News - Week 4: Efficiency level going up up up...

In the murky water of Zea – Andrzej in action

Size does not matter – small fragment of wood found next to a block in the wall dividing Shipsheds 30 and 31

Author: Chryssanthi Papadopoulou and Mads M. Nielsen

One more successful week on the project in now complete. We may be fewer people in the field, since two team-members have gone home, but work continued at the same pace. Two shifts of three divers are now excavating in the murky water of Zea and lots of finds are surfacing every day! A boost to our efficiency is our third surface supply system, a good-bye gift from Charles, which gives all divers the luxury of working without a burdening SCUBA tank on their backs.

The most pleasant surprises of this week include large advances in the field. We now have four trenches, one of which is already fully excavated. The team members are on regular rotations around the trenches so that our newer colleagues will get exposed to material of high archaeological value and the older colleagues will supervise and offer expert advice.

Two of our four trenches are of large dimensions and ‘hide’ within them small architectural treasures, such as limestone blocks, which can verify our estimations on the extent and style of different building phases of the naval installations. Additionally, precious and rare organic material was found in two of the trenches – in closed contexts – e.g. fragments of wood and bone.

Finally, apart from the four trenches we have been working in, this week we have also advanced in revealing the full extent of structure U:1, a paved platform, which was used as a passage between two groups of shipshed. Until Thursday, we thought we had completed excavating its outline. However, on Friday – to our surprise – Andrzej fully exposed four new, worked blocks, further west, which, should they belong to U:1, indicate that the structure is preserved to a larger extend than our initial estimation.

We have thus ended an exciting fourth week and look forward to a fifth one, full of new findings.