Digging Holes: At D.E.P.A.S. Field School
 
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!



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