Digging at Zeitah

It's not often, actually, that the computer guy at an excavation ventures forth from his air-conditioned lair into the harsh reality of the field, but that rare event happened Friday, and is likely to happen again on Monday.

How did this happen?

I ran out of things to do. Seriously! Oh, I could do a bit more filtering through the database, looking for anomalies, or I could have prepared an esoteric report or two, but until data comes flowing from the field, I was having some serious thumb-twiddling time.

So I woke up at 4:30 and piled into the van in the dark with all the square supervisors and their assistants. By 5:20, we had the tools out and were ready to start excavating. I was assigned a couple tasks I was unlikely to botch: pulling back weeds, removing old sandbags and sweeping the slope near the steps clear of loose dirt.

Erin, the square supervisor for whom I was working, commented that it's one of the great ironies of archaeology that a bunch of obsessive-compulsive people are gathered together and told to go clean dirt. Which I did, with a vengeance.

The only things really challenging about sweeping the slope are how to do so without rolling down the hill (it's about a 45 degree slope), and how to do it without killing your back, as you stoop over and sweep with a small hand-brush.

Excavating the old sandbags was more difficult than it might seem. The sandbags have deteriorated over the last 2 years, so the fabric is almost all rotted away, and where it isn't gone, it doesn't have enough strength to pull the contents away with it. So you have to use trowel, brush and dust pan to carefully brush away the dirt with which the sand bags were filled until you reach the bottom of the sand bag, at which point, the fabric can be pulled up.

Why excavate sandbags? Because they were put on top of and next to important or fragile sections of the excavation at the end of the previous season (in 2005) to protect them from the elements and from people who could destroy the site if it weren't protected. The dirt in the sand bags has mixed with water and essentially become a very low quality mud-brick, adding to the challenge of removing them.

By 8:30, when breakfast was called, it had started getting hot, and I heard data calling me from my room: "Oh John! Please come and enter me into the database!"

So, somewhat reluctantly, I left the field and went back to my duties as high-priest of data, grating out in my best Schwarzenegger imitation, "I'll be bock!"

Here are more pictures from the 2005 dig season or from this season.