National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Well, you might not know the names, but I think if you saw the statues, you would recognize them.

These are the ones that are, when you're a tourist and you go to Greece and you go to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, That's the place where they buried the statue underneath.

You're going to find these things that you've seen reproduced in photographs.

So things like Marathon Boy, bronze sculptures, but also the Acropolis.

Among the recovered pieces was a shapeless, corroded lump of bronze and wood.

unremarkable enough that it sat largely ignored in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for nearly a year.

Then, in May of 1902, an archaeologist named Valerios Stais noticed something embedded in the corrosion that didn't belong in any statue or vessel.

A gear wheel, its teeth still visible, fused into the bronze.

It was among the wreckage retrieved from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901.

In 1902, during a visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, it was noticed by Greek politician Spyridion Staios as containing a gear prompting the first study of the fragment by his cousin, Valerio Staios, the museum director.

So it was like a...

It honestly kind of reminds me of the ancient Mayan calendar in a way.

The blue monkeys painting depicts animals that could only have arrived through long-distance trade with Egypt.

To actually see the originals, you have to go to the Museum of Prehistoric Thera in Fira or the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

They were carefully removed from the site to protect the pigments, a serious feat of conservation logistics in its own right.

The ruins were genuinely fascinating, right up until a different kind of eruption threatened my own internal stratigraphy.