Tedious work

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Here is a partial shot of the Kylindra site on the island. In the upper right hand corner you can see new construction encroaching on the cemetery. When I was here in 2010, there was no building, just the cuts for excavation. You can see that there are still plastic tarps covering the area where the burials were taken out of the ground. Just as a refresher, this site is the largest children's cemetery in the world. Individuals, almost all are neonatal, we're buried in pots that people would have used daily. Grave goods are rare.

Photos are not allowed in the lab, so there will not be photos of human remains. However, if you do a Google images search for Astypalaia some may pop up.

Andrea and I have been working on the adult cemetery, named Katsalos, for a couple of days now. The fragments are quite small and often unidentifiable. Those that are recognizable are cleaned with brushes, labelled, photographed and finally entered into the database. We are kind of giddy about the database, because we don't have anything like it to work with at UCLA.

Cleaning and labeling tiny frags is tedious work, as you have to write really small. A quart sized ziploc bag might hold a couple hundred frags. It also helps to know the Greek alphabet, because the label for each bag is written in Greek.

Today the work was especially tedious.
CB