im moving to a new apartment today


probably no internet

but im back to my own room and this place is supposed to be much nicer and without baby

dont know when i will sign back on

A decorated photo I took!

As you may or may not know it is officially my Egyptian weekend. Yesterday I only worked a half day. At around 4:30 I met up with my roommate, Rebecca, and one of the site girls, Delphine, to hail a cab and head to zamalek to see the lecture by Barry Kemp. It was very very interesting. It was all about work being done at a population cemetery site at Amarna. Amarna is an amazing site because it was only briefly occupied during the reign of Ahkenaten which was roughtl 15 years. Therefore, the archaeological material can be pinpointed to a specific point in time and with that certain variables can be accounted for which normally cannot be. The cemetery work is representative of the everyday population at Amarna and the study of the human remains from the cemetery have outlined this paradox for the conditions of the community that worked and lived there. There was a documentary done which only has aired in Europe but part of the lecture confronted the ways in which the documentary omitted some important aspects of the research in the editting. However, the professors remarked that overall the documentary was actually pretty well done, just some things were misinterpretted. For example, the skeletal remains show that any individuals experienced trauma and injuries to the spinal chord and other joint breaks and fractures. Many of these kind of injuries would be typical of individuals engaged in construction labor, which makes sense since the city of amarna was completely built up only with the 15 year span of time. The conclusions were that they were engaged in a lot of hard work- but that is to say they were working long hours on large scale construction. This was miscontrued as brutal slave labor under the crack of a whip. More or less they aimed to answer questions and draw out some of the important information not included after the editting process in the documentary. The film is called The Pharoah’s Lost City, but I don’t think it will be coming to the states any time soon.

The questions that came after the lecture were mindboggling….selective hearing is an obnoxious thing. One of the topics discussed is the fact that the cemetery population was short stature (men were 157 cm, women 153 cm) and the relationship of short stature to nutritional deficiency and anemia. One of the questions they are trying to address is whether or not these deficiencies are a representation of poor living conditions at Amarna itself, or if given the fact that these effects would have been a result of malnourishment from adolescence, and therefore happened to the people moved to Amarna. The latter would perhaps account for some of the motivations Ahkenaten had for instituting a new ideological system and moving the capital in Egypt. One person asked how we know that the short heights of the population was a result of nutritional deficiencies as opposed to it just being a non-egyptian race of very short people…I dubbed this the Oompa Loompa hypothesis. Questions generally bordered on this line of ridiculosity.

After the lecture we headed over to a colleague’s place to order food and have some drinks. I myself am a vodka tonic girl, but the brits are gin drinkers. I thought I hated gin, but it turns out I do enjoy gin and tonics as well….of course that is with enough lemon and enough tonic to overpower the pine tree taste. I also ate way too much sushi, but was oh so delighted. Again this was down in Zamalek, the more upscale area of Cairo which caters to the tourists and to those with more money. It’s where the alpha market is and where a lot of the really nice hotels are. I know it may be weird to believe that there is a sushi place in Egypt, but there is! And I made sure this was a trustworthy one.

Our cab ride was pretty fun on the way back, we had a super social driver. I was with my 3 flatmates and they kept commenting on how much arabic I know and how quickly I learned it. I now know more than two of the girs who have been here for 3 or 4 seasons. And im starting to learn some French from Delphine too!


Also arriving last night was Farrah and her baby. I was the first person to wake up this morning and meet said baby. So far he seems like a pretty happy baby and does not cry, just smiles big. Okay I will even admit that he is pretty cute for a baby. But we’ll see how cute and happy he is once the temperature spikes and once we are trying to sleep through the night. I do feel very terrible though, they managed to lose all of Farrah’s luggage which has absolutely everything she needed for her and her baby. They don’t even have a change of clothes. What a way to start the season…


I did decide to not change my flight around. Instead, once I am done with everything for Khentkawes, I am going to take on a new learning project. So far I have my bearings in fauna, and now with excavation and mapping, and afterwards I can look into learning new specializations. Perhaps I will pair up with the lithics or botany specialists, maybe ceramics, or get more intensive training from the professional drawer who is due to come in at the end of April. Oh my god I’m so obsessed with learning it’s gross…


At 11:00 today Mark gave a tour of the Sphinx. In 1979 Mark did a complete 1:100 scale drawing of every stone that makes up the sphinx, as well ast the two temples before it. The sphinx took him over 2 years..it's absolutely insane.





He did his dissertation on the Sphinx and knows more information than I ever thought possible. It was a wonderful opportunity though. A select group of us was able to walk around and get closer than the general public. Though I work near the sphinx everyday and I have taken pictures of it, this was a new experience for even me. Here are some pictures I took of the sphinx and of the valley temples. Some of the images you can see clearly the levy holes in the limestone from where they were quarried.







Towards the end of the tour we were greeted by the first sand storm of the season. It got really bad by the time we were in the car and it was quite the adventure walking home form the villa. Here you can see it beginning, but when it picked up the pyramids vanished completely from view.










What a bummer to have a sand storm on our day off….this means no pool. Also the pressure from all the air and the wind has caused a wicked headache….in bed with a book for me for the rest of the day. Andddd no proof reading of this

Still not too much more new to report. I have not been feeling great the past few days. Nothing serious or worry provoking, just been really tired. Heh, the only time I seem to pep up is food time.

The internet is up in the small apartment and it is pretty quick so perhaps I will get around to posting more pictures. Here is one I took way back when I was getting super ashy and dirty at the beginning of the season. It doesn’t really capture how dirty I was, as much as it captures how dirty the bathroom mirror is. My hair has a nice sandy highlight to it though.



My hair is actually beginning to take on a dreadlock like form since I only wash it about twice a week…when I take the braids out the hair just kind of stays in sections. Oh well. I’ll come home looking like I was in Jamaica and not Egypt

Today I had to start going back to some of the squares that I completed before. After more cleaning was done to the, there turned out to be more things for me to draw. There is this really long extending mudbrick wall which actually connect through the two squares I have been sketching. This is a pretty neat wall, but it requires close attention because in some areas its really difficult to determine the placement, orientation, and bonding of the bricks. The later it gets in the day, the harder it is too see as well because of the lighting. I was pretty determind to get a lot of it down though.

I’m also going to argue that databasing is a waste of time right now. I noticed today that people are altering the feature logs (the hard copy ones, not the internet ones). This is bad, because I already entered the data, and if I don’t know that changes are made, it wont get entered into the computer. When I work on site, I only work in one of 4 or 5 different areas all working from their own logs and registers…so of course I know when things change in my area, but I have no idea what happens elsewhere. It seems more logical to just enter it all at the end. I understand that its nice to have the information in a database in case anything happens to the paperwork, but we can just make copies and keep them in the folder, replacing sheets in the very end, and then entering it all. I also think this is the best idea because this way, I do not have to work on the computer when I could be working on the site. I get so bummed when I have to stay in. So that’s that.


Tomorrow is Thursday and a half day. Joy. I want to get down to the bookstore and pick up something new, but I do not know if I will or not.

Eh, that’s about it for now.

Updates from Egypt:

I work

I dig

I draw

It's hot

It's dirty

I'm tired

Wash Rinse Repeat..,,actually don't bother repeating, washing and rinsing is of no use.

We finally have internet in the small apartment!

Which means I will be online more, and sleeping less. Some of you may benefit from this. I probably will not! But it’s okay…

It also means I’m not glued to my computer when I am at the villa now, which is actually really nice. Tonight for example, Mark Lehner and I had a good hour long conversation about complexity theory. I wished I could contribute more, it was mainly him just talking at me…but I was just a sponge for the information. He has an essay that he is going to give me to read. I am most excited for this….a challenge that comes in perfect timing as I finished Murakami two days ago. I started this other book that was left in the donated book shelf in the Villa. It’s called “The God of Small Things.” It won the booker prize and I’ve read good things about it….and it also wasn’t something down by Dan Brown and wasn’t some generic gumshoe murder mystery like all the others.

Even last night, pre-internetness I had a very difficult time sleeping. It was very hot and for whatever reason my eyes were wide open. You would think that yesterday would have put me into a coma for how much my body went through. Alas, this was not the case and I did not feel very alert this morning.

Today the winds held off until later, so there was some amount of productivity on site. Temperature reached 103. Miserable. It is slowly supposed to start climbing down from now on with mid week returning right back to 77. Almost sounds like Michigan.

Today I was also given a new assignment. Right now I am in the process of drawing a section of a limestone wall. When drawing my squares, I more or less was drawing everything that occurred within a 5X5 meter square, and from a bird’s eye view (heh this is getting repetitious no?). A section drawing is basically drawing just one thing, at an even larger scale, from profile. So I have started working on a plan of this limestone wall so that we have on record how the wall was coursed. This involves basically drawing the face of the wall and how every stone was arranged. Before I was just drawing the top stones of the wall….now I am detailing all of the internal brickwork (or masonry work rather). This should take me a while as the wall is at least 6 meters long, and so far about 2 and a half meters in height. This is without additional clearing of back fill though. Once more sand is removed I might be dealing with something more like 4 meters. The location of this job is particularly obnoxious given the current weather conditions. You wouldn’t think it though…You would that that me crouched in the corner of two contiguous walls would be safe guarded from the wind and sand…that the walls would protect me. However the thing is, and this may be hard to describe…where the walls end at the top, that’s basically the surface of the rest of the site…The walls I’m working on lead to rooms that drop to a lower level. So basically where I’m sitting…every time the wind blows, it sweeps the sand from above and dumps it right on top of me. When driving home from site today, I could feel a layer of sand over my teeth…It was difficult to move the inside of my lips over there since my mouth was so dry.

What I wouldn’t give to be able to run my fingers through my hair…even fresh out of the shower I can’t do it…it seems I just can never wash all of the sand out. In addition to that it is just so dry. When I try, my hand gets stuck about an inch from my forehead. I feel like the way I wear my hair is both very archaeologist as well as very 1992. Haha, I think it looks cute, but I can’t help but think that I’m one of those girls walking around thinking that it’s okay to stay stuck in a decade that is not my own…maybe I’m just trying to bring it back…its retro! I wear it in a single braided ponytail with a headband. Hey so did Lara Croft right?? And then when it’s time to change it up, remove braid and instant wavy hair! Not that I ever actually do that…I can’t bear to leave my hair down to get even more tassled and tangled by the wind.

Tomorrow I will continue with my wall, and my data entry. It is only supposed to be 98. Only heh. And it’s Monday…which is almost midweek for us. Only 4 more days until the “weekend.” Only one day off this week…Thursday night I think I am going to go see this lecture by Barry Kemp at the SCA. It should be great!

I have a fun game for you all to play from now on…

It’s called:

Guess what the tone of Kelly’s Blog is going to be

It’s really quite simple…before you go ahead and link up to my blog, check what the weather was like in Cairo during my waking and working hours…

Now don’t just look at the temperature…because I can tolerate the heat, but take particular notice to the wind speed, and while you’re at it, be my guest and check out the humidity too…I’m about sick of all the idiots out there who say, “Oh but it’s a dry heat…”

Dry heat my ass. Look at this photo of Giza and Cairo




Notice the community encroaching on the desert plateau. The desert and the pyramids are a sandy island surrounded by endless buildings, roads, and Cairo traffic. I assure you there are people and vegetation abundant throughout cairo and it is plenty humid…no it’s not the amazon or anything, but it’s not so simple as being “dry heat.” The sun is so intense you actually feel as though you should be moving away from a flame. When you pass by a window it feels like a furnance is filtering its hot breath straight at you….

Walking throughout the site today, I seriously would not have been surprised to see a fierce fire hissing dragon fighting off some arthurian knights no less than five feet away from me…I mean two things by this…one, it was so hot that I felt it possible that the only thing that could really account for it is a creature that exhales fire….two, it was so hot that I seriously could have hallucinated such a creature into existence.

What’s worse, is that the pollution is so terrible in Cairo, that all of the smog just traps the heat in even more. So again…dry heat my ass.

But this is all besides the point….No matter what I knew coming into this that I would be dealing with hot weather., Today it was 99 and tomorrow it is going to be 100, however even those are a bit outrageous for mid March in Egypt.

But the heat isn’t even the problem…sure it’s not very comfortable, but it’s the wind that is unbearable. Trying to walk uphill to the tent, against the blowing wind and sand had my pulse in a frenzy by the time I got to the top, and I’m someone in great shape. The wind made getting any work done nearly impossible…at one point, the wind was so strong it ripped my beautiful feature forms from my folder and they went flying across the desert plateau….everyone dropped what they were doing to help me fetch them before they scattered into obscurity….luckily, I retrieved them all…but even that did not supress the rage in my heart that I harbored for this wind. I wanted to give mother nature a good ole punch in the ovary…Actually I just wanted to punch anything. Throughout the day, Egyptian desert ants were constantly crawling over me…in my hair, up my arms, down my shirt…I would flick them off and the wind would whip them right back at me. I would pick them up between my fingers wanting to crush their little exoskeletons so badly…inverebrate pieces of shit…but I would just throw them off, despite the fact that such efforts were futile.

They shut the site down at 1:00, a half hour before lunch even starts simply because nothing could get done with the strong winds. We were all put on duty back in the Villa. I am the offical data entry person, the work of which I have yet to even begin, so that is actually going to take up the rest of my afternoons for the next few weeks. I started today though, and its fairly easy…basically just taking information from the feature logs and the bag registers and entering them into the online database….the problem with doing it today was that I was already aching with irritability from the morning. I was exhausted…Peter described me was walking in with the slouched shoulders of a defeated soldier. As I entered the bathroom to wash my hands, I saw again that I manged to have goggles of clean skin where my glasses had been, the rest of me dusty, silty, sandy. Dirt clinged the peach fuzz between my eyebrows granting me a look that would have given Frida Kahlo a run for her money. On top of this…having proclaimed much too soon my immunity to mosquitos, I managed to get around 30 bites, all between my ankles and mid calves. Itchy, sweaty, dirty, exhausted, and now I have to plug and chug numbers into a computer, over a wireless signal whistling “I think I can I think I can I think I can..” Every entry takes forever to upload…and I sit…watching the bar inch along thinking…”yep…today I hate Egypt and wish I was somwhere else.”

I did database stuff until I thought I would tear my own skin off in irritable frustration. I peaced out a half out early…I knew exactly where I needed to go. True I walked down to the Meridien, but not to jump in the pool…but to walk straight into the gym there and jump on the treadmill. 5 miles in 21 minutes (told you I’m still in good shape)…of course this is not really the same as it would have been running on real ground…but you still get a sense for the magnitude of frustration I had to get out…and all because of dealing with a day of utter discomfort.

Leaving I finally felt calm. On my way there I really thought I would snap…start screaming profanities at the hissers and the honkers…walking home I found my way back to the smile that I normally offer the locals on my walks to and fro.

Then as I unlocked the gate to my apartment, I remembered that tomorrow is Easter and got pissed all over again.

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be worse…whispers of khamaseen hang as heavy as the heat slung from the sun. Khamaseen is arabic for fifty…fifty days that make up the sandstorm season.

Will we see it?

A sand storm?



Time will tell….

The internet still wont let me load mutlitple images at a time but so i can add some color to the blackness that is my blog, here are some from my collection. The Big Ones for which you will be more properly introduced with time (with any hope)

Luxor Temple

Karnak Temple


Hatepshuts Mortuary Temple

Temple at Dier el Medina



Rameseum




Surprisingly enough, I woke up earlier this morning than I did yesterday morning despite the fact that I stayed up much later last night than I had the night before last…I suppose a lot of it comes down to how you spend your day. Since yesterday was relatively relaxing, compared to the work day I had Wednesday, I had more energy to maintain myself into a later hour, yet no need to compensate for it in the morning. Instead when this morning came, at around 5:50, my internal clock pulled me from my sleep…which is just as well because I was dreaming that I was mapping and taking elevations anyway…yeah it’s gotten to that point, where I work so much that I dream about it too.

So I woke up at 5:50 this morning and attempted to tip toe from my room as quietly as possible, out to the balcony to watch the sunrise and do some reading and writing. However, I managed to trip over my cell phone cord which sent my phone flying across the room where it gracefully met the door with a thud. It was probably the most amount of noise I could have made given the set up of the room and the layout of objects that I could have potentially knocked over…of course when tripping over the cord, I myself could have fallen to the floor and that would have made all kinds of noise, so perhaps not the most amount of noise that could have been made. Either way, point is, I think I woke my roommate up. But I didn’t feel that bad because she didn’t go to bed last night until after 3, and she woke me up when she came in…I’m usually someone that can turn over and fall right back asleep so it doesn’t really matter to me if something stirs my sleep, in fact my own bladder will probably do it at some point throughout the night as it usually does. Hopefully she is the same way. If not, well…it’s not my fault she’s jet lagged and not synched with everyone else.

My stomach wasn’t feeling tip top this morning so I waited to make some coffee (heh read: Nescafe). I don’t think it was a bacterial thing but I had some yogurt anyway, which is supposed to help with that kind of thing. I think its actually from consuming close my weight in baba ghanouge yesterday. For those not in the know, baba ghanouge is roasted eggplant which is similar to hummus in terms of consistency and spreadability. It is probably one of my favorite things to eat, especially out here. It’s amazingly tasty and dirt cheap. It’s not really that bad for you or anything, though with everything moderation is key. It was a lot of oil in it so I think that just may have given me a little tummy ache this morning. I seriously had like a bowl full of it last night…

Yesterday morning by comparison, I did not wake up until 7:00. I made myself some breakfast, did some reading and some writing and at around noon I crashed my favorite five star hotel pool.


Here I took a snapshot of my ridiculously tan hands and dirty archaeologist fingernails. I guess in the photo the contrast isn't nearly as strong even though I'm wearing a light pink shirt.




I remember my dad always had tan hands too….and a really tan left arm from hanging his elbow out of the window when he would drive. Haha I just thought, oh man my hands cold rival the dark olive tone of my dad’s…and then I thought, yes well especially now since his hands haven’t seen sunlight in 8 years…oh that’s not funny, but it is…and it’s the honest path my brain took. Sometimes things like that have to be funny.

While at the pool, I swam and continued to cruise through my Murakami, only 160 pages left! While reading and winding through the labyrinth that is this novel, it struck me that I had a craving to smoke some hookah, so after a bit, I walked home, showered and got ready to go to one of my favorite restaurants here, Felfella! I wrote about this place with much excitement last year. I walked in at about 4:00 and the place was pretty dead, I was the only person there. I wondered how strange it was going to be for this little foreign girl to go in and order a water pipe to smoke on her own. So long as they are paid, nothing should really seem too strange, they should be happy to accommodate anyone with money. I walked in the restaurant, grabbed a menu and waited at the table of my choice, one under a nice arrangement of trees and near a garden. When the waiter came and took my order, he did question me three times about the things I wanted. “You sure?” “That’s it?” I pretended to be a pro and interjected with any arabic I could throughout the order. As I anticipated, all of the men in the restaurant were looking at me and I just, again, pretended like this was a normal activity of mine,…hookah smoking, with a book and some baba ghanouge and fresh bread. It’s not as though I wasn’t a regular here, last years… at least for dining. But of course they probably didn’t remember that. They brought out my hookah and lit it up for me. Egyptian hookah is much much stronger than it is in the states…determined not to make a fool of myself, I had to stagger my first inhale and exhale to avoid the coughing that immediately wanted to rip from my lungs and out of my mouth. I learned to take smaller hits. That’s not the only way it was stronger though. My original envisioning of the afternoon had me sitting outside under the shade, smoking, relaxing and reading my book…however this did not happen, this could not happen. I would try and read and just keep reading the same paragraph over and over again….like my thought process reached the density equivelent of jell-o. I still kept trying to read either way, tried to look comfortable and in my own world independent of the stares and whispers of the baffled workers- and with the buzz of the hookah I created and maintained that world pretty successfully.

After a bit the manager came out and introduced himself and started asking me about where I was from and how I was enjoying Egypt. I explained to him that I worked here and that I lived in the Villa down the street with Dr. Mark and the other doctors working at Giza. The manager then offered me a Turkish Coffee which I could not refuse since I had never tried one. It was okay, whatever they use in it has a mild licorice taste and I’m not a big fan of licorice. The pick up of the caffeine countered the weigh down of the hookah and so I was feeling back to normal and decided to head home,

After I spent some time at the Villa getting my fill of wireless, some of the girls that I work with on site walked in and we had small talk…I mentioned what I spent the day doing and one of the girls commented on how jealous she was that I went out and smoked hookah, and seemed even impressed that I went out and did these things all on my own instead of just sitting on the internet all day at the villa. That being said, everyone decided that they wanted to go hit up Felfella for some drinks and hookah smoking themselves. Naturally because I was sitting right there, I got asked if I wanted to go despite the fact that I had already been there. Again, in an effort to not socially isolate myself, I went along with them.

When we got to Felfella the manager was excited to see me back with with my entourage (it was me, amanda, and amelia (the girls I have been working with on site), and delphine (girl working on water systems research) and claire(maryann’s assistant). He greeted me with a handshake and showed us to a great table…suddenly I’m a celebrity at felfella with the wait staff all coming up, calling me by name, and musing at the fact that I was already back. I wasn’t hungry since I had just been there earlier, so I got another Turkish coffee, lettting them know not to make it as sweet this time.

The evening stretched on. I did get a certain satisfaction knowing that I had established some personal connections with the people at the restaurant! Afterall, this place is awesome, and to be on a first name basis with everyone there when I have only been there a day is likewise, awesome. Egyptian restaurants can be rather slow about giving you your bill…perhaps they hope you will order more if you stay longer. I looked across for the manager and gave the international sign for “check please.” (Richard taught me this, you pretend like you are signing a receipt in the air..perhaps everyone knows this it IS the international sign for check, and if you didn’t know before, well you do now!). Haha however when I did this, the manager shakes his head at me, to let me know that he wont give us our check yet. He walks over and I accuse him of holding us hostage. He asks why we must go, the night is young. I say we are tired. Finally we get our bill, pay, and then as we are walking out he hands me a small flower. Very Egyptian…much like the guy who gave me a stuffed camel on my birthday. I don’t really think anything of it (besides…oh man free hookah the rest of the season! Actually that’s not even an issue…hookah in the states costs anywhere from 8-15 dollars depending on where you are…here it is less than a dollar). I get back to the Villa and hop back online since earlier I left abruptly to satisfy for myself once and for all my regards for this going out with everyone business…Fidgetting like I do, I kept twisting the flower around. There was a rolled piece of paper along the short stem which I didn’t think anything of when the flower was given to me, and truth be told I still wasn’t thinking anything of it except I saw a dead bug and I was going to take the paper and use it to pick up the bug and throw it away. When I opened it up, there was the managers name and phone number. Ha! I thought it was hilarious. Flattering sure, but really quite amusing. He looked way too professionally dressed for a restaurant manager/owner. Definitely the face of the operation but never getting his hands dirty in the kitchen. He wore a well tailored suit of charcoal and a pale yellow tie and his hair was slicked back. If he were auditioning for a movie, he would be your typecast carsalesmen with a sneaky agenda. But in reality he seemed genuinely nice…wont be getting any phone calls from me or anything haha, but as I said, I consider it a pretty big bonus to know the big people at my favorite restaurant here.

The rest of my day for today includes….pool lounging, Murakami reading, and email corrosponding. Unless anything exciting comes up, I will abstain from extensive blogging since its everyone elses weekend and since now half of my days work will be made of computer databasing which is never interesting to write about.

Naturally my thoughts will be family heavy on Easter as I am sure everyone else will be thinking of me too and wishing I was closer to home, both to make sure I am okay, and just for that added sense of comfort that everyone around us is safe and okay. But think of it this way…I really haven’t been home for Easter most years…in high school easter was during spring break so I was gone junior and senior year, and in college, Easter was so close to exams that I really just couldn’t come home. At least this year on Easter I wont have to balance the pressure of exams and research papers and instead I will be doing the job that I love, free to think about the people that I love and miss without having to put away those thoughts in order to be productive in a study setting.

Hurray for Holiday Weekends! No I don’t get Easter off, but today is a Muslim holiday and since the site wont have any of the inspectors or security there, we can’t work either. So I get an actual weekend this week! Yesterday on site I threw my first archaeological fit. I’ve been working on this 5x5 meter drawing for the past 3 days now and it is just a lot of detailed stone and pottery debris…also I have to keep adjusting my measurement squares because of the variation in elevation. Normally, you can just use 4 measuring tapes and outline the 5x5 and measure points inward from the tape (this is called offset measuring). However, because I have walls and collapse and just a whole lot of other things going on, I can’t measure from the original outline of the square without the slopes throwing me off…so I have to keep moving inward and setting up smaller units to offset from. Either way…we are talking 30 hours that I have spent drawing this plan, and yesterday, unbeknownst to me, it was already 4:45 and time to start packing up…when I was told what time it was, my reaction was:

“I CANNOT BELIEVE I AM NOT DONE WITH THIS STUPID SQUARE YET!”
Then I threw down my board and chucked my pencil across the site….

I did it moreso for comedic value, I didn’t really snap or anything, and everyone did laugh, but I did feel a single tear of legitimate frustration well up behind my sunglasses. I know this is only my second square ever, and people probably don’t expect me to speed through it, I’m a beginner afterall…but when people around you are stressing about how much needs to get done, and you feel like as the newbie, you aren’t pulling your weight, it definitely has its effect. However earlier when I was standing with my board, plotting points and consistently changing from pencil to eraser to pencil again, Mark walked by and said, “You look like you’ve been doing this for years.” That helps..at least I’m not a neon sign of incompetance to the people in charge. Everyone does reassure me that, things get done when they get done..apparently I am an obvious mass of tension about my work and it reads loud and clear that I am dissatisfied with how long it takes me…but no one wanted to take on the square that I am doing because of the the detail and contouring, so I am at least going to tell myself that it would have taken anyone a while to do…no I am not even going to tell myself that, it doesn’t make me feel any better.


I am kind of hitting that first pivot in my time abroad. It hardly seems that I have already been gone a month (allbeit February was a short month, but it was only short by a day this year). I cannot believe how fast the time has gone, but similarly, there is still so much time to go. This pending that I stay out here until the 15th of May, which I am pretty sure I wont wind up doing. It does depend though, I think depsite the fact that the original plan was to close the site on April 9th (when booking my ticket I told we were closing at the end of April and to arrange to stay 2 weeks past the end)- now it seems like they are going to try and request that we stay open until at least the 15th of April, or probably as late as they can….that gets really tricky with permits and payment etc. But even 6 extra days is 60 extra hours on site so staying until the 15th, especially with the pressure of the close approaching deadline, we would probably get a ton completed. I don’t really know because I have not really worked on sites before, but I imagine it’s much like anything else where a majority of the work just really comes together at the end. The heat could also be a problem though….every morning the past few weeks I’ve been trying to bite my tongue when it came to complaining about how bitter cold and windy the early hours were, knowing full well that I would be missing those cool mornings within a few weeks time…Right now, when I leave my apartment I am wearing pants, long sleeve shirt, short sleeve shirt over it, jacket or sweatshirt, and a vest, and a scarf….I pout about having to take my shoes off because my feet get so cold (and really I leave them on for as long as possible and just don’t walk over the mudbrick walls which are more or less becoming powder before our very eyes…plus Mark never takes his shoes off…). I huddle and hunch over my drawing and wait for the sun to move over the site. As it has been, around 9 oclock the vest comes off, and then right after second breakfast, 10:40, my jacket, and at about 11:15 my sleeves get pushed up and the heat is in full force.

Well summer she is fast approaching and there is no longer the gradual delayering of clothing. True at 5:45 am I am still cold enough on the walk from my apartment to the villa that I still pile on the layers, but it only takes about 20 minutes to a half hour on site before everything is coming off. Yesteday, before 8:00 am I was rockin the cargo pants and a short sleeve shirt with no windy morning to speak of…going off of the other girls on site, I guess short sleeve shirts are becoming more and more “acceptable” at least we haven’t been advised that we are deing disrespectful or anything…so until that happens I guess I will take advantage. Even now, we are talking t-shirts though, so the sleeves still cover all of my shoulders and about midway to my elbows. I cycle between a green Dondero Student Senate shirt and those white fruit of the loom undershirts. Naturally the white ones get pretty dirty pretty fast, but it was just easiest to throw a pack of them in my suitcase than to pick and choose between my other t-shirts.

Anyway, the days are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter earlier. Yesterday I stood up after kneeling for a long time and there were two wet spots behind my knees. Hello sweaty Kelly! I feel bad for my Auntie M who is driven mad with discomfort in the extreme heat…because as much as my family doesn’t think about it now, there will come a time when they have to at least visit me on site for a little while…when I am running my own dig, and have more frequent flyer miles racked up than I know what to do with, you guys are coming and experiencing this too! I don’t care if you like home, and never really aspired to travel across the world, everyone’s family comes and sees it at some point…and I know my dad would come visit me on site in a heartbeat and that he would be VERY ANGRY if no one came to see me when he couldn’t…so one day you will have to at least experience this with me for a week…which is why, Auntie M I feel most bad for you because you hate the heat so much! But you will just have to come early in the season when its still cool. And Aunt Marcia…you just get a lot of valium and Xanax to make it through the flight over water :) I’ll make sure you both get first class seats…haha oh this is laughable, the broke archaeologist making promises with money she does not have…

My roommate did get in a few nights ago. She’s from texas and she does the GIS work (computerized mapping…something I am actually interested in as well). I’m not sure how old she is, but she is older than me and older than the roommate I had last year. It’s weird to adjust to having a roommate after I have not had one this whole time…suddenly I need to be conscious of turning on lights when I enter and leave the room, I need to make less noise when I am looking for all of the things that I am constantly losing….
I was relieved to find out from my roommate that she only washes her hair once a week while out here…so I’m not the only dirtball abstaining. I guess that’s the thing about the drinking water here….it is actually safe to drink, but because of all the chlorine you would never want to drink it from the tap. When you walk out of the shower you smell like a swimming pool.

Lets see what else.

While I was in Luxor I had e-mailed a professor from UCLA that I as interested in talking to and potentially working with. I had not heard back from her, so I was uncertain whether she was in the field, whether she overlooked my e-mail thinking it was spam, or just forgot to respond simply because she’s busy. Either way, I asked Richard, who knows her really well, she got her PhD from Michigan, to e-mail her on my behalf. He sent me a copy of the e-mail and it was really positive, so hopefully I am one step closer to an acceptance letter from there. Now that my geographic interests are broadening I might start considering more seriously some other programs that I was not before really looking into. Michgan and UCLA will definitely be my top two, with me not really counting on Michigan since I am from their undergrad pool. I don’t know though…I’m kind of feeling if for whatever reason I don’t get into my top 2 or 3 that I apply to, that I wont settle for another program, I will just take another year off, keep working in the field and getting more experience, and then reapplying…lots of time to figure it out, we’ll see. Hopefully the response from the professor at UCLA is just as positive as the introduction Richard gave.

Wow I wrote a lot today…that’s what happens when you wake up at 7 am, and there aren’t any other real distractions around you.

I don’t have any big plans for my 2 days off. It’s weird…normally I am used to keeping to myself and therefore not really being aware of the fact that I don’t fit into the groups that form around me…but here I thought I was definitely making more of an effort to be social, but in retrospect I guess that is only relative to how I usually am and perhaps I am still quite reserved…It seems that I have managed to not really fit into any group dynamic that has come together here, which is probably a result of many things like age, experience, job, etc…though probably a little bit of my own doing as well. There are all the older academics who have been working on this project for years and years. They all basically hide out on their own, or tend to administrative things, sponsors or international teams, report writing and whatnot. Most of them are lab specialists this season who have assistants as well who work in the labs. The people who work in the labs, I don’t really know as well, because they spend all day in the labs and not on site, and they aren't the same people that were here last year when I was. And then the people who work on site, have been working together for some time now and already know one other...though there is one brand new girl from the states, but she has been excavating for years, so she kind of relates to them more than I do by way of knowing what she's doing, I guess? Where is this going... The other day, at some point I had overheard some of the lab crew and some of the site crew talking about going out for some drinks for Wednesday night since we had Thursday off. However no one ever mentioned it to me or invited me to go…and it struck me as odd, because I couldn’t really think of why I wouldn’t get invited to go, but at the same time I didn’t really want to go anyway….I suppose I was just surprised because I thought I had been coming across as someone interested in the social outings…but then again, why would I be coming across that way, if the truth was I wasn’t interested?? Does this make sense? Perhaps it makes more sense this way…when I’m on site with other crew members I am laughing and joking and we are all exchanging stories, so it is very much a dialogue and interaction that I am actively participating in….so I would just assume that I would be incorporated into situations where this could take place outside of work…but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized I do really just maintain my indepedence outside of working hours…I walk to and from the villa for breakfast and dinner by myself, I don’t really wait on anyone else at my apartment, I go to the Meridian most days after work and before dinner to unwind, and if I’m not catching up on the internet, I have a book in front of me. So I guess maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that through my own crafted schedule, I am overlooked when plans are made…and I certainly shouldn’t mope about it, because I prefer to be reading and lost in my introvertedness…haha but part of me feels like I am that odd little hermit…but if that’s what everyone thinks and that’s how I am written off as, then oh well, they are missing out…because I am also a very entertaining hermit. They did wind up asking me if I wanted to go just before they were leaving, and I probably would have if I wasn’t all the way at the Villa and in my pajamas.

Okay, that will end my epic for today...that should do you all for a bit in terms of updates on my end. I'm healthy physically, mentally, emotionally etc. Though I am starting to feel intellectually unchallenged...I wonder what kind of thing I can start doing to challenge myself more. I guess I could start that whole GRE studying thing....

I had a dizzying sleep last night…I kept feeling like my body was growing heavier and heavier and that I was sinking into my matress…apparently someone slipped some lsd in my dinner last night…Also, every time I woke up my neck and back would ache, probably from the hours I spend hunched over measuring and drawing…

In general I find that I have very vivid dreams while I am out here. Not really sure why. The other morning I was definitely bummed that I had to wake up and abandon my dream where I was playing Paint it Black on guitar hero… but it was a frustrating dream too because while I was super excited to play guitar hero, the buttons were different and I was stumbling over a song that I normally do okay in! wow the things manifest themselves in your subsconcious….

Today it wasn’t nearly as windy on site as it has been, so I could definitely feel the heat more. Most of the site crew stayed at the Villa in the afternoon to catch up on paper work. My personal paperwork, for my plans is done as much as it can be done for right now. I am probably going to have to stay in tomorrow though to start entering logs into the database. A lot of times it seems that everyone likes having paper work as an excuse to stay at the villa in the afternoons…I personally love being in the field and get disappointed if no one else wants to go back. Today only Mark, me, and the inspector went back to site. I continued planning my second square which is super super detailed so it is taking me a while to get through. I hope I finish it tomorrow.

I’ve come to realize that there is yet another sacrifice I need to make while living here…and it’s kind of gross, and perhaps I should just keep it to myself. The sun and the wind are bad enough on my hair, but it’s the water that is really tearing it apart. The water here has so so much chlorine(among other things I’m sure). I really just cannot wash it in the water everyday. Normally I am one to have really oily hair but you would never know it the looks of me now. My hair is like straw. As someone who plays in the dirt and sand all day, the prospects of not washing it on a daily basis do not thrill me, but neither does having to come home and chop off all of my damaged hair. I’m going to try and avoid washing it every day, and just keep it covered in my bandanas to avoid getting as much sand and dirt in it as possible… however that never seems to accomplish month and my hair always winds up looking much lighter in color by mid day. It’s my inner blonde dying to be rereleased.

In other unsanitary commentary, I’m going to take this time to talk about some girl things, so boys who “wah wah hate it when girls talk about their periods wah wah” avert your eyes. I’m due to start my period any day now and given the bathroom accomodations on site…add this to the list of things that currently don’t thrill me. Last time I was here, I could go seek out my own private spot to use the bathroom, or use the the built one they had next to the store room. I usually opted to find my own clean spot and claim it….it was easy to hide from any potential viewers within the field of mastabas. However at KKT, there is no such hiding place…it is open flat land which means I am forced to use one of the two out houses constructed on site. Why are these outhouses more digusting than the others? Well let me tell you…it is because I have to share them with about 50 Egyptian men who all seem like they need to meet some deuce dropping quota…forget the fact that I have to constantly be waiting for the grunting man to finish ahead of me…more or less there is shit everywhere. I don’t even want to think about what could possibly be richocheting back at me when I’m forced to squat over the hole in the floor. Girls should not have to aim in a hole that is only 3 inches in diameter…it defies logic. For whatever reason also, I’m the only, person, besides the Egyptian men, who ever has to use the bathroom…everyone else just holds it or doesn’t have to go because they don’t drink nearly as much water. I drink more water than anyone else on site and I know for a fact that if you aren’t peeing every 4 hours, you aren’t drinking enough. So for me, there’s no holding it, and having to go and use these horrible bathrooms is just reality…unfortunately I’m the only one that seems to endure it on site. Seriously I don’t think any one else has used the bathroom once. But the bottom line is that I’m just going to feel ten times even more gross when my period hits…there aren’t even waste baskets in these outhouses…

This entry is pretty gross I probably shouldn’t even post it!

I also found out today that the fertilizer used here contains human fecal matter…that’s pretty rancid. I eat a lot of the fruits and vegetables here and never get sick, so my stomach is pretty much tolerant of it, and I can’t just not eat them…people on projects get things like scurvy that way. It is really gross though.

Oh well…let this be your lesson for sure…archaeology is certainly has its down falls. But..I’m still here, and still have no intentions of giving it up any time soon. For a while I was actually unsure about whether or not I would ever want to run my own project…I can only imagine how stressful it can be, but a lot of the times I can’t help but think that I would just be good at it…and there aren’t a lot of things that I take on and say “I know I would kick ass doing this”…usually I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing and just wind up surprising myself and randomly doing okay or not ruining something…but running a project is something that I think I could do….but we will see. Running a project a lot of times means you are tending to far more administrative things and therefore can’t be in the field nearly as much. It is all a lot to consider and someone still has to go get their PhD first….

Never underestimate the glory that is putting on a fresh clean pair of socks….it seriously is one of the most pleasurable parts of my day after standing in the sand without shoes. Sliding those crisp, sand free socks onto my toes…it is something I take great joy in...however today, every new bundle of “clean” socks I opened poofed a sand cloud at me..ugh, I know I live in the desert, and that this should be of no surprise…but it’s just when you think you are getting adjusted that you want to scream about these little things…WHY MUST EVERYTHING I OWN BE SHROUDED IN SAND?

Today I finished planning one square and began another. As I have described, this is a super long process since I have to measure the dimensions of everything! So in my squares that I have been working on, I have been drawing some limstone walls…so I have had to measure every stone and draw it proportionally. It takes a long time but I think I am getting quicker at it…everyone else only just now informed me of this wonderful tool known as a planning frame, which basically allows you to lay a large grid frame over your feature so that you can draw things by eye quicker….we’ll see how helpful it is tomorrow, but I’m surprised everyone waited so long to tell me about it since we really need to be getting work done as quickly as possible.

Because we have so much still to get done before April 9th (when excavations end) the hours seems to be flying by…race against the clock. Oh and the paper work OH GOD THE PAPER WORK…it just keeps accumulating and accumulating. It may be the case that I have less and less time to write since my attention will be needed elsewhere, but we will see.

In other news: I get a roommate tomorrow. Its not the baby…yet…that fucker comes the 27th. Last time my experience with my roommate was pretty great, but I had one from the start…now I’ve gotten really into my nightly routine, reading and falling asleep early. We’ll see how it goes.

Okay, I am super tired and the internet is really frustrating me.

Night.

Saturday began with Mark giving both site people and lab people a tour of Khentkawes. Despite the fact that I have been given a tour of KKT about 3 or 4 times now, there was still a lot of new things I learned both in relation to KKT and Giza and Old Kingdom settlements in general. It blows my mind that there continues to be so much we don’t know yet and so much uncertainty there is underlying the things we think we know…but I suppose I can fully appreciate being apart of a discipline where we are constantly asking questions, and constantly re-evaluating answers. Sometimes I really do stuggle with this profession and an anxiety that I’m not contributing as much as I could to this world and the changes I hope to see and be apart of….but at the end of the day I am enhancing my ability to problem solve, and I am doing so within the context of human behavior and activity, stretching beyond the things that are happening around me now…you can’t learn to read until you know the alphabet, and you can’t full understand how to solve issues relavent to the world today until you know where and why and how they began their course in history…maybe that is a justification that I don’t have to make, and no one out there really ever thinks. “Oh geez that Kelly..what a waste of a mind…she could be doing important things, instead she studies dead stuff.” Anyway…the more I listened on our site tour, and the more I thought about how we amass information and understanding, just again made me feel so content about the direction I am heading and the work I am involved with.

That being said, work flew by today. We didn’t actually start excavating that wall though. The site tour was 2 hours and then second breakfast was an hour after that, so by 11:00 we decided it would be better to wait until tomorrow. I did start planning my square today though. I’ve drawn about 3 meters of a stone wall, which did take me about, 4 hours. Like I detailed before, you have to draw every single stone that makes up the wall to scale, so I had to measure the dimensions of everystone in the wall and plot it on the grid paper. I never even checked my watch, I was so into it haha. So…I have my days when the work just really makes me irritated, but then I have days where I have to be dragged out of the field…what gives? Well I did figure that out today…and it should be of no surprise, but it is kind of sad haha. If I have to do work with other people I get irritated..but if I can sit and do something by myself, I’ll work until the sun goes down…I don’t know how I came to be so antisocial, I always thought I was good at the whole teamwork thing…”plays well with others….” Apparently not though! I was especially in heaven after lunch…not everyone goes back to the site after lunch, some people stay in and do paper work or database stuff…and actually now that we are making more progress I will probably have to start doing more ad more database stuff in the afternoons as well…but also in the afternoons, all of the egyptian workers, the ones constantly removing the sand that buries our site, go home. So today it was just Peter and I on site. It was so quiet and nice and after 2 the temperature goes down. And that was how I spent my afternoon….3 pencils, 2 pens criss crossed throughout my hair, in my square, measuring stones and drawing them. Haha I am really proud of my drawing so far….

Back at my apartment I talked for a while with one of my flatmates too which was good, so I’m not 100% antisocial! Then dinner was nice because half of the people went out because the Japanese team leaves tomorrow. Basically all the field and program managers and directors went out to dinner with them so dinner at the villa was actually just us diggers and lab rats enjoying a quiet evening…usually there’s not enough room for everyone to sit at the table but tonight there was…it was pleasant.

There was probably more I was going to say, but I can’t really think of it now. Oh! Today one of the Egyptian students brought me a birthday present. It was a little stuffed camel. It’s really cute. I think he has a crush on me but he doesn’t know english. We had to have Noha translate between us…it was all very cute.

Sometimes the laguage barrier can be really frustrating, but other times it hardly seems to make any difference at all….last night I went to leave the Villa and thought that if I just got out of there lickety split that the guards wouldn’t follow me home…it’s nice and all that they look after us, but sometimes having the guards follow you just attracts more attention than if they weren’t there…anyway…I was speed walking and sure enough behind me one of the guards was striding to catch up…when I looked back he smiled at me and my intentions to sneak out…thinking this would be funny, I started walking even faster. Naturally he aimed to match my pace until we were racing down the street to my apartment. Keep in mind these guards aren’t just inconspicuous men…these are full military attire with huge guns, guards…by the time we finished our little race, we were both just errupting with laughter…and that was all we could do was laugh…we would try to find some common words, maybe an english one he would know, or an arabic one I would know…but there were none that we shared that could apply to the situation, so we shrugged our shoulders and just laughed about it. Then I said what I could, “Shukran, masalama, ashufak burkra in shalla”

Thank you, peace be with you, I will see you tomorrow, if God wills it.

Happy St. Patricks Day

Today was great.

But I am swamped with work...and really too disgustingly dirty for words. I'm going to start assuming that you don't check my blog on the weekends and that Monday you just catch up....so..I will just write this later tonight and post it tomorrow!


Cheers!

I’m pretty sure that across every time zone it is no longer my birthday…which is sad, but only 364 more days until the next one. It was kind of weird not hearing any of the voices from my family but I did get a plethora of emails and messages which ranks a close second. My mom doesn’t have a phone but I did try to call her neighbor to get a hold of her. Aside from probably wanting to talk to me on my birthday I also realized that she really hadn’t heard anything from me since I left so she might want to at least know that I am safe. I left a message on her neighbor’s voicemail so hopefullly she gts it. Despite the fact that we did go out and have a nice time last night, it certainly is not the same celebrating your birthday with people who barely know you. They don’t really make a big deal about you or anything, and well…let’s face it it’s always nice to have a day when you are a big deal. But I am used to being swamped with home work and midterms around my birthday so it was nice to be absolved from that stress.

Without fail, I wake up every morning at around 4:58, exactly 2 minutes before my alarm is set to go off. Man internal clocks are weird. Today I only managed to sleep in until 6:00. Just like last Friday though, I opened my eyes and immediately felt tired aniticipating the fact that I go right back to work tomorrow. I tell myself it’s a short week though to try and keep my energy up.


Once I finished feeling grumpy about the fact that I will be tomorrow 24 hours later, I got up and cleaned my room. Even though we have people that clean the rooms, and I’m sure we pay them very well and they are actually quite grateful for the job, I still can’t help but cringe at the seemingly colonial tone to it all. Stemming from that, I finally asked one of the area supervisers on site why some of the Egyptians ask me so many questions and tell me everything before they are going to do it as if I know any better than they do about what is going on (especially since they have been through a season of field school out here). He said it all harks back to colonialism…the sheer fact that I am an American implies to them that I am in charge. Naturally its one thing if they need assistance with something that requires two people, or if they think I may have some sort of opinion, but they will check in with me before signing out new feature numbers and things of that nature. Finally I let them know that I’m not someone they have to check in with or answer to…it didn’t really make much of a difference though. Oh well.

I did spend the day out by the pool. It was quite the arrangement trying to put on sunscreen. Elbows down got spf 30 while elbow to shoulders got SPF 15 in an effort to somewhat even out the color of my arms. It worked a little bit. But I still look like a doll with mismatched limbs. My hands are super tan, and my arms just get lighter and lighter as you go up, my torso and chest are pretty much pale and my face is pretty bronzed...but that could be just dirt still lodged in my pores.

By about 3:15 I was pretty exhausted so I walked back to the villa. I was hissed at by some people on my way home and that made my grumpy. Here it is 90 degrees out, I’m fully covered, aiming to be as respectful and modest as possible, intending full well to be polite if anyone talks to me, and yet I’m still hissed at in disapproval. At least it was a short walk. Last night when I was walking home from the villa after going out, I was also harassed by a group of men, however then I was being followed by security guards so I felt safe…but sometimes you just can’t win…I had my head scarf and everything, but I’m still the foreigner trying to live in a culture whose perspectives on Americans and westerners will always be mixed.

So many ups and downs, fortunately more ups than downs.

Well i should probably get some rest, more work starts tomorrow, and its supposed to be a hot one...grr..night

Thursday March 13th

Thank you so far, as well as in advance for all birthday wishes. Except for you Auntie M...who said that you remember where you were 22 years ago today...which I am sure you do remember that because you would have been celebrating my first birthday...but I think you were referring to TWENTY THREE years ago when you were dealing with the wrath that was my mother in her near 24 hours of labor. Sorry to bust your bubble...and make you feel older, but I am 23 and not 22! But hey, I might as well just start lying about it now anyway.

Being in a time zone which is 6 hours ahead of home, -and 9 or 10 hours ahead of another not so important individual :) - only means that I really get to enjoy special treatment for that much longer!

So far my day has been pretty solid. The weather is perfect! I am loving my work, but enjoying my half day off…I am going out tonight to celebrate my birthday and until then I get to curl up in bed and get lost in my book.


Today I finished everything- all sampling all sketching in cross section and in profile- all measuring, elevation recordings everything!- for the feature I have been working on. Yay!

as I already mentioned, today was additionally awesome because we only worked a half day. Ending at one thirty instead of five really makes all the difference. Further, knowing that I have tomorrow off just gives me all sorts of energy. Next week will be amazing too because Thursday is a muslim holiday and since the guards and many other people required to be on site while we work are muslim, we get the day off. So next week I get Thursday and Friday off!

Plus I have even more exciting news!

Yes more!

Guess who is not filling out feature forms for quite a bit?? If you guessed me, then you get a gold star! Contrary to my original understanding- that once I got a taste of digging I would be put right back on paperwork duty- I actually get to excavate more starting Saturday! I will be excavating a thick thick mudbrick wall, removing the top meters in order to more clearly see the coursing underneathe. Keeping in mind that the feature that I just dealt with was a small 1.5 x 1.5 square section took me a week to complete, this wall should really take up a good chunk of time and I will learn much much from it. And what about after that? Finally back to the feature forms? NOPE! I get to plan my own 10x10 meter square…I get to determine and assign my own feature numbers and make up more forms that need to be done, and suggest whether or not some areas of it need to be excavated (though that does not necessarily mean I will be listened to, afterall I’m not a superviser or anything). This should take me a really long time to do since I will have to sketch everything at a 1:20 scale. Basicallly what you do is you take a square, with grid pegs at each corner, all 4 of the pegs 10 meters apart. You take 4 measuring tapes, stretching them out to every grid peg so that you have an outline of the square, measured in meters. From the tapes you can measure everything from within the square and plot it on graph paper. So for example if I am standing between two grid pegs, 10 meters apart, and there is a mudbrick wall within the square….I can find where the wall starts, look at the tape and see where it is relative in the square. So if I look down and the wall begins 4.5 meters from the peg on the south east corner of the square, I would stop at 4.5 meters, and then from there, measure how far away the wall is from the measuring tape ( say it is 2 meters from the tape). I would then plot a point on my grid paper at 4.5 meters (x axis say), and 2 meters y axis. And then, since it’s a wall, I woul measure another point at 4.5 meters to show how thick it is. In a 1:20 scale plan, each centimeter square on the grid equals 20 meters. For my section excavation drawing from today I drew it 1:10 so each centimeter square was 10 meters.

Following this trend, a 1:100 scale is each cetimeter square being 100 meters. So here is a portion of a 1:100 sketch I did at the very beginning. This is just one done in my notebook that I keep and write in everyday. The official sketches go on fancy mylar paper


Oh and here is an example of a feature form!



As you can imagine, measuring all of these points takes a while, especially if you have a lot of features. You have to measure everything that looks different essentially…every wall, every floor space, every patch of debris, any change in sediment, so if one area is crushed limestone, and then it meets a patch of silty ash, or alluvial mud…you have to recreate what you see exactly on the ground and record it to scale, noting slopes and edges and everything you can think of…imagine it this way…I need to draw this assuming that no one may never get to see the square again…because in archaeology you are doing basically doing one of two things. One, you are either documenting everything because as more time goes on, the remains will continue to weather and errode and disappear. Even at this site, we are talking about some features which were meters high in the 1930s and are now only centimeters high. Two, if you excavate any part of it, you are going to destroy it yourself..hacking it into pieces so that you can see something underneathe, or so that you can ship off portions to a specialist like what I did with my past feature. Again, its all very tedious and time consuming, but I am looking forward to it.

In non work news:

Tonight I am going out to dinner with some of the girls, and then out to an Egyptian jazz bar for some cocktails. I am QUITE intrigued to see what an Egyptian jazz bar is like…but alcohol and live music always seems to generate some good times, and here it may even conjure up a fun story.

That’s going to wrap it up for today. So no worries, everything is good…I’m not isolated and lonely on my birthday, and tomorrow I am going to be at Le Meridien sittin by the pool! No reason to be feelin sorry for me at all ☺

Wedneday March 12th

Another fairly standard day though some exciting stuff.

First off I finished digging my feature! I actually dug a bit further than I needed to (read: was supposed to) but it was okay...the cross section gave me some really great layering to look at. Now I just need to finish up some sketches of it and it's all done! I wound up bagging 330 liters of ash and silt :( Today I wasn't nearly as dirty though it did look like I was sporting a mustache.

I did find a reaaaallly nice limestone bowl fragment in my deposit...it really was an exciting find!

Tomorrow we only work a half day, and I don't really know what I plan to do for tomorrow night...maybe I will head to the pool for the afternoon and just relax and read. I also do not have any big plans for Friday. Working out in the field really takes so much more energy and effort than the lab so again, I'm basically left feeling that I want nothing to do with shopping or going into town or anything like that.

Today I managed to get my hands on a book richard wrote a long time ago and never looked into having it published. Its about 300 pages and is all about his experiences in the field. I might read that after I'm done with the wind up bird.

I am having an allergic reaction to something...red bumps on my legs and knees...boooo. Perhaps from working for days in a giant desert litter box.

My tan lines are wicked awful right now as well....despite the fact that I wear sun screen, you can still see the various different sleeve lengths of my shirts outlined on my arms. Still, the back of my neck is the darkest part of me from me staring down at the ground all day long. Henry Wright from U of M used to say you can always tell when someone is an archaeologist because they are constantly staring at the ground.

Looking at the ground you see a lot of things on the Giza Plateau. One thing you see a lot of are scareb beetles...which is funny because they are these huge ass bug beetles that normally people would be freaked out by...but I think because scarebs are so common in the heiroglyphs and you see little molds and statues of them all over gift shops, you just associate them with being cute...and so when these big beatles crawl near me I don't even flinch...in fact I kind of want one as a pet.

I think that's it for now....I am going to go sketch and read. Good night!

Let’s see lets see. Once again I am writing this entry at about 9:00 pm from my apartment (which is still without internet grrrr) which means I wont post this until around 6 amish…which is still the middle of the night for you all so I suppose it matters not.

So this is me reflecting on Tuesday. Monday night I did not sleep very well so I was pretty tired throughout most of today. It seems impossible to dress comfortably for the weather here….like I said the sun makes all the difference…well mid seventies has been quite cool on site especially because it has been so windy…so when the weather said it was going to be 77 I layered up….except I failed to notce that there would not be a cloud in the sky….I wound up being really warm, but it was easy enough to delayer. However, my body could not seem to stay hydrated. Between the dry heat and the wind I just felt like all energy was draining from me. I kept drinking bottle after bottle of water, but trying not to chug it all at once since it will just go straight through your system if you do that. By noon I had drank around 6 bottles and still would feel faint when I stood up. People have been saying that I look tired, but that it’s a content tired...I dug out more and more of my feature today. I should finish it by tomorrow…I know have bagged over 250 liters of ashy deposits to be analyzed. My entire upper body is pretty sore from just carving away to the bottom of this room…which I was thinking didn’t have a bottom for a while! But I have reached the limstone floor throughout most of it now and like I said, should be done with it tomorrow (Wednesday).

I managed to get even dirtier today than I did yesterday! When I came to site I looked at the bags that I had filled and saw that the pyramid dogs had peed on them…you could see the yellow pooled into the folds of the bags…that’s when I looked at the rest of my square that I have bee excavating and realized that dogs, among other animals I’m sure, probably peed in there too…keep in mind that I sit in this thing all day long, digging and digging and digging. I tried not to think about it beyond that and when I was talking to Amelia later she said the real thing you need to worry about is areas where rats are a problem….rat piss can give you all sorts of nasty diseases. Mental note made.

At lunch I got back to the villa and took off my sunglasses only the see that I was a raccoon! Not from tan lines or anything, but simply because the circles around my eyes were the only clean parts of my face. A dust bunny as my Aunt Marcia so cutely struggled to post :) Sorry I published every post you made Marcia...but i thought it was really funny that you tried so many times!

Not just my face, but all over my arms and into every cranny and crease of my fingers…my hair looked about two shades lighter from all of the dust. So…imagine how thrilled I was when I come back to the villa only to find out the water isn’t working…the same was true for the apartments. Luckily the water was working at the hotel, which I have a membership at so that I can use the pool and spa facilities whenever I want…so I just went over there and took a shower…it really had to be done there was no way I could go without showering….our water was turned back on later.

That was about it in terms of work….7 am -1:30 pm straight up digging. After lunch I didn’t go back to site because no one else was going, they were all going to do paper work. I didn’t want to be by myself for the rest of the afternoon so I just helped with paperwork. It was boring but at least I didn’t have to worry about being in the sun any longer.


Other quirky things worth noting I suppose are…at first I was nervous again about being too heavily influenced by british accents and slang…sometimes they really have their own language…they never say pants, always trousers, it cracks me up…but when we were at the pool the other day, a guy came up to me and new that I was from midwestern US just from me talking…it was good to know I am still nasally as ever, but it was annoying because he really felt like he was welcome to converse with me further…which he was not. Additionally comical were the looks I was given when I would mention how close I am with my “ants” instead of my “awnts”….

Also, in Luxor, I learned that Europeans use their silverware differently than Americans do. Americans cut up their food with a fork and knife, and then switch the hand they hold their fork with and eat that way. Europeans always have a knife in one hand and a fork in the other and keep them in the same hands the entire time…it really did seem like such a hassel to cut and switch…so I started eating like everyone else around me…I like it better…but sometimes I still switch fork hands out of habit. This sounds confusing now that I’ve written it out because now imthinking about it too much, but its really noticeable when you’re the only one at the table not eating this way…even Richard eats his food like a European since he lived in Europe for so long.

Me the lone silly American…wearin my “pants”, with my illogical utensil habits, nasally accent, non metric system, and degrees farenheit.

Also my boogers are black.

I have no shame haha.

Ella the Girl of the Cinders

Remember how I thought that I would be spending most of this week filling out feature forms? And then excitingly enough Mark let me excavate a feature? Well, me the naïve and inexperienced archaeologist that I am, had no idea what it took to excavate a feature…and actually I’ve wound up excavating two since there was a feature within a feature. The first feature I excavated was the fill of a small kiln or oven. It turns out that I actually had to excavate half of the room that the kiln was in as well. It turns out that the deposit is so rich with ash and cooking material that they want to sample the entire thing! The largest bags we have are 10 liters and so far I have filled about 6 or 7 bags, and I’m not even half way done. Aside from digging out the deposits that fill the room, which as you can imagine is time consuming in itself…I’m using hammers, trowels, and other huge heavy tools and pounding away at compacted mud, silt, and hard as hell limestone bedrock…if you didn’t know I was an archaeologist you might think that I was doing some sort of slave labor. I antipate my arms to be pretty sore tomorrow. But this is not theonly thing that takes up time…So I have filled about 7 bags as I said, and have probably at least 10 more to go…everytime I fill a bag I need to do the following



Write on the bag the following material
Site: GPMP 2008
Area: KKT
Square: 101.Y28, 101.Y29
Date: 10.iii.08
Feature Number: 21879
Bag Number: 2008-0001
Sample: Flotation
Excavator: KLW

I then have to fill out a bag registration slot and write out all of the information again, next to a new bag number. Additionally I write a description of the feature I am sampling.

After this I turn the page where there are bag number labels. The labels contain blanks with all of the same information written on the bag. I rewrite the information on the label, cut out the label, put the label in the bag so this bag has 2 identical information labels, and then I fill up the bag, then staple it.

Repeat

Dig dig dig, sample sample sample

Today I did this for about 5 hours.

The first hour of the day I spent trying to make sense of the information from 2005 to find the architectural features that were assigned numbers but do not have feature forms….as I have said, we are missing a lot of forms because so much time was devoted to mapping…well the chaos that was this morning was becasuse for 2 of the squares we have features assigned, but no maps with them labeled…at least for everything else we could find the features they were talking about….all I had to go by was the 2005 feature log which would say the square the feature was in, and a one sentence description…and by one sentence description I mean this:

21943: “EW MB wall that abutts wall 29887”

so where do I find this wall, especially since I probably don’t know where 29887 is either?

It was quite the puzzle but I think I figured out most of it. Definitly time consuming though

I also helped Peter take about 120 elevation measures using the level. Its basically binoculars, on a tripod…you level it out by adusting these nobs until a little pain in the ass bubble moves to the center, to tell you that you are looking straigh out on a flat plane. And then some stands with a huge measurement stick from various points within the site. You have to search for it in the eye hole of the level, which sounds simple enough to do but its actually really hard to see and really hard to find. And then you write down the measurement. At first I was terrible at this because I could never seem to find the measuring stick whenever someone had to move…you usually have to refocus everything after you turn it. But I figured out how to use this triangle that sits above the eye piece in order to find it quickly. Peter said that I was really fast at taking levels at that usually it takes people a few days before they get the hang of it. So yay, I’m doing something right.


Still not sure I’m excavating correctly or anything but no one is yelling at me yet. Yesterday Mark asked me how I enjoy excavating and I said that I loved it. He seemed shocked (he is happiest when mapping I think) and said that if I did a good job they would find more stuff for me to dig. Yay!

So since I spent 5 hours digging and chopping and brushing up silt, by day’s end I looked quite filthy. Of course I had no idea what I looked like but everyone would look at me and laugh and call me things like chimney sweeper or Cinderella. Ah well. I tried taking a picture but you can’t really see how dirty I am.



Tomorrow shall be filled with more of the same fun stuff so let me know if this is getting boring to read.

I did remember an additional reason why it benefits me to write in a blog...this way I don't find myself telling the same story over and over again every time I get an IM. I just redirect people to the blog.

I have also started getting specific picture requests! I attempted to take a picture from my balcony this morning of the pyramids at dusk...but there was an overcast today, and actually it was so foggy that you could barely even see the outline of the pyramids. Maybe tomorrow.

We had a drastic change in weather the past few days, going from 90 degree heat, to overcast I mentioned with todays high not getting to much above 75ish. The sun really makes all the difference here. Even a breeze smearing the tiniest stretch of cloud across the sun seems to make you feel 5-10 degrees cooler. However this change from hot to cold over all could mean an approaching sandstorm. I will keep you posted.

This morning at work, i spent the hours between 7 am and second breakfast helping Amelia measure feature points for her 1:20 map of square 201. A 27 (not that that means anything to you). Afterwards, I asked her questions about brickwork and construction coursing and bonding so that I could be sure that I was recording everything as accurately as possible. Everything I've come to know so far is based on what I've read from the London Manual of Field Archaeology. I had been documenting everything correctly, but Amelia really helped me understand what I was seeing and what other information I could deduce from it, so I was pretty satisfied with that. She has been really helpful, so I was additionally happy that I could return the favor this morning by helping her measure feature points and take elevation estimates.

After second breakfast I got to do more digging! The feature I excavated yesterday was actually cut within another feature. After sampling the first one yesterday, we decided to cross section the outside cut and excavate and sample half of it. Man digging is so awesome. I can't wait to be on a project where a majority of the time we are digging up features and not just writing about them. It actually makes me really excited to look into contract archaeology in the states. Contract archaeology is kind of sub category outside of academia but you get to dig plenty!

I am relieved to say the least, that I really wound up enjoying the field work...I now just understand how chaotic projects can get and how crappy things are when there is a complete lack of organization...so many kinks have been worked out since last week though. It also helps to see the actual site continue to be unbackfilled...we just uncovered the stone houses from the Hassan excavations in the 30s and when you are standing on this expanding city scape and actually seeing the structures and the ruins, you can justify feature form filling a little bit more.

I do miss my animal bones though.

My first sentence must be devoted to congratulating a Miss Megan Goldenberg for getting accepted to her top choice grad school. I send you many hugs and kisses from afar.



Heh. I know I seem to blame everything on the lack of internet access, but also…just because I am in another country, doesn’t mean that I am on vacation, or that my workload isn’t the equivelent of a full time job back at home…I say this because no one else sits down and writes in a blog every day after work…they especially don’t write about work after getting off of work. I think last time when I came to Egypt, I never really looked at it as living abroad…I think given that I was only here for 5 weeks, and spare time was mainly devoted to tourist like activities, it certainly felt more like an extended vacation. Being in the field was a new endeavor and by the time I adjusted to it, it was time to return home. But it is different now…I am already adjusted, I am someone who helps others adjust…this is my home for right now. I don’t feel like a foriegner any more when I walk down the streets…I know enough arabic to greet all the familiar faces, I always know where I am going, how to get there…I don’t feel like a stranger to this country and that brings me to feeling really weird about keeping a blog this time around…I feel like it would be the same as me writing from Royal Oak everyday for the Egyptians to read…or me writing from Ann Arbor everyday for my family in Royal Oak to read. I guess that kind of brings me to the realization of what “home” means to me…I know a lot of people say home and start talking about family and warmth and blah blah blah…not that I don’t love my family or anything, but for me..I think home is where you feel comfortable on your own…home is where you don’t feel like a stranger...and I think it is a balance between your capacity to be independent and the extent to which you are involved in a community- whether its your actual city, your family, your colleagues, your friends. Meh maybe this isn’t really anything original or insightful….but again I don’t see you writing a blog for my peace of mind!

Aside from that rant (actually that was a fucking tangent…) I was originally going to say that we still don’t have internet in the small apartment, and therefore I think I will be one day behind in all my posts…like now its just after 9 pm…I didn’t want to sit at the villa on my computer really late, so I came back here after dinner and started blogging from microsoft word…which means that I wont post it until I go back to the villa some time tomorrow…hopefully first thing in the morning, but who knows with the wonky internet out here.

ANYWAY

So about today!

Today was a beautiful beautiful day ☺ Yours truly got to excavate her first feature! Now if you don’t retain detail…you might be saying, well…I thought she was going to be excavating this whole time, why is that a big deal…well I’m currently a learner…so I get to watch a lot, and follow up with all the detailed paper work on site…in general though, this season there is not a whole lot of digging going on. They more or less really botched things up last season and we are going through and fixing it….which is definitely an excellent experience, though when they first explained it, I was rather bummed that I would not get to dig as much as I really wanted to…as I have stated my workload as more or less been feature forms feature forms feature forms….today, as I sit in my square recording the dimensions of bricks in the exposed walls Mark Lehner says…”I don’t know…this feature is pretty peculiar…might want to see what’s going on underneathe…how about that Kelly, you think you might want to dig this up…” This being Mark Lehner and everything, perhaps it would have behooved me to play it cool…but I did no such thing….like a dog eager for a road trip, my eagerness was not contained…This was the first thing that was to be excavated on the site…no one has done any excavating yet, we have all been recording recording recording…so for ME to be asked to dig it, was nothing short of amaaaazzzing. Mark showed me some tricks of the trade for how to set up the grid so that I could do my drawings at 1:20 on the single feature sheets. A 1:20 site map, without being able to show you how big the grids are, just means super up close we’ll say. So I cleaned it with a brush, measured it, I mapped it, I photographed it, I took elevation measurements (where the feature sits above sea level), I made a sample bag for flotation, and then I excavated it!!! Sorry I can’t really tell you was “it” was….but it was pretty neat.

On a standard season (techinically this is supposed to be a study season where the crew is more focused on reporting, publishing) I would be able to constantly do this…unfortunately who knows how many other things I will actually get to dig….but, I will be doing a lot of excavation in India and it does look like I have the option of coming back here again next season, with them paying for me to come out here…at least covering the flight cost.

Another reason why I’m not so all about blogging these days is because I have been reading like a fiend…I only brought two books with me here and I’m already finished with one and well over 100 pages into the other…there’s an enligh bookstore downtown, perhaps I will go there some time soon. The villa also has a “library” of books people donate but they are known to be pretty trashy and terrible. I still have a good 500 pages left in Murakami though so that should hold me over a bit.