Wednesday 15 August 2012

No mean feet !

Good job we had some time to relax at the beginning of last week, as we were certainly busy by Wednesday!  On the Monday we had gone over to the American Archaeology school in Pachia Amos to meet Tina, who's an osteoarchaeologist we had met at Dudley's talk.  Anyhow, Tina showed us round the place and introduced us to Sydney from American who has been helping her this year with her work at the centre.

view from the American 'school' across the mountains
(and what then became our lunchtime view)

So, after we got back I sent Tina an email to thank her for her time and said we'd be happy to help out if there was anything we could practically do.  To my surprise she replied to say "yes" there were a large number of foot phalanges (toe bones) that needed to be sorted and recorded if we wanted to do that!  So, Wednesday through to Sunday saw us spending each day going in to Pachia Amos and sorting and recording toe bones! 
beginning the big (toe) sort

To give you some background (I know you're interested really!), the bones come from a cave in the Lasithi plateau which was found when dynamiting was being done to make way for a new road.  The cave had been used an an ossuary for the secondary burial of Minoan skeletal remains (so the original burials were elsewhere), with most of them being placed in the cave around 1600BC.  The excavators believe that the bones were transferred to the cave on one or possibly two occasions separated by a short interval of time, from tombs in the vicinity.  Now, being a secondary burial site, there are no 'burials' as such, so each bone has to be treated as a separate indidivual - and each human body has 206 bones.  Oh, and the number of skulls so far excavated exceeds 400 - so we are talking about a lot of bones here.

As I said earlier, we were given the task of sorting and recording the toe bones (phalanges to give them their osteological name).  What this actually meant was separating them out into which toe they belonged to, and then which part of the toe (more details - the big toe has 2 bones in it and all the others have 3).  We started by sorting out the big toes and then moved onto the others later on.  By Sunday afternoon we'd managed to sort, record and bag all the phalanges that there were - around 750 individual bones! Dud was phalanged-out!
Dud hard at it with the toes


down to the last few phalanges
One of the bonuses of helping out was that Tina showed us some of the skulls that had been found which, interestingly (yes really!) had examples of head trauma, some of which were definitely deliberate injuries (so much for the Minoans being peaceful then).  In particular we saw a woman who had sustained a very forceful blow to the left side of her forehead, and a man with three injuries on the left side of his head - possibly from something like a sling-stone.  Anyhow, we were quite excited to be shown these skulls - well I think Sydney and I slightly more so than Dudley.
Sydney and I get up close to one of the skulls


The T-shirts in all their glory

We had to be finished by Sunday as Tina was off to Chania on the Monday to look at a site being excavated where there was a female skeleton that she was asked to go and look at and help excavate - some people have all the fun!  Anyhow, we were really pleased to have been able to help her and Sydney finish off the 'feet' before Tina packed away for next year - so we may be back!  As a thank-you, Tina gave us customised t-shirts, which we had to wear for the 'team photo' !  (In case you can't read it in the photo, the T-shirts say "This year in Crete......I learned all I wanted to know about Minoan feet!"

Team Photo - 'high fives', we've finished!

We were definitely quite tired by the end of Sunday and spent most evenings of the week eating in, apart from the Thursday when we went to Bogazi's taverna to see Vagelis and Yiannis and their live music.  On that evening, there were a couple of other musicians staying in Mochlos who turned up with instruments and just joined in - it was really good.  There was also a couple of men who gave a demonstration of dancing - and they had great moustaches !
Yiannis & Vagelis (with me)

So, after all the excitment of last week, we planned a quiet few days this week......but on Monday we went into the village to meet Nick whose daughter and grand-daughters were over - she is going to get married in Aghios Nikolaos next year, so we've set a trend !  Then yesterday, after a visit to Panagiotis we decided to try a new taverna and went to the one owned by Dimitris (a friend of Panagiotis) and it was really good - the food was delicious and we had a long chat with Dimitris after we had eaten, and Dudley was presented with a new set of worry beads, or Kombolói  as they are known.  Maybe next week will be quiet then.................


dancing demonstration

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