a breath of air

Today we took the new troops to the dig and they settled in wonderfully. Mark and Matt and Vicky laid a new piece of grid in the south and then they just started digging it, like that. Like grid are supposed to lay out. Actually, it took them most of the morning, but still. Progress.

I actually dug for a little while, in between causing trouble for innocent people (their square was getting less so every centimeter) and tidying the daylights out of the field desk (I relabelled the drawers. Possibly this will make it less necessary for all of us to go through all of the drawers and still not find any fine-point Sharpies) and applying Band-aids to what were, fortunately, very small wounds.

The deep pit was down to an interesting layer of stones. Then they found a smashed glass vase,



or something like it, and the interestingness of the stones diminished. Kalila cleaned around them and then took them out. We believe we may be through the messed-up historical here, but it's getting unsafely deep in the sand. Time to branch out.

Nancy, who appears to be a nice school librarian, is secretly the fastest non-professional test-pit digger around. Her effect on the pit near the lilacs has been profound in both senses of the word, and then she also found a rather tasty drill fragment.





John found another piece of the well-decorated pot as Sam found two pieces of last week(we probably have a good 7% of it now), only some 45 cm deeper than the first pieces.


Lauren the intern is leaving for Poland next week. I shall be alone in the lab, but apart from the amount of work I was able to palm off onto her, I shall miss her company and her competence. And she put up with a lot in very good humor.

Tomorrow I go back to the lab. Out of the sunlight, away from the blue herons and the photo ops to supervise the deposition of hideous bits of slag, modern glass, and microscopic rhyolite flakes. Dick says he notes my attempts to make him feel guilty about this without being moved by them. But he went just crazy at State Surplus and bought me and Lauren Swiss Army knives from the spoils of airline security. I usually feel bad for the people who showed up at the airplane gates packing shivs and having them confiscated,(having been clueless myself at times), but the previous owner of mine wasn't someone I want to know. The last 2 mm of the little blade is snapped off and both blades were so dull I was sharpening pencils with a flake from the flint-knapping demonstration instead. A few minutes with the kitchen sharpener has restored my knife some self-respect. And getting a weapon from my feudal overlord is good for mine, of course.