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.