I’m looking for a book I read at least 30 years ago, about a girl who goes to an island (I think Crete, Greece) with her family, but is mostly left to amuse herself. She meets up with an archaeological excavation and gets a job with them by drawing pictures of the artifacts they find.
Mystery of the Hidden Hand by Phyllis Whitney copyright 1963
From the jacket
Right now Gale Tyler is twelve, but if she lives to a hundred, she surely won’t forget this amazing summer on the island of Rhodes. She’s here with her mother and her brother, Warren, who is as thrilled as a future archaeologist can be on his first visit to Greece.
Thrills not exactly archaeological greet the young people the very first morning of their stay at the hotel operated by their aunt and her Greek husband. Up on the fourth floor, where Gale and Warren are the only guests, a whirling, leaping, black-shrouded figure streaks by and disappears into a room farther down the hall. Thuds and a jumping sound soon come from behind the door. But when it is opened by an angry little woman who rushes up from the third floor, the room is empty.
Presumably empty, that is. Someone at an upper window of a big white house surrounded by trees is definitely sending mirror signals to the room. Also, in a closet, Gale discovers a strange packet folded in a leotard, obviously hidden there.
Like a Pandora’s box, the packet when opened releases a whole complex of events involving the American visitors deeper and deeper in mystery. Their cousins, Nicos and Tassoula, and dignified old Thanos Castelis, proprietor of the famous Pegasus pottery works, are all caught in the tangles of a dark family secret. Unraveling begins at the white house, leads to the ruins of Camiros, and reaches an exciting end on the rock of Lindos, high above the Aegean.
Possibly one of Phyllis Whitney’s juvenile mysteries? There are a couple that take place around archeological sites, and I know at least one or two were in Greece.
Solved! “Country of Broken Stone” Nancy Bond, 1980
I solved my own request (after eight years) – I was a little off in my memory, the girl and her family move to Northumberland, UK for the summer next to a Roman archaeological site on Hadrian’s Wall, where she gets to draw some of the artifacts they uncover.