clean dirt and early nights

Today I was glad to be back in the trench.

Jamie started the day by explaining the work assignments like he usually does, but today was a little different because of yesterday's rain. We worked in the area of the trench which had been excavated by the mechanical digger it was all muddy and messy because of the rain which cause us to have to alter excavation techniques.

Because we not only were working in a newly opened area of the trench bu the entire area was covered in sedimentary deposits that the runnels of water left behind yesterday (Gabii is on a slope), we had to clean the entire surface of the excavation area to define our first Stratagraphic Unit.

we focused first on taking off a few centimetres of dirt with pick-axes and trowels (it was so messy and squishy) we also had to re-define features which had been previously "clean" and now were covered in mud.

The team was divided into three groups all working towards each other (towards the center) in separate parts of the extended trench area. the soil was really muddy which was good for determining stratigraphy from the color but it also made for muddy work.

Jamie explained to us how he worked with the mechanical digger to excavate he extension. like any excavation they removed small layers with the machine and the archaeologists stood in the trench with shovels and trowels to see if any features became visible. First walls showed up so the digger continued on that level to expose others, in places where nothing was revealed, the digger went deeper so we were left with an uneven surface with some features exposed.

So today we worked from the exposed walls to the area where the "atrium" is supposed to be. we are exposing walls which seem to be anomalous, but may belong to different phases of the structure we are excavating.

we managed to meet our lunch time goal (working from 8-12:30) of meeting in the center of the atrium. So after lunch we began to even out the trench to define our SU. I was working with Andrea, one of the trench assistants and another student Sheira. We were working towards a level of reddish dirt which was exposed in one corner of the trench that had been excavated lower then the rest by the mechanical digger. We used trowels and had picks until we began to see a change between the darker earth and the red color. By this time the wet mud had been dried out by the sun so not only was it harder to distinguish the color but it was also more difficult to trowel because it had been baked hard. By the time it was 3 and time to leave, we had mostly finished defining our part of the trench.

It was another early night for me, I worked on planning the last two weeks of my european adventure and promptly fell asleep at 9pm.