Skata

One of the first words that any Greek will teach you is skata, they seems to really enjoy making you repeat it over and over again.  It literally means shit.  Anyway, we often run into skata while working in the lab, rat skata in particular.

The room that is the storage for the burials is most afflicted with rats, as they love to use the cardboard boxes for their nests.  It just comes with the territory, we often have to clean up the destruction and the skata that the rats leave behind.  

Today we really had a disgusting mess on our hands.  Andrea picked a new burial for us to start, and when we opened the box there was a large rat's nest in there with the burial.  ICK! ICK! ICK!  The rats had dragged some of the following items into the box: lots of pink felt, packing foam, receipts, a bag from the local bakery, plastic ribbon, tyvek labels and cardboard.  Most of the items were shredded into fairly small bits and then co-mingled with the pottery, dirt and bones from the burial. ICK!  Oh, there were large amounts of rat skata mixed in for good measure.

No photos of our work in the lab are permitted, so you will be spared the image of the rat's nest.

So for half of the day we dealt with a disgusting situation as we had to pick all of the extraneous stuff out of the burial before we could begin to process it.

After work I went down and soaked myself in the ocean for a long while.  I floated around until my fingers pruned up.  I needed to soak all of that rat poop off of myself. I feel better now.

I took this picture from inside the rat room.  The window looks out onto our outdoor dish washing area.  The huge rock keeps the shutter from banging shut in the high winds that are commonplace in Astypalaia.

More soon.  Hopefully not so disgusting.