It is not unusual to be Greek and dig abroad. But being the Greek director of a Greek team excavating abroad and publish everything you do each day is quite extraordinary.
But this is the case of Costas Kopanias, the Greek archaeologists and University lecturer who starrted his own archaeological project in Erbil, in the Kurdish region of Iraq, directing a team of junior archaeologists and university students. Apart from keeping the high standards of their meticulous work, team members are occupied with an additional, more joyous, task: spreading the word in relation to their work through daily posts in their blog page. Although interactive digs are fairly common, and Greek digs in Greek soil have figured as interactive in major archaeological websites ( eg. the Zominthos Project in Archaeology.org) , this is the first time that a Greek dig happening abroad is documented online in such a clever, simple and direct way. Posts are in Greek and come directly from the team members in the team's blog, recording work in progress as well as interesting incidents that may happen when a group of young aspiring archaeologists travel miles away, in a tormented land, as Kurdistan, to reveal its past and probably carve its future.
You can read the team's everyday adventures in http://mesopotamia-uoa.blogspot.com/
Source: Αρχαιολογ?α Online, 28/04/11
