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 ☺