Today was the first day of excavation and the house is almost at full capacity. The three dinner tables are all full – I don’t know what we’ll do when the last few stragglers get here – and I’ve had to revise my shower plans. It really does feel like some strange adult summer camp: half of the house is centered around large open-aired courtyards with sand floors so we are outside 99% of the time we are not in the field (where you are still outside), the showers are either ice cold, blisteringly hot, or dancing some lovely tango between the two (definitely my least favorite shower experience), we eat at large family style table, and everyone wakes up at 5:30 am and is asleep by 11:00 pm.
In the last month I have discovered a strange but intense love of the early Christians of the area, my favorite is a crazy monk named St. Shenoute known for his “intense passionate love” aka he beat his followers to death for breaking his rules – good times – but he also saved 20,000 people from Blemies – also good times – and even more strange CERAMICS. Everyone thinks I’m crazy but I just can’t get enough of these silly pot sherds – luckily Amheida (our site) is literally covered in millions, not an exaggeration, of them so we have plenty of secure and non-secure sherds to work with.
So for the first two weeks of the excavation I will be working with the lead ceramicist and her motley crew of Italians as we sort and catalog thousands and thousands of pot sherds. I’ve been working with her the last few weeks cleaning old season’s sherds and so today as a reward she began to teach me how to draw pottery, which is really exciting because once you know how to draw pottery you are pretty much an invaluable addition to any excavation! Exciting! So, that’s what I’ve been doing when I haven’t been traveling around the area or reading about silly desert ascetics – scrubbing pot sherds! Anyway, she told me I was her favorite student today – though I’m starting to think she was buttering me up for more pot sherd washing tomorrow (my hands look like an old lady’s).
Usually this would mean I could skip the 5:30 wake up call for breakfast at 6:00 and a bright and early back-of-a-truck ride to the site, and instead enjoy a leisurely breakfast with the other home-based archaeological units like small finds and the physical anthropologists, but not this season. Apparently they’ve decided to sort on site this season, which means we have to lug our equipment to the site at 6 in the morning and then sit under a sweet tent sorting all the buckets of sherds the various archaeologists find and bring to us.
Speaking of archaeologist! The house is crawling with them! They’re everywhere – and they are Italian, and French, and Dutch, and English, and American and they are all amazingly interesting and friendly though the language barrier is proving to be quite the barrier and most dinner tables are divided by nationality. I’m constantly in awe of the people I meet because most of them are very important names that I’ve been reading in class, or that come up when I’m researching a paper, and they are all incredibly friendly. Well, they are friendly to the students, there are some intense rivalries springing up between the two dig houses. There is a “Canadian House” right behind our house, the Canadian House is run by Tony Mills who is the founder of the whole oasis excavating business and runs the famous Dakhla Oasis Project (DOP), and oddly enough the Canadian House is currently full of Australians. Our house is headed by Roger Bagnall (the greatest of all professors – for real) who is relatively new to the oasis – about 8 years I believe – and who has a massive multi-million dollar grant which allows our house to be way more kick-assier. Like totally woah. Anyway, the two houses DO NOT get along apparently, there are some crazy scholarly rivalries surfacing and some also not so scholarly but pretty hilarious fights as well.
For instance:
Today at breakfast we were all talking to Professor Bagnall about how the internet is running slowly and how we have noticed Australians sitting outside our house with their computers on skype (which we are not allowed to do until after 11pm). Professor Bagnall, who is a man who gets things done, was not pleased by this and so went to Bruno our tech guy and told him to password protect the internet from now on at our house so that the Australians can no longer steal our bandwith. Bruno did this and no one told the Canadian House this had happened so they all came over to use the internet in a big group, sat down in the computer room with Professor Bagnall watching gleefully nearby, and tried to log on. He promptly informed them that the internet was now password protected and they all slammed their computers shut and marched out. The door that opens to the courtyard between the two houses has been shut ever since.
Silly archaeologists!
Anyway – as you have read there is a heck of a lot going on around here and I will try to be better about updating now that the Australians have stopped slowing down our internet connection, but I can make no guarantees because this whole excavating thing is pretty darn hectic!
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
soon I promise
Soon there will be a full update! el'humdellelah!
I haven't been able to write much about our Kharga field trip because the full excavation team has arrived and the house has been in a pretty much constant state of turmoil trying to get everything ready for the first day of excavations (Saturday). I've been assigned to pottery detail and so will be following the ceramicists around learning the tricks of their trade (and by learning the tricks of their trade I mean drawing and cleaning potsherds from 6 am to 10 pm). I've been working with them off and on for the past 3 weeks though and I think they are starting to realize I'm really interested and are excited to teach me more. in'shallallah!
anyway,
I promise to update soon - at the very least there should be pictures from the trip.
I haven't been able to write much about our Kharga field trip because the full excavation team has arrived and the house has been in a pretty much constant state of turmoil trying to get everything ready for the first day of excavations (Saturday). I've been assigned to pottery detail and so will be following the ceramicists around learning the tricks of their trade (and by learning the tricks of their trade I mean drawing and cleaning potsherds from 6 am to 10 pm). I've been working with them off and on for the past 3 weeks though and I think they are starting to realize I'm really interested and are excited to teach me more. in'shallallah!
anyway,
I promise to update soon - at the very least there should be pictures from the trip.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Future Plans
Random Note About What I Do When I'm Not Reading About Christian Egypt:
So being here with all of these crazy archaeologists (who I've been reading for the last 3 years) and bitter grad students has definitely helped me in forming my own plans for life after senior year. I'm thinking about doing a joint degree program in law and a MA in art history/archaeology. EPIC. I've emailed a couple of schools that I'm interested in (Boston...) and have gotten surprisingly encouraging answers. Pretty sweet. Though going the MA route means I still have to learn French and German. Le sigh.
So being here with all of these crazy archaeologists (who I've been reading for the last 3 years) and bitter grad students has definitely helped me in forming my own plans for life after senior year. I'm thinking about doing a joint degree program in law and a MA in art history/archaeology. EPIC. I've emailed a couple of schools that I'm interested in (Boston...) and have gotten surprisingly encouraging answers. Pretty sweet. Though going the MA route means I still have to learn French and German. Le sigh.
Friday, January 8, 2010
"Walk this way if you would like to stand on a 5000 year old floor"
The days here are always full, there is always something happening around the house or someone to bug if there isn't. The past week has been about settling into the house and the leisurely routine we get to enjoy until February (when we begin working on the site and are out of the house from 630 am to 7 pm with lots of work following). Most of my leisure time has been spent either walking around with a group of students in the amazingly beautiful fields around the house, or studying in the library.
It seems that I always gravitate toward libraries, even when I am in the middle of the Egyptian desert. I love the room because it is cozy and cool - two things that are absolutely necessary from 2 pm - 530 pm here in the oasis. We have each been assigned three presentations - 15 min, 25 min, and 45 min - that we will give at various points throughout the three months. They were assigned based on each students "skill set", apparently everyone has some sort of historical specialty that covers a different time period, and when brought together we create like an archaeological super team. Pretty nice.
My presentations are: The Romans in Egypt to the middle of the 2nd century, Christian Kharga (a nearby oasis), and the Red and White monasteries.
I've actually really gotten interested in the christian sites that I have been reading about, and so the research portion of the presentations has been very nice.
Today was our second field trip! An archaeologist whose work we have been reading in class agreed to give us a tour of an important oasis site, and so our motley crew piled in to the Mystery Bus and traveled about 30 minutes away to the most well preserved Old Kingdom settlement in Egypt - which is very impressive considering the oasis is in the middle of the Western Desert and would have been incredibly hard for the Egyptian's of the Nile Valley to reach. The site is called "Ain Asil" and consists of a cemetary with 5 of the most impressive mastabas found for governors of a district - in fact one of them was second in size only to the Pharaoh's mastaba. It seems that being in the middle of nowhere allowed the governor's of the oasis to flex their power in ways that would not have been permitted had the Pharaoh been made totally aware of what was going on.
The site was amazingly well preserved, it is currently being excavated by the French and apparently they are well known for restoring sites, and so we were actually able to go down into one of the mastabas and see our first Egyptian burial chamber up close and personal. It is absolutely amazing to stand in the little room lit up with a very distinct white light (it allows the paintings to be seen without destroying them) and be centimeters away from something that was drawn in 2500 BCE.
Our group is very interested in the Sheikh Muftah - the local Daklah oasis dwellers of the Old Kingdom - and the Nile Valley Egyptian's relationship, and the site was full of possible clues to their relationship. The settlement that was built near these impressive mastabas originally started out surrounded by MASSIVE fortified walls (almost 4 meters thick), and so clearly the Egyptians were living in fear of something - which the archaeologists suggest were the Sheikh Muftah people living nearby. Apparently the threat was not too great though, because soon after building the fortified walls the city expanded outside of them.
One of the great buildings that was outside the walls was a HUGE Governor's Palace where the men who were building the mastaba's lived. It was lavishly built and furnished, and we know this because it was violently burned to the ground at the end of the 6th Dynasty and was never reoccupied, and the fire was so intense that the wooden doors and columns of the palace fell over and left huge scorch marks on the stone floors, which you can still make out today. This allowed the French archaeologists to pretty accurately guess how tall the structure was, and then reconstruct parts of it nearby.
It has been unseasonably hot here which has thrown all the archaeologists into a panic because they worry if it is so hot now it will be unbearable in February when we start to dig. This heat was readily apparent today as we hiked from the bus about a mile and a half across the desert to the site and then back after wandering around for 3 hours. But there is a plus side to all this desert walking though - my legs feel like steel! I guess it really is true that walking in sand is an amazing workout.
"Remember you are over the edge of the wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go."
J.R.R. Tolkien
It seems that I always gravitate toward libraries, even when I am in the middle of the Egyptian desert. I love the room because it is cozy and cool - two things that are absolutely necessary from 2 pm - 530 pm here in the oasis. We have each been assigned three presentations - 15 min, 25 min, and 45 min - that we will give at various points throughout the three months. They were assigned based on each students "skill set", apparently everyone has some sort of historical specialty that covers a different time period, and when brought together we create like an archaeological super team. Pretty nice.
My presentations are: The Romans in Egypt to the middle of the 2nd century, Christian Kharga (a nearby oasis), and the Red and White monasteries.
I've actually really gotten interested in the christian sites that I have been reading about, and so the research portion of the presentations has been very nice.
Today was our second field trip! An archaeologist whose work we have been reading in class agreed to give us a tour of an important oasis site, and so our motley crew piled in to the Mystery Bus and traveled about 30 minutes away to the most well preserved Old Kingdom settlement in Egypt - which is very impressive considering the oasis is in the middle of the Western Desert and would have been incredibly hard for the Egyptian's of the Nile Valley to reach. The site is called "Ain Asil" and consists of a cemetary with 5 of the most impressive mastabas found for governors of a district - in fact one of them was second in size only to the Pharaoh's mastaba. It seems that being in the middle of nowhere allowed the governor's of the oasis to flex their power in ways that would not have been permitted had the Pharaoh been made totally aware of what was going on.
The site was amazingly well preserved, it is currently being excavated by the French and apparently they are well known for restoring sites, and so we were actually able to go down into one of the mastabas and see our first Egyptian burial chamber up close and personal. It is absolutely amazing to stand in the little room lit up with a very distinct white light (it allows the paintings to be seen without destroying them) and be centimeters away from something that was drawn in 2500 BCE.
Our group is very interested in the Sheikh Muftah - the local Daklah oasis dwellers of the Old Kingdom - and the Nile Valley Egyptian's relationship, and the site was full of possible clues to their relationship. The settlement that was built near these impressive mastabas originally started out surrounded by MASSIVE fortified walls (almost 4 meters thick), and so clearly the Egyptians were living in fear of something - which the archaeologists suggest were the Sheikh Muftah people living nearby. Apparently the threat was not too great though, because soon after building the fortified walls the city expanded outside of them.
One of the great buildings that was outside the walls was a HUGE Governor's Palace where the men who were building the mastaba's lived. It was lavishly built and furnished, and we know this because it was violently burned to the ground at the end of the 6th Dynasty and was never reoccupied, and the fire was so intense that the wooden doors and columns of the palace fell over and left huge scorch marks on the stone floors, which you can still make out today. This allowed the French archaeologists to pretty accurately guess how tall the structure was, and then reconstruct parts of it nearby.
It has been unseasonably hot here which has thrown all the archaeologists into a panic because they worry if it is so hot now it will be unbearable in February when we start to dig. This heat was readily apparent today as we hiked from the bus about a mile and a half across the desert to the site and then back after wandering around for 3 hours. But there is a plus side to all this desert walking though - my legs feel like steel! I guess it really is true that walking in sand is an amazing workout.
"Remember you are over the edge of the wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go."
J.R.R. Tolkien
Monday, January 4, 2010
First Day Out in the World
Today was a good day not to be sick, as it was our first field trip out of our beautiful dig house!
The house itself is a sprawling mudbrick structure with several stories - each with large courtyards open to the sky, in fact, the only roofs on the house are over the kitchen, library, and our bedrooms. The weather here is beautiful, only slightly chilly at night, and being able to sit in a comfortable chair with a glass of tea and a shady awning is pretty much perfection. I haven't been able to really enjoy the food, but with my recent immune system comeback (plus 10 to antibiotics) the last 24 hours have been full of delicious food. They definitely feed us well. And often. Really often.
Our field trip this morning began with the gang piling into the "Magical Mystery Bus", a bus from the 1970s with an amazing paisley roof and bright red seats, and heading to our future archaeological site at Amheida which we will all know very well all too soon. We ran around the site (literally we ran up sand dunes because for some reason we had only allotted ourselves an hour at the site) and Ellen, our professor, pointed out the major finds so far: a large Roman villa which the team has faithfully reconstructed several meters over, a large Old Kingdom village and temple, a giant hill made up of human bones (which was really crazy), and several prehistoric campsites. Pretty much all of human history in a few square miles.
After a short delay during which our poor Magical Bus became horribly stuck in a sand dune and we had to call several bedouin villagers to help us dig it out, we continued to a school where Gaber's (the leader of the house staff) children go. It was actually really nice for such a small village, they had a large room full of computers for the students to use, and a room full of dancing preschoolers who coerced several of us into joining them. Much hilarity ensued.
Then on to a two thousand year old mosque and village located in the heart of Gaber's modern village, which was really incredible. We ended our excursion with tea and peanuts at Gaber's brother's house which was beautiful.
The area around the dig house can only be described as "lush". It has the most neon green fields I have ever seen. EVER. It is pretty much crazy insane. I will post pictures of this day and the dig house soon, so far all I've been able to manage is the first few days in Cairo, what with the being deathly ill. Anyway, so far the days I have not been tied to the house - meaning today - have been pretty darn amazing.
The house itself is a sprawling mudbrick structure with several stories - each with large courtyards open to the sky, in fact, the only roofs on the house are over the kitchen, library, and our bedrooms. The weather here is beautiful, only slightly chilly at night, and being able to sit in a comfortable chair with a glass of tea and a shady awning is pretty much perfection. I haven't been able to really enjoy the food, but with my recent immune system comeback (plus 10 to antibiotics) the last 24 hours have been full of delicious food. They definitely feed us well. And often. Really often.
Our field trip this morning began with the gang piling into the "Magical Mystery Bus", a bus from the 1970s with an amazing paisley roof and bright red seats, and heading to our future archaeological site at Amheida which we will all know very well all too soon. We ran around the site (literally we ran up sand dunes because for some reason we had only allotted ourselves an hour at the site) and Ellen, our professor, pointed out the major finds so far: a large Roman villa which the team has faithfully reconstructed several meters over, a large Old Kingdom village and temple, a giant hill made up of human bones (which was really crazy), and several prehistoric campsites. Pretty much all of human history in a few square miles.
After a short delay during which our poor Magical Bus became horribly stuck in a sand dune and we had to call several bedouin villagers to help us dig it out, we continued to a school where Gaber's (the leader of the house staff) children go. It was actually really nice for such a small village, they had a large room full of computers for the students to use, and a room full of dancing preschoolers who coerced several of us into joining them. Much hilarity ensued.
Then on to a two thousand year old mosque and village located in the heart of Gaber's modern village, which was really incredible. We ended our excursion with tea and peanuts at Gaber's brother's house which was beautiful.
The area around the dig house can only be described as "lush". It has the most neon green fields I have ever seen. EVER. It is pretty much crazy insane. I will post pictures of this day and the dig house soon, so far all I've been able to manage is the first few days in Cairo, what with the being deathly ill. Anyway, so far the days I have not been tied to the house - meaning today - have been pretty darn amazing.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Pharaoh's Revenge
I of course am the first person to suffer the Pharaoh's Revenge (the worst of all the common traveler's illnesses in various countries according to the CDC). Needless to say the last 24 hours have not been a pleasant time. Luckily the dig house is large and beautiful and has a separate wing of bathrooms that I have been able to isolate myself in. I'm not sure how successful my body will be in fighting this off without medicinal aid, but that is the recommendation of the program, so at least for another night I will tough it out.
Anyway, I will update more hopefully in the next few days.
Anyway, I will update more hopefully in the next few days.
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