landingtree | (no subject)

Today we were granted entry to a place as holy in its own way as Sounion: INSTAP, the Institute of Aegean Prehistory. It's the kind of place that sits between the site and the museum, producing the results which will later turn up in lines like 'The presence of haematite demonstrates...' We were shown heaped bags of soil samples waiting to be filtered into heavy, light, and waste portions (tiny shards of bone or pottery, carbonised plant remnants, miscellaneous mud), and the water-recycling system put together by the Institute and its plumber to balance the needs of filtration against Crete's frequent droughts. We saw a cemetary's haul of bones laid out on trestle tables, many of them chips no larger than a fingernail, others looking like wood or cinnamon quills, and one or two precious bits of skull large enough to hint at the sex of the dead. We saw pithoi jars in several stages of restoration from shards, everything done to them reversible, and a Roman silver coin partly cleaned under a microscope. We saw the kind of basement that results from the need to throw nothing away ever, where shelves are being removed on the basis that the little gaps left between them are too valuable to waste. That lot there, said the woman giving us the tour with evident satisfaction, we're analysing for another organisation, so in six or seven years we can give them back. We saw a lab in the corner of the same basement for cutting tiny pieces off ceramics, saturating them with resin to make them non-friable, sanding them down to a thickness of three microns, and using a microscope to determine exactly what kind of clay they were made from. And we saw people at work on giant electronic artists' tablets making acurate sketches of finds for publication. The whole place had the number eight wire feel of a discipline still inventing itself with anything to hand, with a lot of money but never enough, sandblasting pottery with ground walnut shells, using dental wax to mold fills for gaps in pottery, and cursing the predecessors who wrote crate lables in quick-fading red ink.

...

Tonight's hotel was meant to be the worst on the whole trip. True, the mattresses are thin. But there are also kitchenettes! We get to cook! A potluck is convening on the upstairs balcony, all ingredients from the shop across the street. My lentil soup is on the stove, my roommate's chicken sliders are on the table; much is right with the world.

(I am finally catching the group cold. Ah well, can't have everything).