Category: Uncategorized
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Scorpion
When we arrived on site at Vigla the very first day, I was feeling ready and excited to get to excavating, but truthfully I was more nervous than anything. Despite my love for studying archaeology, I was unsure about my ability to show up and actually do the work as well as I wanted to…
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Pottery: The Fabric of our Past Lives, Part III: Derpy Birds
Cypriot pottery is best described as playful. There’s a joy and wonder to look at the figures depicted along the rim of a vessel, or a vessel shaped a little like a dolphin, or warrior centaur men. So many examples of Cypriot pottery are whimsical. My favorite motif as we combed through museums in Larnaca,…
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The Ashlar Block in EU23
I spent all my time at the Vigla site in EU23, and through this site I was able to learn about opening and closings SUs, and how to determine when something is special enough to open its own SU. While working in EU23, SU8501 we started to remove the layer of mud brick, plaster, and…
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Pottery: The Fabric of our Past Lives, Part II
Since pottery is so important to chronology and periodization and is going to take up a lot of your life during your dig, let’s go over some technical jargon as an introduction to analysis: Once you’ve determined what kind of sherd you have, you look at the fabric. The fabric is the clay makeup of…
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Pottery: the Fabric of our Past Lives, Part I
Why does so much of archaeology revolve around pottery? I’ll include the continuing caveat that I’m a history, rather than anthropology, major, so there were so many things I didn’t know when I arrived in Cyprus. I’d always wondered why so much of any history museum included rooms (and sometimes rooms and rooms) of pottery.…
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Kition
Near the Larnaca Archaeological Museum is the excavation of the site of Kition. This area is a breathtaking example of an ancient city-kingdom. It not only spans from behind the museum but also a block away where there is a more open space for you to view. The walls may not be as grand as…
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Climate Change in the Mediterranean
When traveling around the town I was stopped when I noticed there were climate change books in the back of a man’s truck bed. Curious about the advances the Mediterranean may have in this global crisis I stopped to ask the man if I could view the booklet. To my surprise he allowed me to…
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Cruciform Figurine
I was amazed at the fact that there was one individual figurine I kept seeing all over the island. Not only is it on the currency but was in all the shops that I had visited as well. It was a cruciform figurine. This is a human-like figurine that was highly created in the Chalcolithic…
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Petra tou Romiou
Driving along the coastline towards Paphos from Limassol, you will notice there is a beautiful rock laying in the sea. It’s not like any old rock that’s out in the water. When driving by it will catch your eye from a distance, or at least it did for me. Come to find out this beautiful…
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Sieving
You are going to have to get good at a game called “Is this a Rock or is this Pottery?” You’re not going to be very good at it the first few buckets of dirt you sieve– and you will have to sieve. Whether you love it, hate it, or just accept the necessity of…
Vigla Archaeological Project 