Geoff Stennett - Team Architect


4.13 AM, front stalls, Leoforos Apostolou Pavlou Avenue, Paphos, Cyprus.

I awoke to the roar of motorbikes and realised it was still two hours before I was to rise and join the team.  Thirty five minutes later a garbage collection truck shook me from my slumber.  I climbed back into bed and just as my eyelids were beginning to droop a street sweeping machine seemed to be cleaning the inside of the wardrobe.

5.07 AM front stalls, surround-sound, 3D without the glasses.

I descended the stairs to the common room to the smell of burnt toast. It was only 6.55AM and already a menacing haze of sweat hung low over the gathering crowd, their eager sun-creamed faces gleaming in the early morning gloom. Then Mel yelled, “OK let’s go folks” and in a minute the room was empty.

7.03 AM, Ground floor, former Apollo Hotel, Paphos Cyprus.

I walked to the drawing room, sat down and contemplated the day’s surveying ahead.   Through the window the sun was beginning to rise on another stifling Paphos day, although the clouds over the Troodos hinted we might just be having some rain. Save for the sound of Guy entering data into his computer and an empty Zorba’s bag fluttering in the early morning breeze - it was finally silent.

7.35AM, Nea Paphos theatre site.

As I head off for the site, the old, arthritic, ginger dog is again soiling the footpath as I pass.  I push open the site gate and see that activity is well under way.  Like a Meer cat Ronan’s head appears momentarily above the trench baulk and then disappears in a cloud of dust.  His trench contains yet another mediaeval wall, but in the southern section the pavers of the Roman road are forming – hurrah!  The Roman road is fast becoming the most common feature in the various trenches opened this year, and would seem to remain undisturbed for the entire width of the excavation site.

Kerrie is yelling orders to her team from the main street corner where she is still directing the traffic.  Her trench in the western parodos  is deep and presents many questions that cannot be adequately answered at this time.  Excavation above the parodos has confirmed the method for containing the earthen fill in the cavea.

Across the site Ivana is using the Bi-Pod in her trench. Specially built by Anthony, based on a design thousands of years old, it is proving invaluable in removing relatively quickly and safely the larger fallen stones in the trenches.  As expected her trench has also come down upon the Roman road.

Directly to the west  Hugh is planning his 19thC walls.  He has devised a special planning technique which involves a tape measure, a megaphone and instructions he downloaded from UTube.

Hannah is hovering above her trench on a magic carpet, while elves remove the spoil in little wheelbarrows.  Tiny pink Corinthian capitals appear momentarily and then vanish. 

Mel on the other hand is firmly rooted in the realities of the bedrock.  He has established an understanding with the stuff like no others have. The rock may present many strange and enigmatic markings but there is one thing he can rely upon – in the morning it will still be there.

David White - Trench Leader

After three weeks of hard work it is time to relax and unwind for a day.  Some of the team caught a minibus and explored the nearby Rocks of Aphrodite where according to legend the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty was born in the foam of water, and then onto the Roman settlement of Kourion to explore the reconstructed theatre for comparison with ours at Paphos.

Then it was back to Paphos where the team had a BBQ at one of the local bars run by an Australian Cypriot.  We showed our millinery skills by having a competition to make the best hat.  Can you pick the winner?

These days are fun and it allows the team to unwind a little before refocusing on next week's excavation and study.  The temperatures are still high and so it remains hot and exhausting work so a little time to bond together is always appreciated!

Hugh Thomas - Trench Supervisor


My name is Hugh Thomas and I am a trench supervisor for the project. When I am not working at Paphos, I am either trying to complete my PhD in Classical Greek Archaeology, or I am teaching archaeology at the University of Sydney.

This year I am the supervisor of two trenches. Trench O9C and Trench 10D. Trench O9C was a trench I worked on last year but we weren’t able to complete in 2009, while Trench 10D is directly to the west of it.

A supervisor of a trench is someone who overseas everything that is happening in the trench and who records all that information and tries to make some sense of all the dirt and archaeological finds coming out of the ground. Often we have more unanswered questions then we have answered, but slowly as we dig down deeper we can begin to know a lot more about our trench and its role for the theatre!

I write this after one of the most hectic, interesting and enjoyable days I have had this year. Each Trench has thrown up some interesting things!

In Trench 09C, the two students who excavated it revealed a really interesting context. They hit a clay surface that was likely the floor for an old house that use to be on the site. On this surface, lots of different pots, including some that are almost complete, have been unearthed. Not only that, the students also found a bronze plate and lot of other unusual finds. My theory is that when people came to build an even bigger house after destroying the old one, they threw in a lot of old pots or just left them there if there were not going to be of use any more. Hopefully, once we photograph and record this clay surface, we can dig through it and try and uncover what was under the house!

In Trench 10D we uncovered a well! So far the two students excavating it have gone down about a metre into the well. Wells are fantastic to find in archaeology as people often throw pots or other objects into them, where they remain preserved wonderfully for archaeologists. We haven’t found anything like that yet, as most of the pottery we have found seems to be more modern. But hopefully as we get deeper, things might become even more exciting. However, the issue soon becomes how deep will this well go and how much can we excavate so people can still get in and out of it. Only time will tell…

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Melanie Bullers - Team Cook


Hi I'm Melanie & this is my first dig!

Cooking for 50 hungry archaeologists is a daunting prospect, especially as I've never cooked for more than 20 people before but it's an exciting challenge & an adventure in itself.

The daily food shop is a trip I look forward to as I'm never quite sure what will be in store. Take for example the supermarket. To start with it's all Greek to me. Thank goodness for the pictures on the labels! At the butchers it's difficult to work out if the Cypriot lamb is is actually lamb or goat. And thanks, but no thanks, I won't buy a skinned goat's head today. Erk! The fruit & vegetable market has a concrete water feature in the middle of the shop with plastic palm trees and live turtles in the rock pool. Are the turtles there for display purposes or can you actually buy them to eat I wonder? Then there's the escargot – live snails the size of golf balls. Hmmm....

My days are very busy planning meals, shopping and cooking. The cooking is another challenge as I only have 2 working stove tops and 1 ½ ovens, which might seem a lot, but it does limit the type of food I can cook, especially in the vast quantities I need to make.

50 people eat a lot of food. Every day we go through 3 loaves of bread, 6 litres of milk, 2 litres of cordial, 3 boxes of cereal & at least 2 jars of jam. And that's just for breakfast.

I have wonderful volunteers each day who help with the food preparation, getting meals out on time and washing up. You'd be surprised at how many cups, plates, knives, forks & spoons need to be cleaned at the end of a meal, and then there's all the pots and pans.

I'm having a great time and, although I can sometimes be on my feet for up to 16 hours a day, I'm doing what I love by making people happy with my food.

Anthony Mansfield

This is my first classical archaeology dig (I usually work as an engineer) so I am learning a lot about Greek and Roman antiquity and how to dig it up.  I have found however that there are still a few things that I can teach the archaeologists.

Today trench leader Kerrie asked me to remove some large rocks from her trench.  In the past this has been a difficult job, the trenches can be deep and the rocks heavier than the average adult.  More importantly, it can cause serious injury if a rock is dropped and falls on someone.  In the past many of these rocks have been left at the bottom of the trench, obstructing the excavation, simply because it is too dangerous to try to remove them.

When I first arrived onsite the trench leaders asked me if I could think of a way of safely removing these large rocks.  They asked me because I am a mechanical engineer trained to find solutions to these types of problems.  Whatever solution I came up with had to be simple to use, easy to move around the site, quick to set up and take down and, above all, as safe as possible.

My solution is a simple device called a bipod.  It is just two long (3m) legs joined at the top and spread a meter or so at the bottom.  A pair of guy lines  (ropes) are tied to the top to hold the bipod upright and a block and tackle hang from the top for lifting things, in this case large rocks.  When we need to lift a rock we set the bipod up by the side of the trench.  We then lean the bipod over the trench, hoist the rock using the block and tackle and then lean the bipod back to bring the rock out of the trench.  Once we are finished we coil up the ropes, fold the bipod legs together and put it away.

The hardest part in getting this solution up and working was finding all the bits we needed in the local Cypriot hardware stores, especially as we only had a few words of Greek to explain what we were looking for.  In the end, after about six or seven hardware stores, we found what we needed and carried it all back to the dig house.  Carrying the 3m poles in a small car without roof racks around the back streets of Paphos is another story in itself but we managed it.

The bipod is a nice simple solution to a problem the dig has been experiencing for a number of years.  Like many useful items it is a design which can be traced back to an era even earlier than what we are digging at present so it is just another way that it suits the purpose.

Oh, and Kerrie was very pleased at how quickly we could get the rocks out of her trench.  It gives us more time to scrub all the pottery we are finding!

Fiona Hallenan-Barker – Theatre Director


It was a real joy to be able to conduct a workshop on a theatre that has over 2300 years of history seeping up though the ground. The “felt” experience is a part of the excitement of the archaeological dig and the opportunity to explore performance techniques, and the acoustics of such a beautiful theatre, was too good to pass up.

The workshop was structured to cover the following areas:

* Introduction

* Warm Up – Active Listening

* Awareness & Attention
[Being aware kinaesthetic presence in the space]

* Vocal Energising
[Professional warm up exercises]

* Playing with language
[Shapes and textures of sounds (using Oedipus / Antigone / Medea)]

* Heightened Story Telling
[Cue scripting the Messenger speech from Oedipus]


There may have been a few nerves at the beginning but by the end we were relishing sharing the story of Oedipus with each other.  With such a large team it was great to have the opportunity to divide into two groups so that each person got the opportunity to perform using the heightened language of the play, and also got to sit in the cavea and experience listening to the story as audiences may have long ago. 
In the dig house we wake up every morning to see the sun rise over the Archaeological Park by the Ocean, hmm… maybe next time Othello in the Odeon…?

Mellisa Mance - student team member


Coming to Cyprus to participate in my third archaeological dig was very exciting!  I had dug in Pompeii, Italy and in New South Wales before, so I thought I knew what to expect, but the archaeological site of Paphos is a bit different to the rest.  It was the ancient capital of Cyprus and only a tiny portion of it has been excavated.


With up to 60 people digging on one site you have to divide the site up into trenches. I was allocated to a trench which was part of the ancient entrance to the theatre (the parodos).  We spend about 6 hours digging each day using tools such as trowels, picks, shovels, scale rods, cameras, soil charts and even spoons for those tight spaces!


The afternoons are spend cleaning and sorting the many artefacts that we find, and then once all of the hard work is done we can visit the local sites and go to the beach, etc.


Life on a dig is hard work, but a very rewarding experience!