7:45am. No rain. The sky is partly cloudy and I will be able to move onto the Katafiki Gorge as hoped. I is a cool, clear morning after the rains. I will begin with E57 and E58 at the lower entrance to the Gorge.

E57 was located by Blue Team on August 3, 1981. It was described as a heavy concentration of various ceramics including roof tiles, black glazed sherds, rims, bases, body and pithos fragments. I hope to reiterate the transect conducted by the Blue Team and collect the footage (refer to 1:5000 trace map).

9:00am. E57 is spread over a relatively large area in a grove of olives with many young trees planted amid derelict terrace lines. Hugh cairns are piled up near the center of the area. I will conduct a video walk | transect | take slides, etc.

E57 @ 34S 0696123 4142801.

9:40am. I have just completed a series of video transects through the area along with a video diary segment. The ground is very wet so the sounds produced while walking across it were negligible on tape. I will now move on to E58.

10:23am. I have spent over half an hour trying to locate E58. I have walked back and forth across the area between the dirt road and the drainage. This area of the hill is covered in a new grove of olives replacing the more open grain fields with olives spaced at much greater distances from one another and along the dividing lines between plots. Contemporary manuring practices are taking place in this new grove. The area is littered with a combination of goat bones, trash and manure from rubbish heaps.

As I walked over the grove I came across various pottery scatters but nothing on the scale described by Blue Team on the 4th of August, 1981 as associated with E58. The soil is a deep reddish brown from the rain and therefore it is a similar color to some of the ceramics. Nevertheless, most pottery sherds are clearly discernable. I took a photograph of the manuring remains and a GPS reading of the grove area @ 34 S 0695915 4143218.

I will make an entry into my video diary and add a video transect through the area and subsequently move on to the Katafiki.

11:00am. I have now completed a video diary segment of the contemporary manuring practice and two video transects across the area surveyed on August 4, 1981. While taping these I am now fairly certain that I located E58 at the intersection of the line of large olives, the dirt road and the drainage. The density of the materials here was much higher than the surrounding areas. I marked this concentration @ 34 S 0695853 4143246. I am now moving into the gorge.

12:00pm. Walking along the streambed I notice a Greek Orthodox shrine with icons of Agios Nikolaos, Agios Antonios, and Agios Georgios. Directly across the streambed is a concrete marker with the letters ΠΑΣΟ 198… OΘ. Perhaps the concrete was leftover from the constructio of the shrine. The location of the shrine @ 34S 0695997 4143973. Incidentally, these markers are located where the old roadway crosses the streambed.

At some point the a roadway was bulldozed down from the Upper Fournoi Valley probably in hopes of making the passage more amenable to automobiles.

12:40pm. I have walked all the way through the gorge along the road to the Upper Fournoi Valley. I am in an open series of farming plots with many young olive groves and well-maintained terraces. I am not far from the area of F25 which sits on the slopes just east of the ravine.

I am currently taking notes on the top of a stone structure, which has the appearance of a half bridge or watermill tower. However, there are no water channels. Perhaps it is an agricultural structure used for dumping materials into something below. The upper surface is level and composed of cemented cobblestones which taper in towards the highest point downhill.

The terrace line further upstream gives out about 15m before the structure, but it seems to have been on a line with its endpoint. Perhaps a path ran along the lower side of the terrace adjacent to the stream channel.

The water table in the area seems to be much higher here because of the lusher vegetation growing near the streambed. Such is not the case a few hundred meters more into the gorge to the south where the vegetation drops off significantly by comparison. Given the karst topography of the gorge, the water must drop further underground at the transition point.

On returning through the Katafiki Gorge I will attempt to locate the horos inscription (boundary marker) designated as E15.

3:11pm. I have just returned to the car from E15 in the Katafiki Gorge. I successfully located the horos inscription at the meeting point of the obvious ridgeline in the middle of the gorge with the western cliff face. The letters OP were easily discernable, but the letters OΣ were not. Indeed, because I was unprepared to find the marker had not remembered the OΣ. Therefore I was unsure of what looked like part of the sigma (Σ) below the OP. I only subsequently made this connection upon consulting the “Register of Sites” from Jameson, Runnels, and van Andel 1994 when I returned to the car.

I took a slide panorama of the Katafiki Gorge from E15, several video panoramas of the area as well as a video diary. I will review this footage to see if I can make out the portion of the sigma (Σ). Because of the weak GPS signal near the cliff face I took two separate GPS readings and will take the average of the two as the location: 1) @ 34S 0695840 4143907; 2) @ 34S 0695837 4143910.

On the way back down the slop from the boundary marker I stopped by an old pine whose bark had been stripped back for sap extraction. The old resin cans were rusted but still in place. The bark had begun to grow over the cans. The tree was located @ 34S 0695913 4143850.

I believe I have obtained enough landscape footage for the various new media projects I envision. Tonight I will drive to Epidauros to see the Lysistrata. I plan on recording the play from various angles in the theater. I will then take photographs from various points in the theater for a “myGallery” project.

Go back to July 15, 2004

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Summer 2004 field notebook

July 16, 2004 log entries

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