now, just waiting for us to release them.

A worm's eye view

After another day in the sun with the agoraddicts, it was a pleasure to be able to read John Lanchester's outstanding article on the Greek default in the London Review of Books (yes, the Greek default, which he is probably right to take as a fait accompli). Lanchester, a Brit, offers an extensive overview of the crisis, its causes, and its probable consequences. Although a novelist should probably know the word 'passivity' (which any classicist will prefer to his awkward 'done-unto-ness'), his piece is certainly one of the most illuminating contributions I've read so far, and for having brought it to my attention I should thank my friend Leo - a translation into Roman in more senses than one.

Lanchester offers us what he calls 'a worm's eye view' of the crisis. Granted, he says, the Greeks (as well as citizens of other countries that borrowed heavily, like you and I) profited from government borrowing, but it didn't feel that way at the time. In any case, though Greece now has too many cushy public-sector employees, can you really blame Giannis for taking up that promising position five years ago? He was just trying to earn a living, and the government job was the most attractive option available to him. He can't be blamed for the government's decision to create that position, nor was he to know that it was ultimately unsustainable given the state of the public finances and Greece's likely rate of growth. And if anybody did know that the number of new public-sector jobs was unsustainable, they were ignored, like Cassandra prophesying the fall of Troy.

Lanchester mixes up a number of insightful observations here, but because he tries to develop them all the picture that emerges is blurry. His first point is a perceptive comment on a tragic feature of human psychology: our setbacks hurt us more than our victories make us happy. The follow-up again appeals to an understanding of the human mind, premised on the assumption that people will do what is in their short-term interest (if I get offered a good job, I will take it). Lanchester then exploits the sense that, in our modern quasi-democratic constitutions, there is a gulf in power and communication between the rulers and the ruled: I didn't borrow money, the government did, and anyway, how was I to know it would all end it tears? Finally, we have one of the fundamental problems with democracy: policies are chosen on the basis of what please people, not with a view to what is best for them.

I sympathize when Lanchester gestures despairingly to the abyss dividing government and governed in our modern states, just as I did when George, the protestor I talked to in Syntagma Square, made a similar lament. At the same time, it seems clear to me that there is enough responsiveness even in our imperfect democratic mechanisms for the people to take proper responsibility for their own fate. Given time, memory, and good historians (this is crucial) a people should be able to learn from its mistakes. Those who remember the destructiveness of over-spending by past governments should be cautious about accepting the assurances of parties who promise ambitious projects in the future. Occasionally this works, for a while; Canadians, for example, consistently punished fiscal indiscipline in the wake of the deficit run up by Trudeau's governments in the 70s.

But more often it doesn't work, often because people like to vote for politicians urging them to let the good times roll. This is one problem with democracy even the ancient Athenians didn't have figured out (let alone the modern ones). The politician Demosthenes was constantly complaining that his fellow citizens only wanted to hear what was pleasant (that King Philip of Macedon was no threat), not what was true (that King Philip of Macedon was about to take over Greece). Plato was more scornful, comparing democratic politicians to make-up artists who could make a sickly customer a picture of health (philosopher-kings, he thought, would be more like expert nutritionists, patient builders of genuine well-being).

Cutting back is difficult, as a lot of people are remembering these days: it's painful to give up that holiday, those clothes, that daily takeaway coffee. But when you consider the alternative, it turns out that the perilous path of discipline is the only route we can choose if we value our autonomy as adult human beings. Of course it would be much easier to save if someone made our spending decisions for us, just as it was easier not to make mistakes when our parents were overseeing our every move. In the same way, it might well be easier for countries not to overspend if their spending decisions were taken away. Technocrats in Frankfurt, say, could impose the discipline that politicians in Lisbon and here in Athens seem unable to go through with themselves. If you find that an acceptable scenario, you may as well stop reading this blog; though it does place in stark terms the real stakes of arguing that our democracy is partly to blame for our sorry choices. If we complain too much about or freedom to choose, someone might well just take it away from us.

The two towers

It's impressive - and rare - when classicists can use their personal experience to back up a claim about the ancient world. Victor Davis Hanson made his reputation (in Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece) by casting doubt on ancient reports of armies destroying crops in a summer by drawing on his own failure to drag olive trees out of the ground with a tractor on his farm in California. (He later followed this up, in Hoplites, by having his students run around in replica Greek armour to test a theory about the mobility of heavy infantry in classical times.)

But few scholars of ancient warfare can match the experience of N.G.L. Hammond, the sometime headmaster and specialist on Macedon who also led the British mission in support of the Greek resistance to the fascists in World War II. Hammond argues in one article that ancient armies can't have depended upon pack animals alone for provisions on campaign; the reason being that he had tried to provision an army that way himself in Greece, and it hadn't worked.

The Spartan armies that marched into Attica every year during the early phases of the Peloponnesian War, or into Boeotia to battle the Thebans in the early 4th century, must have used wagons to transport provisions, and to use wagons there must have been a good road. Hammond thought he knew where that road was: it ran between modern Vathikhoria and Agios Vasilios in the Megarid, near the splendid ruins of the fortress of Aigosthena (now Porto Germano). Since a series of ancient towers were constructed to control the road, Hammond christened it 'The Road of the Towers'.

Encouraged by my supervisor and the director of the excavation, I set out to walk the road and find the towers along with my flat-mate, who I'll call Adventure Mike here, since his name is actually Mike, he's adventurous, and everyone else on the dig calls him that. For all their encouragement, my professors had been rather vague on the specifics of the walk, and none of the bookstores in Athens seemed to have a detailed map of the area in stock, perhaps because it's off the edge of maps of Attica and of the Peloponnese. But I did take a picture of the plan of the ancient road in a book by Hans Ruprect Goette on my my new digital camera.

We took a bus out to the town of Vilia, which is nestled under Mount Cithaeron, which formed the natural northwestern boundary of Attica in ancient times (nearby, you can see the ruins of another fort, that of Eleutherai, probably built by the Athenians to defend their hinterland). At Vilia, I tried to tell the bus conductor that we wanted to be dropped off if possible at the place on my map of Attica that was marked 'Ancient Tower'. He seemed confused, and told me he didn't know where the ancient tower was, but took my map and went up front to consult with the bus-driver.

After a few minutes of deliberation with a few of the passengers and the bus-driver (who pulled of the tricky feat of simultaneously consulting a map and driving thirty people up a mountain road), the conductor returned and told us we'd already gone by that point, but that if we waited when we got to Porto Germano they would drop us off on the way back to Vilia. We nodded, waited, and were eventually dropped off exactly where the map - and a road sign - told us there was an ancient tower.

Except there was no ancient tower, at least not there. Mike said he was used to Greek signs announcing archaeological sites that were actually miles away on the nearest major road, so that people knew where to stop their cars. We went into a roadside restaurant and asked the man if there was an ancient road anywhere near. He asked me where I was from. I said that I was born in Calgary, which isn't false, and it turned out to be the right answer: he'd lived there himself for several years, and was happy to give us an extra bottle of water for free at the start of our trek.

The road up into the hills our Greco-Albertan friend had pointed to was soon criss-crossed by other roads, but we kept working our way upwards till the road narrowed into a goat track. There was a spectacular view out over a long green valley speckled with the orange roofs of houses that eventually opened out into the sparkling blue of the Corinthian Gulf. Near the top of the climb we came to a shrine with a picture of Mary in it and a cross on top. We felt good: we were doing the Road of the Towers.

Or were we? The trail became harder and harder to identify; after a while we realized that there was no trail. We had simply been following random openings in the brush for the last half-hour or so. But since by this time we had begun to descend again, we had no intention of climbing back to the shrine. Instead we stuffed our lunch of bread and anchovies into our mouths just before any of the swarm of flies could land on it, and kept working our way down into the valley.

At this point I mentioned despairingly to Mike that we hadn't even seen any towers yet. As soon as I said that he pointed out into the distance at something that looked like a shadow that was somehow wider than the tree which produced it. We looked at it through our cameras, using the zoom to reassure ourselves that we had, indeed, found one of the ancient towers. Soon afterwards we spotted another. They were too small to be used as lookouts, and since they were down in a valley they wouldn't have made sense as refuges or strongholds.

But they did control the road, and we knew if we made it to the towers, we would also have made it to the road. For the next half hour or so, we slalomed down shale, between trees and over or through an ever-present, shin-high layer of sharp holly bushes. By the time we reached the first, circular tower, we felt like intrepid archaeologists bursting upon some undiscovered site. But soon afterwards, we noticed a display board with information for tourists, and the broad, red road leading to it, and felt, to use a phrase I learned in the UK, like right wallies.

But at least we had found one of the towers and were on the road to another of them, which was square. After this we climbed out over a valley crowned with rocky crags, with plains where grain was being grown far below. The sun was beating down, and we were running out of water; we ate some biscuits and kept marching. After a while, there was a fork in the road. To our right, we could see it winding off towards the distant gulf like smoke curling up into the ether. We turned left, hoping that somehow the road would get us back to Calgary.

The road mocked us, indulging in enormous digressions and perambulations around fields and hills. At some point we walked past a donkey chained to a tree. We drank our water and ate through the rest of our food. We'd been walking for about 5 hours and the sun was unrelenting. We walked by a reservoir filled with days-old water seeded with dead bugs, but filled our water bottles with it anyway, just in case. Finally we spotted a modern road, so I poured the buggy water on my head.

But the modern road was long, and the Greeks driving by in their swimsuits with their beach equipment were in no hurry to pick us up. Instead they liked to wave at us, cheering or jeering as they sped by. We found two or three half-empty bottles of water that had apparently been thrown out of car-windows on the way by. I drank one of them in three gulps. Soon afterwards, I spotted what looked like a cafe or a house, and my heart rose as mirages of cold drinks formed in my mind's eye.

Then I saw a cross and my heart sank. A church, for Christ's sake. Inside there were bottles of oil and water. I opened the Bible on the lectern and read the first passage my gaze fell on: it said (really) Piete ex autou, drink of this; this is my blood. Well, our blood now. We swiped two bottles of water and left two Euros as an offering. I wondered whether the water was for ritual use and Mike said, 'They're supposed to be Christian'. Then we noticed that two young guys in a pickup had pulled over and gestured for us to climb in.

They were going to Porto Germano, so we went with them. When we arrived we had half an hour to down an astonishing number of bottled drinks before the last bus left for Athens. We took them down to the beach and watched the families watching the day go down in flames: the serious children focusing on their play, the vigilant adults keeping an eye out, the superior teenagers strutting their stuff. I walked to the edge of the pebbly beach, scooped up the latest wave from the distant Ionian and Adriatic seas, and poured it over my head.

Americans in the agora

Hanging over a chair a few feet away from me as I write is my flat-mate's T-shirt, commemorating 80 years of American excavations in the agora. On the back is the first sentence in the now extensive series of excavation notebooks, begun in 1931: 'After proper ceremony of sprinkling of holy water by priest of neighboring church, Agora Excavations began about 7:30 a.m.' Our supervisors still record all our finds in the same type of notebook (as well as on an iPad), and our workdays are still measured out by the bells of the same church.

One question I am sometimes asked by people outside of the field is, why are there Americans in the agora? There is a short answer and a long answer. Let's deal with the long answer first.

The long answer is that at some point in the 19th century, elite Europeans decided that their culture originated in classical Greece. Since being in touch with your Greek roots was a way of demonstrating that you were European, the great powers started founding study centers in Athens, which could act as bases for excavations elsewhere in Greece. The German Archaeological Institute was founded in 1874; the American School opened its doors in 1881; and the British established their centre in 1886. (Canadians had to wait till 1976 for their own modest institute.)

In the first half of the 20th century, there was a scramble for what promised to become the most significant archaeological sites in Greece. The Brits were first to Knossos; the French set up camp in Delphi and Delos. In Athens itself, the Germans scrutinized the ancient cemetery and potters' quarter, the Kerameikos, and the Americans got down to work in the area they suspected lay over the classical agora. (There is a Canadian dig at Mytilene).

Americans run the excavations in the agora, in other words, because they are part of a long tradition of European cultures looking for themselves in Greece. That's the long answer. The short answer is: money. The Americans, as usual, seem to have more of it than everybody else. In the early days, John D. Rockefeller paid the workers and the archaeologists; nowadays the excavations are supported by the family of David Packard, who sold computers, through the Packard Humanities Institute.

Though American money is largely what has ensured that there are Americans in the agora year after year, the agora itself is very definitely part of Greece. Everything we dig up is legally the property of the Greek state (and ultimately the Greek people). There are of course a great number of Greek archaeologists, but there is a lot of digging to do, digging is expensive, and Greece doesn't have enough money to dig all its sites itself (especially nowadays). So allowing the foreign schools to excavate makes sense for both sides.

One thing that may make less sense to some is that we student volunteers actually get paid a small amount each week to sweep dust away from ancient stones. Most excavations don't pay their student diggers, since there is an army of aspiring archaeologists out there every year who want the experience and are willing to it for free. Sometimes students will even pay money to work on an excavation, especially when the dig has a training focus.

But you won't be surprised to hear that paying diggers makes a lot of sense to me. First, it prevents archaeology becoming yet another of those professions (like journalism) in which the only people that can get a job are those who are wealthy enough to be able to do unpaid internships. And second, well, I've just been digging through dirt in the Greek sun for seven hours. And as my flat-mate said to me on day two, 'Can you imagine how crazy you'd have to be to be working this hard without getting paid?'