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!
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
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
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 13, 2008
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 ☺
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 ☺
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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!
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!
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, March 10, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
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.
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.
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