Sun Drunk
July 1, 2014
One of my trench neighbors walked up to her supervisor, my roommate, with something in her hand and said, “Hey… I found a rock,” in a semi-giggly, loopy voice. Welcome to the wonderful world of “sun drunk,” where all those exposed to too much sunlight suddenly act as though they’d been throwing back glasses of wine instead of throwing shovelfuls of dirt around. Sun drunk is a phrase everyone on my site (and probably most other sites) is quite familiar with. Sometimes when it strikes it makes you a bit wobbly on your feet, other times it just makes you do and say silly things. Just like a bottle of wine! Today we had planned on numbering our walls (of which there are many!), but instead at the end of the day we ended up naming them instead: Fred, Frank, Eleanor, Evelgard (something like that… can’t quite remember, I just remember it was “Evy” for short), and Bertha. Bertha is the biggest wall. Sun drunk.
It’s best when everyone is sun drunk at once, which happens occasionally since everyone is baking under the same sun with no shade to speak of (unless you’re lucky enough to have a high outcropping of bedrock to your east, as my trench neighbors do – lucky bastards). This elicits a lot of giggling and goofy weirdness across the entire spectrum of oddities. Today we named the hallway-to-nowhere (it literally is a hallway that leads to walls and has absolutely no exits… damn Minoans) the “Grand Salon” and several other things that I can’t remember because to was too damn loopy. Then in my sun drunk rage I suddenly got quite angry at the dirt (it was confusing the hell out of me), and wailed on that for a bit, only to come to the foggy, glazed over sun drunk stage. I think the goofy sun drunk stage is the warning sign – like getting your second wind right before you pass out from exhaustion. If, after this hits, you don’t hit the shade a take a break, you are likely to hit the “dazed and confused” zone, which I imagine comes right before the incredibly dangerous “pass out from sun exposure” zone. Both zones are exactly as they sound. Once someone gets a little too quiet and stares blankly at the dirt they’re digging you know the sun drunkenness has progressed to a bad place. But we’re all pretty good at not getting there and getting plenty of water and shade when we start to get a little too silly.
But before the danger zone, the tipsy stage is full of terrible puns, rocks that look like animals, talking to the dirt, and sharing silly stories/memories/embarrassing tales. Sun drunk makes us all a little silly, but it makes us all closer and gives us a better insight into each other’s weird, but wonderful personalities. Just one of the many joys of archaeology… as long as you don’t pass out… or break something important.
