News - ZHP Guest Book: Casper Toftgaard Nielsen

Casper in Danish waters.

Author: Casper Toftgaard Nielsen

Outstanding hospitality, an exciting excavation and academic discussions ... and all for the price of one chocolate cake!

For a couple of years I have been following the Zea Harbour Project (ZHP) through the project’s homepage and thought it looked like an innovative and very interesting piece of Archaeology. So when I realized that I had quite a few bonus points with British Airways and plenty to get me a free flight to Athens and back, I took a chance and wrote Bjørn Lovén, the Director of the project, to hear if it would be okay for me to come down and visit this year’s excavation campaign for a week or so, to see how the project worked and functioned. Great was my joy when Bjørn wrote back and told me that I would be more than welcome, I could even lend a hand and participate in the excavations myself if I wanted to, instead of just watching from the sidelines, or pier as it would be in this case.

And it turned out to be much more educational than I could have hoped for. The project was in the start up phase of this year’s campaign when I arrived, and as the team members trickled in, I was asked to help with getting ready all the tools, pumps and other archaeological nick-nacks needed, when doing an excavation. Secretly I couldn't have been happier, as I consider this co-working approach absolutely the best way to get to know people and get them talking about the project and its academic and methodological principles. This was easy as the ZHP mixed crew were a very open-minded and talkative bunch of people of different ages and nationalities, bringing together German, English, Semi-American, Danish and Greek approaches and qualities, giving the ZHP a much better overall mix of theoretical and practical qualities than is the case on more homogeneous crews .... in my opinion!

To summarize, I got valuable experience on harbour archaeology, which is rare in Scandinavia where I normally work. I got a wealth of advice on equipment maintenance and acquirement and will never forget to use eBay in the future. I had lively discussions about archaeological theory, methods and leadership and finally I saw how it's possible to excavate safely in heavily polluted water, all together experiences I would have had great troubles getting in Scandinavia as quickly, pleasantly and enjoyable as I did with the ZHP crew, who had the most enviable team spirit.

Oh yeah, by the way: I'm Casper Toftgaard Nielsen a very happy visiting Grad. student from Copenhagen University, Denmark, whose expenses, except for food, amounted to the traditional visitor’s cake! …since I was invited to stay in the ZHP project apartment and store very advantageously situated out toward Zea Harbour and the excavation area.