«…In 1988 I ‘succeeded’ –as we then used to say with great enthusiasm- in the exams to the University of Athens. It was summer 1989 when I first joined archaeological fieldwork at the Cave Skoteini, in the central mainland; within a big team of specialists and students I have then opened my explorations to prehistory. There, in the afternoons when we used to do some laboratory work in the old elementary school of the village following the morning dig, I have for the first time undertook some pottery research, on the Mycenaean and Classical-to-Roman ceramics from the cave.
In 1990 I took part in the surface surveys for Neolithic sites on the islet of Yali, Dodecanese, and joined the Neolithic pottery-recording project for that site, while later that year I went to the dig of the Bronze Age settlement of Kalogerovrysi, lying inside a pine forest outside of the town of Halkis, central mainland. Soon the following months, I joined the project for cataloguing pottery of various periods, excavated from the Nestor Cave in Pylos. In 1991, already in my 3rd undergraduate year, I would follow the second and third seasons of Skoteini project, as I was very much interested in keeping in touch with the theory and conclusions of this certain site. Later that year I started working for the Ephorate of Paleoanthropology-Speleology in Athens, the institute running the cave projects in Greece, as an assistant to the Cave Skoteini animal bone identification.