Kylindra

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Here is a shot of the Katsalos cemetery that we have been working on for the last three weeks. Excavation took place several years ago, we are working through material that has been held in storage.

We took a field trip to the site earlier this week so that we could get a bit of context. The two conjoined cuts are burials 12 and 13. The Greek word for burial is "taphos". We have become adept at reading the Greek labels in the bags and boxes. I've decided to try to learn some ancient Greek, mostly because I like to know the roots of words. It is the language major in me coming out.

The Katsalos cemetery is contemporary with the children's cemetery at Kylindra, about 750 BC to 150 AD. They are very close to each other on the island, we pass both walking up the hill to the lab in the morning.

In the Katsalos cemetery the graves were reused and some people were buried on top of one another. Human remains are co-mingled and extremely fragmentary. We find lots of hands, feet, patella and teeth. Both children and adults were buried in the Katsalos cemetery, it makes me wonder why some of the kids didn't get buried at Kylindra.

Let me tell you that these ancient Greeks were really large people, we marvel at the size of their first metatarsals. Today I found the largest upper central incisor that I have ever seen. It was still developing, and had more mammelons than I usually see.

We are working to determine MNI, a daunting task with a co-mingled cemetery. Today we opened a burial that was supposedly one person, but we already have teeth from neonates, children and adults. 5 or 6 radial heads and several tali are also present, and we've only opened a couple of bags. We won't finish this burial, hopefully someone can sort it out next week.

More soon
CB