This last weekend a few of us rented a car and decided to go adventuring at two nearby sites, Laertes and Syedra. This was a wonderful trip to take near the end of our time here. These two sites, but especially Laertes, are not frequently visited and not very excavated. In essence, Laertes in particular has been left to return to a state that is similar to what much of Antiochia ad Cragum still is. We got to trek around the whole site, climbing from structure to structure and through many prickly plants. It was an amazing feeling to be able to climb around these piles of rocks and be able to make educated guesses about what kind of structures they may once have been a part of. It was an obvious display of how much we’ve learned in the last month at our site. Additionally, Laertes was a wonderful visual reminder of what the acropolis was like at the beginning of the month: covered in lethal plants, mostly indistinguishable from its surroundings, and covered with piles of dirt and rocks. Laertes was an amazing site, as is Antiochia, and it was empowering to know that we had been uncovering something so cool and to see how much progress we really have made. Finally, the excitement of discovery as we explored Laertes was a reminder that there is so much still to discover at Antiochia, so much that we can hopefully look forward to discovering in the coming years.
