Date: Saturday, June 4, 2005
Partners for the day: Peter Van Buren (text) Neha Shetty (images)
Site(s): Ramnous, Marathon
Museum(s): storehouse at Ramnous, Marathon Museum
Principal Buildings/Monuments: Sanctuary of Nemesis, Athenian trophy
Time Spent on Each Site: from ca. 9:30 to ca. 2:30 [ 5 hours]
Weather: Sunny, still really cool for June in Greece – guess we won’t be seeing the terrible heat we were told to expect!
This morning, the group shuffled in to breakfast and munched down rolls and cold cuts in near silence in preparation to go to Marathon. Our energy level was no higher than one could really expect, considering that we are still recuperating from the rather arduous experience of writing forty page papers. Though the portents seemed ill when we sluggishly boarded the bus, the group started to perk up on the bus ride through the Marathon plain as our guest lecturer, Dr. Steven Diamant, explained to us the significance of a number of sites within the plain. Dr. Diamant studied archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania at the same time as Professor Rutter and now lives in Greece. He brought the group to the Sanctuary of Nemesis, the fortified town of Ramnous, a prehistoric cemetery, the Marathon museum, and the burial mound of the Athenian dead, giving us a great deal of information about all of these sites.
Marathon impressed me very much, but struck me very much the way I had imagined it. What really surprised me today were two elaborate structures that had recently been built to enclose and control traffic flow around two different burial areas. The enclosure buildings were large, clearly expensive, and very modern in design. When we were walking into the first building, Ben compared it to a stadium or other athletic building based on its layout and construction. The buildings used steel beams and a latticework construction of metal pipes by the ceiling to span the distances over the burial mounds or grave sites. While the outer walls were infrequently pierced with windows, most light was artificial and surprisingly good quality considering what the group has experienced in entirely too many museums. Raised walkways were built inside each of these enclosures such that one never actually touched the ground inside. These walkways were mostly on ground level but each went up a flight of steps at one point and spanned the site in the form of a bridge, allowing the visitor to look down upon the site from above. The wooden planks used in the floors of these walkways were of good quality and very attractive, though the spacing between the underlying beams that supported them at moments made me feel a little nervous. In the end, however, what was apparent was that an extraordinary investment had been made in these two enclosures.
It surprised me very much that such elaborate structures should be built over two small cemeteries. The cemetery areas enclosed by these buildings, while impressive, really did not seem to warrant the couple of million dollars worth of investment that the enclosures seemed to represent. The cemeteries are certainly fragile and warrant preservation, but backfilling could likely preserve them just as well. It could be said that these structures were built over the cemeteries to allow people to see them, but the interest to the general public seemed so minimal as not to warrant several million dollars’ investment.
While we have seen enclosures such as these before, they are almost invariable employed to protect architecture, for example the Palace of Nestor, the Heroon of Lefkandi, all of the architecture at Thera, the east magazines at the Minoan Palace of Malia, and so on. The only other covered funerary structures we have seen recently were the tombs at Vergina, which were architecture and had elements that required special preservation. Also, they had a nationalistic draw, as the Greeks seem to consider Philip’s tomb to be a national treasure. It did not seem to make much sense that these cemeteries be covered with such expensive enclosing structures, especially since no entry fee was charged.
My confusion about these enclosures caused me to think about these structures in the context of their surroundings. Quickly, I remembered that the artificial lake created for Olympic rowing events was just a few kilometers away. It suddenly made much more sense. Most likely, these cemeteries were covered and prepared to be shown to the world last summer for the sake of showing off Greek archaeology to visitors on their way to or from the rowing events. If not for this reason, I am uncertain why the choice was made to enclose these cemeteries. Personally, I realized more poignantly than I had at any point before that archaeology is a field influenced by politics as much as by logic, and that choices about which sites would receive more investment are based on many concerns in addition to the simple facts about which sites require the most investment for conservation.
Posted by Abby Gillard at June 4, 2005 02:41 PM