Diary, 25/05/20 – Lockdown

It has been two months since the last update… sorry. I was not expecting such a gap but when I’m not travelling seems a bit irrelevant to update boring desk work from home. However, now it makes a year since the fieldwork in Archaia Messene and I am finally putting together the data thanks to Pedro‘s help. The visitor study we did with the students from the University of the Peloponnese is still unfinished, as work keeps accumulating, but some of its outcomes are slowly coming out. One of them is the heat map of the image, where we can see those areas with a higher impact for visitors, where they not only pass by but also stop for photos, etc. There are other interesting details, like the low percentage of people that stops to read a panel. Hopefully the report will be ready this summer and I will of course upload it and share it. I have also kept conducting digital interviews… they are not the same but will save the situation. But one of the main tasks has been writing, and writing not just about some preliminary results, but other basic issues like the methodological and theoretical frame of the project. In this sense, I am particularly enthusiastic about a text where I propose a method to design and interpret archaeological heritage management models. It has been an idea I pursued for years now, and little by little all this will see the light. Anyway, I really hope READ MORE

Diary, 15/06/19 – Fieldwork and languages

My grandmother was born in a village called ‘Arroyomuerto’ [dead river] and at some point it was decided to change the name into something nobody remembers but appears in Google Maps. When I saw the entry panel to Archaia Messene I remembered it. ‘Mavromati’ [black eye] was the original name of the village where the archaeological site is, but nowadays it took the one of the site for marketing reasons.