whining, winning, wine and titty kitties

The past week has been good fun and I’ve definitely learned a lot. We opened a new trench on Tuesday since the first one I was assigned to this week with Kelsey and Taylor ended up yielding nothing. We opened our trench in the section of the hill called ‘CB’ next to Andi’s trench which has pulled up lots of different things.

Monday was spent in ‘CA’ in a small trench that was opened the previous week in hopes of finding evidence of a forno where Etruscans would have smelted metals - but no luck. We dug until we hit sterile soil and Tony decided that it was time to close the trench and try somewhere new.

On Tuesday we cleaned up the work that had been done, straightening the baulk walls and evening out the bumps in the floor of the trench. We took final elevations in the morning then took closing photographs and moved ourselves across the hill over to the wasteland of CB.

First we had to lay out the trench. This involved clearing the area we were going to ding in of sticks and stones. This was made all the more difficult by the fact that the area had been forested over the spring and the entire ground was thick with tree branches, new trees trying to grow and thorny vines which entwined the branches on the ground.

I managed to cut and bruise myself a ridiculous amount of times by tripping over and whacking myself with branches. And my leg was dripping in blood when I got wrapped in a thorny vine.

Clearing is SO much fun.

Once that was finished we had to lay the points for the corners of the trench. The entire hill is on a grid so we had to make sure the 4mx4m we were laying out was perfectly square with the other trenches nearby. We triangulated the points of the four corners which pretty finicky – it involved 3 plumb bobs and 3 measuring tapes, several strings and some line levels. After measuring the points, screwing them up and fixing them again we had out trench strung in time for lunch.

During lunch it started to rain (the past week has had some super weird weather. We’ve been getting rain and thunder and lightning and it has been cold (well relatively – in the mid 20s) after eating it started to rain harder so we walked down to sit under an awning by the farmhouse which is on the hill to wait it out. After an hour it seemed to have cleared up so we went back to see what the trenches were like.

Playing in the muddy soil was messy but pretty fun and squishy. We found more terracotta that afternoon than we did the entire day in the previous trench. We worked to drop the trench down to the level of Andi’s trench which was finding things about 15-30cm down.

The second day in CB started with a walk/lecture by Tony since it was raining a little and we wanted to wait to see what the weather would do before starting the day. Since half the trench was hungover the morning was not exactly smooth. We were all tired and sore and grouchy and we started to get trench stir crazy early on. We laughed at nothing and everything and I ended up with my hair tied up in a ponytail on top of my head (which I sported the rest of the day)

In the afternoon Taylor and Kelsey invented a game to motivate us. First round whoever could fill the most buckets of dirt in the allotted time (while still practicing good archaeology) got a free beer. The second round they threw a pick pass across the entire trench and if we could get the entire trench cleaned up in 37 minutes then they’d buy the trench a 5L jug of wine.

We did it.

Archaeology and Alcohol seem to go together.

That evening we had a lovely dinner of Mexican food courtesy of Julian - Which he followed up with jell-o shots.

Delightful night

Then Grayson and Hannah came back from a walk with the most adorable tiny kitten. He was ridiculously cuddly too and I spent most of the evening with him sleeping between my boobs. we had to leave him outside at the end of the night since we couldn't bring him into the house. so we put him in a box with a blanket and some food and water before we went to bed.

Julian later told me that Gianluca - the grandson of the woman who owns the hotel is going to keep the kitty and bring it to his house. He named it grappa (Gianluca is the bartender at the hotel bar and Grappa is a really strong alcohol that he likes to encourage us to drink) I don't know how he ended up with the kitty at the end of the night but I am really glad he did.

Saturday I went into Siena for the morning with Alec. We did a bit of poking around but were too exhausted to really do too much. That night everyone was sitting outside the kitchen and we invented a new game and dubbed it “Pod Pass” we passed a few iPods around the circle and each person had to choose a song and add it to the on-the-go playlist, then we put the iPod on and everyone had to guess who had chosen each song. After the first playlist it just devolved into a silly dance party. It was lots of fun.

Today was a good lazy Sunday - a nice rest for the final haul and the last week in the trenches. I’m going to miss this place.