Get the latest tech news

The Archeologists of Athens (2023)


By collecting long-forgotten archeological data, a new project reveals the researchers who toiled unrecognized.

At the corner, tucked underneath the looming façade of the National Bank of Greece, an open-air site plunged some twenty feet below the modern city; inside this pit was a huge section of the ancient wall from the fourth century B.C. In the courtyard café of the Numismatic Museum of Athens—a beautiful three-story neoclassical mansion that was once the residence of Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman and amateur archeologist—I had coffee with Olga Voyatzoglou, who worked on rescue excavations for the state service in Athens in the nineteen-seventies and again in the nineties. “Because the owner is paying, they don’t want to lose money, so they are always saying, Go faster.” Some landowners would begin construction illegally, digging the foundations of buildings themselves and destroying the archeology; others pressured her team to excavate only to a certain depth, fearing that they might find something.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of archeologists

archeologists

Photo of Athens

Athens

Related news:

News photo

Israel’s Archeologists Are Helping Locate Those Killed by Hamas