Morning Time
 Breakfast isn't so bad---for the first fourteen days. But there
is a limited number of possible combinations of pita bread, peanut butter, jelly and honey.
Sometime during week four you are seriously longing for a good piece of Merita white bread.
At 5:00am we are in our small school bus and on the road, if you want to call it a road, to our excavation site. By the time we arrive, I feel like I have been popped in a popcorn machine (if you don't
already have a stomachache from drinking the water you are likely to have one
by the time you arrive at the site). We unload our bus at the edge of our site, greet our locally hired workers, and then carry all of
the equipment to our squares.
The first order of business every dig day
is to take pictures for photographic records of daily progress
in each square. And this is no joke: just before the photographs are taken, you literally have to take a big brush and sweep the rocks inside the square and then you have to sweep the dirt floor (to remove our footprints). You have to make the rocks "shine" so they will show up in the pictures. That means brushing away the wind-blown dirt that has collected overnight. Try to imagine frantically sweeping dirt off of rocks, with the wind whirling around you, and watching all the dirt you just removed from the rock in front of you
come to rest on the rocks you just finished behind you!
Before beginning the exciting process of digging there is still more work to be done. We must fill out a pottery tag with the date,
loci, and other specifics needed. The tag must be placed on a new pottery pail and then the pail is taken to the
sift. Also at the sift the "clicker", or counter, is attached to the sift for the workers to keep count of the
gufahs that have been sifted.
Finally we can begin the day's digging, which is a slow process. This is not a race to see who can find the most and the quickest. It is, however, a tedious process of removing each layer of soil or loci.
This is accomplished by using a hand pick, a 4-1/2 inch hand trowel, and a dustpan. It is very important to keep track of each
locus that you reach so that later it will be easier to date the pottery found there. Along with digging, square work includes the
articulation of rocks and walls, determining the loci and
stratigraphy, taking
munsell readings, drawings and producing scale. During the entire workday, in almost every conversation, I was asked "Have you drunk any water lately?" Water is extremely important, especially in such an environment as Jordan. You can dehydrate very quickly, in the heat and low humidity, without realizing it.
A major aspect of work with an archaeological dig is group dynamics. You have to get along with your square supervisor because you work side by side in a small square for over a month. I was constantly apologizing to my supervisor for bumping into him or almost chopping his fingers off with my
trowel. An essential requirement is the ability to get along with everyone and willingness to obey leadership. An archaeological dig is entirely a team effort. No one is paid; everyone is there on a volunteer basis.
By 9:00am the team has been up for five hours and everyone is ready for a little break and a bite to eat. So we take a "second breakfast", which became repetitive rather quickly with watermelon served just about every day. Watermelon was also served at our hotel with meals, so by the time the trip was winding down I never wanted to see another piece of watermelon! When our thirty-minute break is over we return to our square for
the last hours of work.
|
