What I'm Doing Now... And How My Knowledge of Greek Pottery Came in Handy

So, I know its been awhile, but I'm very proud of myself today. Not that its been awhile since I've been proud of myself, but that I haven't been very good about posts.

Since school has started I've been spending my spare time (which isn't much) volunteering at the Arizona State Museum. I work in the archaeological collections department, mostly organizing as during the move between buildings quite a lot of things have gotten mixed up. Also what you actually see in the museum is not even half of what the museum actually has. Its been collecting things since the 20s, and when you have that much stuff things can go astray fairly easily, and those things are easily put off. So things are a confusing mess. To make it harder, in the early days they didn't always keep the best of records so sometimes things don't quite match up, as was the case today.

So this was pulled for a pottery class. The piece itself was labeled as coming from Pompeii, they called it a Roman vase, and dated it to 79 CE (That's just the date of the eruption at Pompeii). Now that you know that lets take a step back. So I was readying these pieces for pictures, a collection of Roman, Greek, and Etruscan pottery, and matching printed labels with the correct pieces. But when I came across the Roman vase label, I couldn't for the life of me find the corresponding pot. My boss came and helped, and found this, the numbers matched, but the first words out of my mouth were, "That's not Roman."

Luckily my boss is awesome. So I explained what I believed it to be, looked up some examples online, and contacted my Greek Archaeology Professor to get her opinion. And, YAY, turns out I was totally right! This is a big difference. It makes this little pot about 600 to 700 years older than originally thought. Its a late ProtoCorinthian Aryballos. I recognized it by the shape, which is the biggest clue. But also there is a scale pattern below the handle (sorry it's hard to see in the picture). So there you have it, I've now used my knowledge of Greek Pottery outside of the classroom.

Back!

Sorry for the long pause. Brandon and I were in Oregon at the Oregon Star Party volunteering with my lovely friends from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Also my transition back the U.S. was not so awesome. Turns out those antibiotics I took in Spain really did a number on my digestive system, and I've been sick after every time I've eaten since getting back. It took a while to figure out what was wrong, but now I'm on a diet of yogurt to fix it.

But oh the things I have to tell you.

So you all know the massive problems with the dig that I was on. It was pretty much all I could talk about. But what you didn't know was that my professor here was responsible for getting me on the dig. She knew that I was looking for something to do over the summer and her newest grad student was running a field school in Spain. Said grad student is from Spain, and is now in the phd program here. Turns out he's in one of my classes. Which of course is awesome. And by awesome I mean dear god someone shoot me. This is of course made better by the fact that she asked me how the dig went. I wasn't going to lie. I told the truth. I told her about features being rebuilt, about the lack of archaeological integrity and the sheer lack of ethics. And, of course, she was concerned (to say the least). The natural question from her was why didn't I go to 'said grad student'. I made up an excuse. But honestly what went on at that dig was wrong, pure and simple. There is no getting around this. Now my professor is his graduate adviser so I've no idea what will happen next. What I do hope is that this grad student will learn something. Because from what I saw, he didn't see anything wrong with what was going on.