We've had two grueling weeks on Keros so far and one more to go! The goal of our survey is to document the entire island, which involves a lot of walking and climbing in extremely rugged terrain (and trying not to fall down cliffs or get scratched to death by thorns).

Each morning we leave by boat at 6:30, which drops us near our survey area for the day (or at least within a couple hours' hike). There are two types of survey. When we do extensive survey, we walk 100 m tracts spread 15 m apart and record the artifacts we see on the ground, collecting only a few. Intensive survey involves close looking at an area 20 m squared and collecting more artifacts.

In addition to these two surveys, which are done by teams of 4 or 5 people, I've been assigned to mapping the terrace systems of the island using a GPS. Often I'm with one other person, but we've had some injuries leaving us shorthanded some days, so I've been going by myself as well. That involves systematically looking over an area of concentration several hundred meters square and recording waypoints along terrace walls. It's a really interesting project--at least to me--because it's amazing how extensively the landscape of Keros has been developed. Keros seems like a very inhospitable and difficult island for people to live on, but people at various points in time invested huge time and labor in created terraces walls which are made of boulders and often hundreds of meters long.

We return to the boat around 2 p.m., get back to the hotel, and have spanikopita or cheese pie (yum!). After showers, we do data inputting relevant to the days' work or backed up work from previous seasons. Hopefully we get a nap at some point, too! Professor Renfrew occasionally leads seminars related to the archaeological work or knowledge of the island and Cycladic material culture.

Everyone seems really pleased with our progress so far! Hopefully we can finish this season having acquired a lot of archaeological evidence and some serious leg muscles.