Greece – Mordor/Mt. Doom
June 5th 2007
Since it is coming up on a week until I leave again for the last season on Antikythera, I have decided to countdown with some more stories from ASP06. I never got around to writing them up, so I figure it’s a good time now!
I suppose it’s human nature to name and rename places to fit one’s personal geographies, or to make a foreign place seem more like home. I know myself I have marvelled at similarities between physical and imaginary landscapes myself.
On Antikythera, the first field season was a time of discovery. We nicknamed parts of the island, in part because we didn’t know what they were really called, and also because we just liked making our experiences part of the geography of the island, as it wormed its way into our affections.
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Antikythera as it unfolded during ASP05:
Roman Hill Fort: This was a WWII gun emplacement up on a side of a hill overlooking the Secret Beach. We also found lots of white chert there. At the time, we needed a way to talk about going off to the Secret Beach, so it became “looking at the Roman Hillfort”. The Secret Beach: This is actually named Kamarela Beach, but we didn’t know it at the time. It is tucked away on the western coast of the island, and has two arched access points to the ocean, making it a kind of protected pool, where the water was a lot warmer than the beaches at Potamos and Xeripotamos. We were told last summer that during WWII, a lot of dead soldiers washed into the beach area and were buried up on the hill overlooking the beach. James almost died here diving for a sea anemone shell. I have it here by my desk. Blood on the Rocks:This is where I got hit in the head. Bulgaria: I think Sach came up with this name. There was a little house complex out by some obsidian sites we found on the island, and it soon came out that there were two woman living there, and one had a connection to Bulgaria, so that became the name for that region. Excerpted from one of Sach’s emails to someone interested in the island: “[Living there is] a fantastic pair of yayas: a mother and her daughter who returned to Antikythera after ~40 years of exile after the Nazi’s forcibly removed the whole population during the second world war. The mother is over 100 years old… and still gardens and feeds her two donkeys (the last two on the island). The daughter is friendly (she doesn’t speak English) and must be around 80 herself! The mother’s face is amazing: she has a penetrating look and positively beams defiant resistance to infirmity. There are also piles of small pill bottles dumped around the side of the house.” This was the place where I had to lie in the road for a while due to a double whammy of maquis and extreme heat. Mars:Southern portion of the island, on the way to the lighthouse, where the soil is almost exclusively terra rossa, and in 2005, there was a major lack of vegetation coverage. It was total Red Planet action there. In 2006, it had changed quite a lot, there was a lot more vegetation coverage. The Land Before Time/Lost World:This is a very low area again in the south of the island where there is an almost complete geological/vegetation shift. It is almost primeval, and you can imagine dinosaurs frolicking happily about. The Gap of Rohan: From our hotel in Potamos, we could look over to a ridge on the northernmost spur of the island. There is a little saddle in it, that was very reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gap of Rohan. James and Andy came up with this one. I am sure this is what inspired later allusions to Mordor, but I am getting ahead of myself. Gorge of Death:Sach ran a team down here, a gorge of blinding white, heat-reflective marl, littered with smelly dead goats and green chert nodules. He found the chert source but lost some sanity there, I am sure. |
Last summer, ASP06, we added to and refined some of our geographies.
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Antikythera in summer 2006:
Valley of Death:The name for this site was given during the 2005 field season, but I didn’t visit it myself until this past summer. I ran a gridding team out here with my co-grid-mistress Varina. The Valley of Death is in a valley (duh) in a quite remote part of the island. In fact, it is located at a range of hills which roughly divide the island. Myronas, the taverna owner, actually was born and grew up on the other side of the island from where he is now, and he still keeps beehives back out from his birthplace. But anyhow, the Valley of Death is a terra rossa plateau in this little valley. It is riddled with Mason Bees, which are metallic blue-black bees that pick up pieces of gravel…it’s quite shocking to see. Anyhow, I am sure you can imagine why it got the name Valley of Death. It’s in a Valley and when the sun is high in the sky it turns into a giant frying pan, complete with heat waves. The Pentagon:In the northern part of the island, just over from Blood on the Rocks, there is a field enclosure that is shaped like a giant pentagon. It was a great landmark when we were using satellite photos for gridding. This was the site of the marvellous SuperGrid that almost made Varina and I kill some of our gridlings. The Lighthouse: This really should be Sach’s story to tell, as I didn’t actually ever manage to make it down there, although I was in Mordor. But let’s just say that the Lighthouse became our holy grail in 2005 and it was finally attained in 2006. In fact, I will just put Sach’s video here and you can check it out yourself. It features the core groups of Rats (plus irregulars like Brenna and I) in Mordor and on their way to the lighthouse. (More movies are on youtube.com, if you search for “sachkillam”) |
I am sure there are more I can’t remember (Sach??), but the big stand-out was Mordor/Mt. Doom. I helped name this place. Mordor was the result of the action of scientific rigour. Originally, Aaron and/or Oli had surveyed in the region, and had written the coastal rock off as inaccessible/not worth the bother. But part of the whole scientific process is that even though you are 99% positive there is nothing there, you still should really go look anyhow.
So I joined the Maquis Maggots, which were newly christened the Rats, helmed by Sach and we set out.
Imagine a large hillslope and area full of jagged limestone teeth, nothing green, nothing cool, nothing wet except the mesmerising splash of the ocean so very far away (or in some cases not far at all but it might as well have been on the other side of the moon). Now take those limestone teeth and randomly put deep crevices so that the largest flat area to place a boot sole is about the size of the palm of your hand, separated by a gap of anywhere from 10cm to almost a metre apart horizontally or vertically, or both, just to be fun.
Here we have some hobbits scrambling over the rocks in Mordor. This was actually the bottom slope of a fairly large upthrust, so this was actually called Mount Doom. Here Mike and Laura had gone off to do some 2 person tracts on the top of the ridge, and are scrambling back to get some lunch. Mike is the guy in white, and if you look just up and over to the left you can see Stealth Laura in her green shirt and camo pants on the top of a rock.
I managed to snap Sach when he obviously is reflecting on the majesty that is Mordor.
Lunch in Mordor was a chance to take the torture devices that were our boots off. We actually had shade here, which was so miraculous it deserves special mention. Lunch was paksomathia (lembas bread), water, tomatoes, feta, dolmadas, and orange lunchmeat “ham” sausage (see Food in Greece for a description of our lunches from ASP05. I actually ate the lunchmeat this summer. It helped to eat it in as few bites as possible and don’t chew unless you had to. We also might have had gigantes too. I should have written it down.
At lunch, we actually managed to find a way to the ocean. If you walked on a really sharp spur, you could clamber down to the water, where there was a little proto-fjord thing. While this picture captures the joy of cool water on hot bruised feet….
…it doesn’t show the discomfort of sitting on jagged teeth of rock. Here I have captured Sach just as the bliss of the cool water is being overwhelmed by the sensasion of jagged rocks on the ass.
By the end of the day from scrambling around on these rocks, we were absolutely fried. If we weren’t vertically climbing, we were horizontally climbing. I lost my pen at some point, and two hours later, Sach found it glinting in a rock crevice. That was the most exciting thing we found all day. This picture shows one of the nicest areas of Mordor where it was turning back into Bulgaria-ish area.
I enjoyed my day with the Rats, but I am sorry I didn’t get to go to the lighthouse with them!
So if you ever get a bunch of ASP people together and hear: “No, the site was over by Bulgaria, remember? We went to Mars first and then had to come back through and pop over to the Pentagon…” then you can smile and be in on the joke.