Huge post to make up for major lack of any.

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!