The First Week in the Trenches

Hello All,

This will probably be a long post.  I'm too lazy to go and do day-by-day, or topic-by-topic, so I'm just going to start typing what I remember and we'll see where it goes.  I'll at least try and put a few pictures in to break up the monotony.

By the way, you may sense some frustration or anger in my post, but honestly, it's just that I'm SO DAMN HOT.  I can't remember the last time I was in some AC.  It's made me quite grumpy.

Each morning of the week my day starts at 4:15AM, when I wake up to get ready for the dig.  I have to get dressed for the dig and bring everything that I'll need with me to the dig site, including my own water.  There's no chance of returning to the "hotel" until we are done for the day at noon.  I also got roped into bringing the tripod for the surveying level every day, so I have to bring that with me as well.  We all have to make it downstairs to the front of the hotel by 4:45AM, promptly, or the bus will leave without you and you have to take a taxi on your own dime to site.  We load all our bags into one van, and all hop into another.
The van is a passenger travel van that can fit about 20 people, which is about how many people we are.  There is, of course, no AC.  The driver only rolls down the window a crack to smoke out of, so it gets quite stuffy in there.  He drops us off on the side of the road and then we begin our long trek up the side of the hill.  And it is quite the trek.  There are two paths: the really steep-dangerous-I'm surprised no one's fallen and died-path, or the longer-slower-steady-Oh my God when will this end-path.

This is not the steep path.  Just imagine what the steep path looks like compared to this.

It takes about 15 minutes to get up to the site from the road.  It, like all good acropolei, is located at the tip top of a rather tall hill in the region.  You're already winded by the time you make it to the site, and you haven't even started the heavy lifting (more on that later).  There is one positive to the hike:  I get to see sunrises and views like these every morning.

Once you arrive at the hilltop, it's straight into the digging with barely even a moment to catch your breath.  Most of the time, it's quite cool in the morning, which makes it nice weather for digging.  That doesn't last very long once the sun comes up.  The sun is quite brutal here.  I keep getting sunburns, even though I wear long clothing and reapply sunscreen 3 or 4 times while on site.  This past weekend I got sunburned on the top of my feet after standing in the sun for 10 minutes.  I really hate my skin sometimes.  But we had one glorious day where it was overcast and sprinkling all day, and the temperature likely didn't break the upper 80's.

The little bit of sun we had that day.

We got a rainbow that day, too.

This dig moves a lot faster than my previous dig.  I've spent the majority of my time here pick-axing and shoveling instead of troweling and brushing.  Let me tell you, this is not fun.  This is not the kind of archaeology I like.  I like slow, methodical, careful archaeology.  With this we pick and pick, maybe find some roof tiles or pithoi, then make a note, rip them out of the ground, throw them in the dirt pile, and move on.  I understand that there's a lot of material to get through, but we seem to be just ignoring the later stuff, just to look further and further back.  It's got me a bit miffed.  We've cleared more dirt in the past week than I did in the entirety of my time at the last dig.

We stop for breakfast for 30 minutes some time around 8AM.  We have to sit in the shade of our storage container and eat the food that the "hotel" provides.  Most of the time it's a ham and cheese sandwich with drinkable yogurt.  90% of the time the yogurt is warm and sour due to it's lack of refrigeration and it's car ride to the site.  Then it's back to work with no scheduled breaks til noon.  We can take shade and water breaks when we need, but there's not many places to get shade and the water is always what you bring, which is always the temp of outside, because there's no refrigeration, ice, or cold storage.

NW corner of the site.

East on the site, and the container, where we store all our stuff.

The Propylon Ramp (smooth paved walkway).

Laying out the lines for a new trench.

Yet despite all the complaining, we have found a lot of really cool stuff, most of which I don't have pictures of.  I started the week working down in the Late Iron Age stratum.  We removed a pebble floor and found some destruction layers with a bunch of pottery.  We also found a really awesome bronze votive of a jar.  It was essentially found by itself amongst a Iron Age destruction layer, so I don't know what sense they're trying to make of it. Once it got interesting, we were moved up to the South side of the site.  They had just taken off the top soil with a bulldozer, so we started digging fresh ground there.  We found a bunch of roof tiles, some continued walls, and pieces of giant pithoi (storage jars).  In my trench we found a bizarre circular stone we think may have been a lid for the storage jar.

The bronze votive jug.

You can't really tell, but there's a pot there.

See!  Here it is with its handle!

A body sherd piece with engraved decoration.

Around 11:45AM, we have what's called no new dirt time.  This means there's no more picking or troweling, you just need to sweep and shovel up the dirt you've already loosened and take notes on the happenings in your trench for the day.  Around noon, we load the equipment in the container or van, and then make the trek down the side of the hill/mountain.  We all climb, covered in dirt and sweat, into the non-AC bus and make the drive back to the "hotel".

The rest of the day has various required activities and free time, which I will talk about in the next post.  

Hope you all have enjoyed seeing the dig through my eyes!