Penn Museum Blog | The Unwritten Site and The Unplanned Trip – Chris Bloomer – Penn Museum

The field school I attended is called Excavating in the Aegean: The Case of Despotiko, Paros, and is offered through College Year in Athens. Under the direction of Yannos Kourayos, my fellow students and I examined the sanctuary of Apollo, one of the most famous sanctuaries in the Aegean. This site has been under excavation since 2001 and the earliest finds date to the 9th century BC. This summer, we worked a few hundred yards from the actual sanctuary in what is thought to have been settlement housing or a storage building for the sanctuary.We found a grave with several skeletons, a Byzantine gold ring, a full unbroken pot, and hundreds of pottery sherds ranging in size, color, and time period (mostly from the Archaic Period, roughly 2,700 years ago).