We have a floor level!

Hello Everyone!

Exciting times! The past two days have been ripe with special finds! I will get started with the pictures because there are quite a few. So our square went from pile of roof tiles, to pile of collapsed stone wall (which sucks more to clean then the roof tiles, to floor level which is hard packed and has lots of broken vessels on it.

The picture above you can see in the top left corner, no more rocks or roof tiles!

This is it! Our first coin! It is so big you can even read the amount which is 'K' and on the back you can see the emperor's head and he is holding a cross, but until it is cleaned we will not know which emperor it is.

The long (by some) awaited only picture of me in the square, this was taken this morning before we started digging so now the square is as deep as my shoulders and we are starting to have trouble getting in and out but the floor is 10 cm below my feet as we found out today.

 

This is a picture of our supervisor Goce hard at work in the North East corner with our giant Iron block which we still do not know what it's identity is. Two conclusions which have been thrown out are an anvil maybe or just a piece of refined Iron Ore which had not yet been made into anything.

 

This is a bit of a blurry picture of the Iron block, a capita from an Ionic column (which is being used as a stone in their wall near their entrance which is in the square beside ours) and a mortar upside-down which is also being used as a stone for their wall.

 

This is a close up of Goce's hand and part of a red slipped fineware plate and a mysterious very fragile Iron circle, which you can see half of from under a roof tile which is covering the rest of it.

 

This is Melissa, my new special finds model, she is holding a giant Byzantine bronze coin which we found on our floor level and one of three carved knife handles which we also found today.

Tomorrow hopefully we will finish uncovering the rest of the floor, if you can imagine we have only uncovered maybe one eighth of the floor level so far and we have all of these amazing finds, we also have a smashed amphorae and a broken glass bottle which we may have all of the pieces for.

I will update you all as we continue!

Giant Pigeon pictures!

Hello Everyone!

Sorry for the lack of posts but nothing really great has happened. I do have pictures of our trip to Skopje, the giant pigeon, and my square without the roof tiles!

We'll start with the pigeons!

This picture is from our trip to Skopje, the trip was good but the city was big and hot. It is greatly under construction to make it a better tourist destination but that is not set to be completed until 2014. We did tour the old part of the city which sold pretty much only wedding dresses, jewelry, and gelato lol. The bazaar was very interesting also but kinda sketchy and full of people and gypsies.

This statue is of Alexander the Great, Macedonia and Greece are both trying to claim Alexander which explains the size of the statue which the Macedonian's have constructed.

Next is our square I6 which is now free from roof tiles! Yay! We were so excited to clear them out and now we get to dig deeper to the next layer of destruction which should be the fallen interior wall. We have used the metal detector a few times but still no beeps! Oh well, maybe tomorrow!

Well that's all for now, if you have any requests please let me know, I have been trying to get a photo of a horse or donkey pulling a cart down the street but they are so fast that I can't get my camera out in time! But I am going to Ohrid again tomorrow so if you are curious about anything here and want to see it message me and I will do my best to get a picture of it!

Until next time!

Love,

Lauren

Trip to Bitola!

Hello all!

There will be more posts this week as stuff is finally progressing in our trench! But for now I will show you pictures from our second trip which was to Bitola and the ancient town of Heraclea Lyncestis!

First will be pictures of Heraclea Lyncestis which is a much smaller town then Stobi but it also has a lot to be uncovered like Stobi.

 

This is a small statue of the greek goddess Athena, which was found at Heraclea and now it is in the museum there.

This is a picture of their theater.

This is a picture of the group minus me.

This is a special one for mom, no explanation required.

This is a picture of the main tourist area of Bitola, unbeknownst to us, all shops except the supermarket were closed on Sunday.

This is a statue of Philip II of Macedon, who is the father of Alexander the great and the supposed founder of this city.

Well needless to say when we were turned loose on the city between 1 and 5 there was not really much for us to do except shoo the gypsy children and wander the semi empty street further in while contemplating as a group if we were in a zombie movie or not. We have yet to determine the answer but on the positive side we know the grocery store and restaurants so well we could give tours! Yay iced coffee with iced creme in it!

Well that is all the pictures for now, I will have updated photos of our square soon!

Love you all!

-Lauren

Still digging!

Hello Everyone!

We are now one week into actual excavating because we didn't do any on the Wednesday when we arrived and the Thursday after that. We have reached the end of the first part of excavating our square, we need to wait for the other trenches to get to the same point and to help with context we need to get to that same level in the square to the south of ours.

The first picture is of the first trench completed to the destruction layer, once the other trenches are ready we will remove all of the fallen roof tiles. And that is Annelies in the trench standing on an inner wall beside the hearth.

 

 The next picture is of Goce (our supervisor) he is also the one who has been making sure that my blog is accurate lol.

The next picture is of our new square which is just south of the other one. This is what we started with on our first square.

The next picture is of a little creature we find in our squares all the time lol.

Well that's it for now! I'll post again later!

Love you all,

Lauren

Trip to Ohrid Lake

Hello Everyone!

This is the post for our trip on Sunday, nothing big happened today so I will give you these pictures to sate your curiosity.

On Sunday we went to Ohrid Lake which is a touristic town on a very old lake which contains prehistoric fish and fauna.

This is a picture of the lake from the hill, the town has two hills, like a camel as our tour guide described it.

This is the view of the lake where you can see Albania in the distance, Albania has 1/3 of the lake while Macedonia has 2/3.

This is the view from almost the very top of the second hill and St. John's church (not st. John the baptist but the other John who was the youngest apostle of Jesus).

This picture amused me and since the internet was working well I thought I would include it lol, McDonald's are everywhere!

We have 5 more days of digging until we get another day trip to Bitola. I will post again if I come across anything entertaining.

Love you all!

-Lauren

Digging day 2!

Hello!

I have heard that the supervisors here are checking out my blog so hello to Goce! They also corrected some of my information and I hope that it is up to par now.

I have pictures of our site and some of the other diggers!

This is the site we are working on for now.

This is Ashley one of my trench-mates.

This is a picture of our trench at the bottom and 2 of the other trenches.


Tomorrow is our day off and we will be tourists in Ohrid which is a UNESCO world heritage site.

Oh and FYI the network connection here is pretty stretched so the posts might become fewer.

Love you guys!

-Lauren

First tour and Day of Digging

Hey, today was our first digging day and it was brutal hot, especially towards the end of the morning. Waking up early wasn't so bad and the actual digging isn't that hard but the heat is overwhelming. It's a good thing that we stop at 1pm.

Anyway, the pictures that I have for you today are of the already excavated areas and a few more from around the campsite.

This is the "guard dog" she does a lot of barking but is really a big softy and she is expecting puppies soon!

This is a Roman Bath house.

This is the Roman Forum which is still being excavated hence the wooden stairs. They are dating it to the 2nd C CE which makes it along with the theater the oldest features on the site.

Sorry, this one is a little blury but the light was fading. This is one half of the Roman Theater dated to the 2nd C. CE. It is enormous and most of the seats have the names of the theater's patrons carved onto them. It's kinda like buying a box in the Scotia Bank Place.

I would love to post more pictures but the internet is uncooperative lol. We went into Negotino a small town not far and exchanged our money into Denars and everything is so cheap. I bought a 2L bottle of Fanta and a juicy box of chocolate milk and it was 65 Denars and 200 Denars is 4 Canadian dollars, you do the math, so that means everyone is getting gifts from Macedonia because I am a millionaire here lol.

Tomorrow I will be able to post a picture of our half excavated site for your entertainment, so far we have semi-confirmed that there is a wall and part of a kitchen oven which is made of stone bricks and then they would put a clay lid on it to bake bread. There is no clay lid now but there is evidence that it collapsed into the hearth. We also have an abundance of collapsed roof tiles from the 6th C CE house which we are excavating so tomorrow we go deeper!

Oh and the new picture under the title is the baptistry which is located in the Episcopal Basilica. The mosaic on the floor has the fountain of life, deer (which represents us) who drink from the fountain and for some reason peacocks who represent godliness somehow,

Love you all until then!

-Lauren