Course schedule

Tuesday 9.8.2016

We will stay at Highview Gardens Apartments, which looks quite nice. However, due to tight schedule, we do not have much leisure time to spend there. We make our breakfasts in each apartment and eat it there. We are provided breakfast items somehow. Then we dive every morning, and have sandwich lunches on the dive site whenever we have a chance to eat it. Afterwards, we maintain the dive gear and move back to the hotel. In the (late?) afternoons and early evenings we have lectures and other practical work in Highview Gardens, and finally late in the evening we eat dinner together at a local tavern in Mazotos village. Repeat this for 15 days, and then we are all cooked well done. There will be some days off with no diving to off-gas, so that your body can recover completely from deep dives.

It takes some time just to get to the Mazotos dive site. First we take a 15 minute car ride to Alaminos Harbour, We have some cars for the project. From the harbour we take a rib (rigid inflatable boat) to get to a larger boat anchored on top of the work site. The rib is kind of small, and we do not all fit into it at once. Several trips are needed each way. The boat ride will be some 4-5 miles, and it takes us at least 15 minutes to get to the work site. Altogether, it will take 1-2 hours for all of us to get to the dive site from the hotel. Dive operations probably last 3-4 hours. And then another 1-2 hours to get back. All this to work on the dive site for maybe half an hour or so!

MARELab's rib Andreas Ioannides
(https://ucy.ac.cy/marelab/en/education) 

We keep most of the dive gear in the boat on top of the work site for the whole fieldcourse duration. I do not know, but I would guess that tanks can be filled up there also. We would need a compressor for air and a booster system for oxygen. A booster can boost the lower pressure oxygen in large 50 liter O2-tanks to 200bar pressure needed for our decompression tanks. A normal compressor can be used only for gases containing max 40% oxygen, and that is not suitable for pure oxygen. Oxygen fill-ups are slow, because for safety reasons the maximum gas flow should be only 50 liters/min, and even the smaller 7 liter decompression tanks hold 1400 liters of oxygen. However, they might be only half empty after each dive. If the compressor and the booster are not stored in the vessel on top of the work site, we will have significant extra logistics transporting the tanks to the onshore fill-up station.

The 1st dive is on Sunday, and it will be an introduction to the work site. On Monday we practice tagging artefacts and taking notes. All the rest of dives are marked "photographing and excavating". We are split into 3 groups of 4 students, and each group will do their own excavation, under guidance from the professionals. That will include documenting it thoroughly with photographs and drawings before, during and after the excavation.

Lectures will cover topics like UW (underwater) Archaeological Photography, UW Excavation, Photogrammetry, and Shipwreck Archaeology. All lectures are from real experts in the field. Practical work will include hands-on practice with (e.g.) Finds Tagging, Pottery Recording, Artefact Drawing and Artefact Photography. Each group will also make a presentation on the results of their own excavation.

The real scientific work begins only after our fieldschool, when the finds are preserved and maybe displayed, conclusions are made, and the results published in peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and conferences. That will take years, and is the work for professionals. Our job is to help out in collecting basic data on which science can be made. Depending on your point of view, uw excavation can be the fun part, or the grunt work.