Concordia CMLL Study Tour

By Daniella Odubayo

Circumstances could not have been less ideal for the production of this blogpost. After a bout of food poisoning, and a temporary period of recovery the day previous, the day of my chronicling was overshadowed by the sickness that loomed over my shoulders (or should I say stomach).

Our day began with a bus ride to the site of Gournia, a.k.a, Dr. Buell and Kapua’s baby, and the view from the site was strikingly beautiful.

I was heavily sleep deprived, and the view, among one of the most beautiful I’ve witnessed on the trip, truly seemed like something out of a dream.

Our first order of business was a great history lesson on Harriet Boyd-Hawes and the history of excavations at Gournia from Daniel White, supplemented by other fun facts from Dr. Buell. As I curled into the fetal position to try to rid the pain from my traitorous intestines, I was struck by the humanity of the stories I heard about the site. For instance, it was mentioned that Harriet Boyd-Hawes is a real legend in the area around Gournia, with a local village even having many people named Harriet. Harriet herself had a close relationship with the local people, and apparently one of the excavators that worked on the site is married to a descendant of the person who showed Harriet the initial ruins. Who would have thought such romance was imbued into the history of such an incredible site? It kickstarted the fading beat of my heart, and was enough to keep me going for the next half-hour.

While only being able to hear a portion of the tour before collapsing on the entrance terrace, it was fascinating to hear about the archaeological process from the people who actually worked on the site. At one point, it was mentioned that one portion of the site that contained overflow basins and channels that led into one another took five years to excavate, and was “hard going” as Dr. Buell put it. To a layman such as myself, who has no experience excavating a site, this was an important lesson in recognizing the effort it takes to excavate even one, seemingly small, portion of a site. That such an innocuous location was apparently a “Thunderdome”, was eye-opening, and it was cause for reflection on the various other sites we had been to, and the stories that could be told about their excavations. The area itself is theorized to have been a drainage site, since the settlement is on a slope, and/or it might have also been a way to collect rainwater. What it demonstrates is that during the Protopalatial period, people were thinking about what amenities a settlement might need, and that they were concerned with layout and organization of space.

I didn’t get a chance to ask, but I also came across many wild onions in the region, and I wondered what the deal with that was. Had the region been overflowing with onions in prehistory? Who’s to say!

After Gournia, my consciousness returned in brief bouts at the research center. Going through the process of sorting through pottery sherds, cleaning them, putting them together, and taking them into the photography studio, it was absolutely amazing to witness what the process was like.

Then, we visited the museum, which was extremely “state-of-the-art” as Dr. Buell described.

The arrangement of objects was great for picturing how they might have been found on the archaeological site’s they come from. Something that I always thought was unfortunate was that in exploring settlements or palaces, they were always very empty, which removes a vital element of picturing the life that was lived in those places. While the museum couldn’t restore that feeling of seeing them in situ completely, the glimpses we got, of skeletons in vessels, and objects strewn about a burial, allowed for a further understanding of what “The Archaeologist” would see on a dig.

After the museum, my body was failing me, and I could hardly lift my fan to cool myself down. The group headed off to Malia, and I can only imagine how amazing it must have been. My classmates were kind enough to provide pictures so that I could experience some if it for myself. For me though, it was the end of my day, and I drifted off to sleep in the back of the bus, with interesting fever dreams awaiting me.