In the Trenches

June 21, 2014

The first week of the excavation has already come and gone.  It’s amazing how quickly time passes when you spend 75% of your time covered in dirt.  This year I am in my future classmate and friend’s trench, which is especially nice.  We have been assigned an area nearby the metallurgy area I excavated last year and hope to make some important discoveries.  So far it seems like that will be the case, but the walls we have uncovered are a bit strange.  For example, there is a room that we have dubbed “the bathroom,” which has no entrance – just one big rectangle, the size of a bathtub.  Maybe there’s a doggy door closer to the bedrock.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. 

Besides my awesome trench master, the rest of the crew (i.e. his minions and my trenchmates) is pretty fantastic.  Everyone gets along well and pulls their own weight, so it will be a good summer.  Hopefully this year no walls will be destroyed (as happened last year in my trench… grrr…), but I don’t really think I need to worry about that with this group. 

The best part about being back in the trench is getting to dig through history and solve the mysteries that the ancients left behind for us.  What was this room used for?  How long was it used?  When was it built?  Who lived here?  These are just some of the things that we are hoping to answer, but there are so many more where those came from.  As a current trench minion (rather than master), I don’t have to deal with these questions directly quite yet – I’m content to dig happily and not destroy anything important (destroying small, unimportant things, though, is reasonably okay).  But hopefully in the next few years I will have to start answering such questions about another site.  I’m starting my PhD program in the fall and plan to continue excavating and moving up the fieldwork ladder until I can’t walk.    

During our first week of excavation I remembered a few cardinal rules of fieldwork that I figured might be entertaining to share.  Some are important for the integrity of the trench itself, while others are more key for ensuring that your trench functions well socially… since if the first rule is broken and things don’t go well it often leads to very awkward, sometimes angry encounters in the trench (for the record, I have witnessed it but have never broken the first rule myself!).

Trench rules:

1.     No trench-cest (i.e. in-trench relationships of any sort)

2.     Don’t break the baulk line (the lines that delineate the trench).  If you break it, you owe everyone in the trench a beer.

3.     Don’t piss off your trench master

4.     Don’t rip out rocks unless specifically told to do so by your trench master

5.     Don’t put shell in the pottery bucket

6.     Check my pockets before I leave site everyday (sometimes I put finds here while sieving or digging if the pottery bucket is too far away, then I promptly deposit them into the appropriate bucket/bag)

7.     Respond to all of your trench master’s requests with “Yes, Master.”

Okay, the last one is not a real rule, but we have taken to using this line in the trench and are amused by it.  Of course, we are all sun drunk, dehydrated, and silly, so it’s much funnier to us, especially later in the day after we’ve all gotten good and loopy from sun exposure.

For more on the fun of the wonderful world of sun drunk, read my next post.  Until then, the digging continues…