Today was awesome compared to what we've found so far! We started out with some pictures and planning out the few rocks in trench 33 and the Red Death corner. I got to try my hand at planning on a grid square. It's meticulous work, if not a little difficult. You take a plumb bob and basically try to get as completely over what you were drawing as possible. Then you have a grid square and you transfer each feature,  square for square. I got lucky, I only had to draw four rocks and a little outline in the northwest corner of the Red Death section. Somehow I managed to draw four circles, roughly the proper size and shape of the rocks in the middle of the grid.
That's when things started getting interesting. The Red Death section was given the context number 321, while the rest of the soil was context 320. When we started digging, we found part of a plaster floor and that got context 329. Along with the plaster floor, we found two stone pavers, including one that I helped the workman remove that was pratically intact. It looked a bit like a puzzle, but we pulled out all the pieces and put them in their own bag so that at the museum they could be easily pieced back together. The wall so far is looking like a series of rocks, but we haven't taken them out yet because we found more rocks underneath. They don't exactly line up nicely, but we're holding out for a connection.
In Trench 34, to the east of 33, we found a lamb bone, possibly part of a leg I think...? It was really cool because there were two pieces that could fit together and we had the end, where the joint would've been. They also found a bronze piece in that trench and I pulled out an ancient, rusty nail from the sift. Again, supper cool. Unfortunately now that we are in a real context and not on the surface layer, we have to send buckets to the sift, which means the majority of our trench spent most of our time down there. I got to come up and help supervise and run paperwork at the end, which is a bit more interesting since you are there when they make these really cool finds.
Right now they are leaning towards the Geometric period with the pottery we've been finding. I found this beautiful base piece with painted lines and an orange and black, rimmed base that they dated, likely to the Geometric Period. This is really cool because, until our excavation of the Lower Town, most archaeologists believed that Mycenae was completely abandoned after the Mycenaeans and remained uninhabited. But since we're finding walls and pottery and other really cool stuff in the Geometric Period (around 900-700 BC), that is obviously not the case! Take THAT Schliemann!
Tomorrow I have no idea what we will find, but I'm super excited. If it's anything like today, it promises to be awesome.

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!