Day 2 of Excavation: Day 2, I've heard, rings with echoes of the same sentiment. I hate sifting. By now the novelty of the sift has worn off and you realize that it's really something that is very dusty and hard on the arms and knuckles (since you're holding a bar at either end and smashing your knuckles against the edges of the sift every time you shake it back and forth).  Most everybody standing around the sift looks like a bandit, though we make a very dirty and colourful group of bandits. Most opt to wear a bandana over their mouths and noses when at the sift. It's hot, but at least you won't have an impromtu asthma attack every time someone shakes up their batch of dirt (my apologies, Mr. Leppold, soil). After a little while, everything just starts to look like dirt clumps (which you have to break up in case there's something inside) and you can no longer tell the difference between plaster, ceramic, a bone, or a rock. There are a few easy ways to tell, though, if your eyes are deceiving you.
1) Tap it on something. Mostly metal works. You find a sherd and tap it on the edge of the sift or a trowel and compare it's sound to the sound of a known rock. They sound different. You don't have to only use metal, though. Many at the dig tap an unknown piece on their teeth. It does the same thing (though you don't usually have to compare it to a rock with this method) and what's a little dirt for archaeology? You breathe enough of it anyways. Everybody is already sneezing dirt.
2) If it's bone, stick it to your tongue. Bone is porous and will stick very well. This is because all the bone marrow has broken down by now. The only thing you don't want to do is stick metal in your mouth. That can be a bit iffy. Today at the sift we found a nail and Andy, the siftmaster this week until Erik comes from the Glas site, was ready to tap it on is tooth, but decided against it when he realized that it could actually be metal.
The cool part of the sift is actually when they find a grave. That's only happened a handful of times (as in you can count it on one hand) at this site, but when a grave is found, you have the opportunity to potentially find things like coins, beads, or even something shiny ;-). At the dig, you're paid 50 Euro for gold and Linear B pieces. Doesn't sound too bad, eh? Of course, that's not found all that often. Like I said, only a handful of times. They've found one adult grave with some stuff and three babies graves with only some little beads, in the course of the entire excavation at the Lower Town.
Luckily, you don't stay on the sift all day (unless you're Andy the siftmaster). You rotate, two in, two back at the trench. Today we made the first pass and sifted as we went, combing through the broken up soil to find ceramics and the like, that way Andy didn't get backed up with our stuff too. We found a few cool things, including a sling stone, but really what we're looking for is part of a wall that runs parallel to a big one, south of our trench. Through the miracle of Geomagnetometry, we belive it would only run through the upper northeastern corner, though. We still do the entire trench (because you never can truly know until your excavate) but so far nothing but a few hundred pottery sherds have popped up. At the end of the day we gridded another trench next to 33, dubbed trench 34. Original, I know. Tomorrow we'll be beginning excavation there and hopefully will start finding that wall. It's supposed to run right through the center of that trench.  Right now neither look like much, but tomorrow will hopefully end with a layer of exposed wall. Cross your fingers!

Day 1 of excavations:
Happy Fourth of July! We started the first day of excavations, which reminded me a lot of weeding at first. In order to dig you have to get rid of all the dead and living plants over the area where you believe there may be ancient whatevers. How do we know there are ancient whatevers before we've even broken ground? The miracle of technology! We use a variety of techniques that can give us a general idea of what is under the soil. It's not a very descriptive idea, but most of the time we are not just digging without any sort of clue as to what's exactly down there.
My trenchmaster (how awesome is that title, really?) is also named Katie, which is very confusing most of the time, and with her direction we cleared about 500 square meters, give or take. I'm not talking just a little bit of grass. I'm talking lots of hay and thistles that get stuck in your hand. Once more, when you're clearing, you aren't necessarily under a shade. So clearing is a lot like gardening, but with shovels and brushes rather than rakes. Not that we didn't have rakes; there are just four trenches and only two rakes. Those who wait don't get a toolbox. Sucks, but that's archaeology. So, I learned how to rake with the side of a shovel. A little difficult, but you get the hang of it after the first ten square meters or so...
After we cleared most of the larger debris from the area, we marked out one grid (which would be dubbed trench 33 in the computer and in our hearts) of five meters by five meters. Across the north side is 1-5 and down the east side is A-E. But column 1 and row E is always set aside as a "bulk". Basically, it isn't dug and will serve as a walkway between trenches until the area is excavated. The only reason they'd take out a bulk is because they need to, i.e. there's a wall that runs straight into the bulk. If we do our math right, that gives us 16 1m x 1m squares within a trench. These are called E.Us, or Excavation Units. A single person might work in an E.U. at a time, and E.U.s are used when something is found to denote placement and to sketch diagrams of fixtures.
After marking out our grid, we cleared off the smaller bits and pieces with straw brushes (think a smaller version of a sawed off straw broom) and dustpans, and then took preliminary readings with the total station. A total station takes,well, everything. Geographic coordinates, distances, and depth. It's basically this eye-looking machine on a tripod and you hold a staff with a mirror sensor on the head. Then the eye moves around until it finds the sensor. You hold the rod level at the point for a few seconds until the GIS guys say "okay" and then you move onto the next point. The really cool thing is that when you move, the eye of the machine moves with the "magic staff", provided you don't get in the way of the eye's view of the sensor. Yes, I stood there and moved the magic staff up down and all around and watched the total station move and it was really the hightlight of my day. Well actually, maybe that was when the workmen decided if they were going to dig in that grid the next day, they'd want a tarp up so they weren't out in the hot, Grecian sun.
And that rounded off our day. I know it might seem like a whole lotta nothing, but it was preparation that is necessary to archaeology. Archaeologists don't just dig holes, we methodically remove layers of 5-10 centimeters each pass. Every bucket of soil is sifted through and two people have to rotate through at the sift each day. Sifting is where I did most of my heavy lifting. You have to go bucket by bucket and you're standing with a wire sift hanging over a wheelbarrow. Dump a bucket, you are your sift buddy lift the sift to about chest height (letting it hang while you sift tears at the ropes), shake it until every little particle is through, and then you go through with your hands, picking out everything: pottery sherds (that's the proper term, not 'shards'), bone fragments, sea shells, lithics (stone tools and whatnot), you name it. Sherds with paint on them or that are handles or bases are considered 'Diagnostic' (meaning they could actually tell us something important, as opposed to the hundreds of 'body sherds' that we find with nothing on them whatsoever) and they go in a seperate bag. The sift can get hectic, especially with four trenches going at once and Greek workmen powering through 10 centimeters at a time with big pick-axes. You have to keep each trench accounted for and each pass (5-10 centimeter increments) marked. It can get confusing, but never fear for the siftmaster is always here with his handy-dandy notebook and tick-marks. Coloured buckets help denote where each batch of soil came from, until they run out of a specific colour bucket and then all hell breaks loose.
So you see, an archaeological dig is packed with all sorts of things that require thinking. It's not just mindless digging. Like I said earlier, it's METHODICAL.
After the dig we didn't do much of interest and I promptly fell asleep after an entirely cold shower (that felt glorious). So there's my harping for the first day. I hope you enjoyed it!