Grave Diggers
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
Grave Digging Athens—When Professor Manolis Andronikos announced last month that he had discovered the tomb of King Philip of Macedon, it recalled the moment a hundred years ago when another...
...The late Professor Carl Ble-gen used Homer's Odyssey to help locate the palace of Nestor at Pylos, and British excavators are now using the same guidebook in their search for Menelaus' palace at Sparta...
...He just kept looking—for 25 years?until he hit the jackpot...
...And the wall paintings found at Thera give us a unique glimpse of how people fixed their hair and built their ships in 1500 BC...
...Modern technology has made the tiniest seed or piece of charcoal an invaluable relic...
...But even then, they are seldom blinded by the dazzle of gold or ivory...
...Today, archeology is a highly competitive science in which grains of corn, or shards of pottery, are just as important as golden diadems...
...This procedure takes a lot of time and money, but the point is to build up an entire picture of a civilization, not just touch the highlights...
...Andronikos' method seems to have been a mixture of documentation and chance...
...Grave robbing is one of the world's oldest professions—second, perhaps, only to prostitution—and few valuable caches remain unplundered...
...Restoring these paintings is an art in itself: Technicians are able to reassemble these ancient masterpieces from the smallest fragments...
...Publicity can detract from the real significance of a discovery...
...Grave Digging Athens—When Professor Manolis Andronikos announced last month that he had discovered the tomb of King Philip of Macedon, it recalled the moment a hundred years ago when another archeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, excavated a royal tomb at Mycenae in southern Greece...
...then it is the job of a modern artist to try to understand the themes and spirit of his ancient colleague and complete the painting from fragmentary evidence...
...Residue at the bottom of a bowl tells what they grew and drank...
...The mask belonged to a king who was even older than the hero of the Trojan war...
...The position of a wall or doorway can reveal their sense of architecture and town planning...
...Apparently Philip's final resting place remained untouched only because another tomb had been built on top of it: The grave robbers felt they had cleaned the place out when they found the first one...
...The position of a fallen pot, or burn marks on a wall, can help reveal the cause of a society's destruction...
...Sometimes, however, not much is left...
...Once they have identified a townsite, for instance, they will dig trial trenches to locate promising areas and gauge the extent of the site...
...More and more, meanwhile, arche-ologists are coming to believe that many ancient legends contain kernels of truth...
...The world is always stirred by such discoveries, with their hordes of great wealth and attachments to legendary names...
...Charred bones in a hearth tell what people ate...
...He knew that the region of Vergina was close to Pella, the Macedonian capital, and rich in tomb sites...
...Ancient Pella, Philip's capital, was first identified 20 years ago when a villager found a piece of marble column while building a storeroom...
...Perhaps the most valuable find of all is a wall painting, and some experts think the painting above Philip's tomb is more significant than what was found inside...
...In the old days, archeologists simply dug for treasure, but now they are much more careful...
...The first problem for any archeologist is to find a site, and often, they are discovered by accident...
...Only it was not Agamemnon...
...But the state of archeology has changed a great deal in the last century, and Andronikos is already regretting that he made such an electrifying claim...
...Few moments in an excavator's life can rival that instant when he or she enters a pristine tomb...
...Tombs, like Philip's, present a slightly different problem...
...The island civilization of Thera, the most likely origin of the Atlantis legend, was discovered when a goat put its foot through the floor of a cave and revealed a staircase...
...One notorious village in the Nile Valley makes its living largely from selling its only natural resource, pottery stolen from tombs...
...The good digger will look on the floor for a coin that might have been dropped by some careless, long-dead workman.??Steven V. Roberts...
...Each shovelful of earth is carefully sifted by hand for the most minute clues...
...After he had found a golden death mask at the bottom of a grave, he cabled the King of Greece: "I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 1
