This last week my room learned that waking up at 5 in the morning is made significantly less pleasant by using “Heigh-ho” from Disney’s Snow White as your alarm. You may not know this – none of us did – but the song begins with a chorus of dwarf voices shouting DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG. While this was an alarming and unpleasant way to wake up, it was nonetheless highly appropriate for the one day it was our alarm. Our lives in Gazipasa have become a routine of waking up early, eating delicious food, digging in the dirt for six hours, eating more delicious food, napping and doing our readings for lecture, lecture, more delicious food, and going to bed early in preparation to do it all again the next day. Described this way it sounds like a monotonous and exhausting routine. While it is exhausting, it is far from monotonous. In the last week we have made so many new finds in our trenches, and talked so much more about the culture of the time Antiochia was inhabited, we are reaching a point when we are able to put together the pieces of what happened on our site. In the first week it seemed hard to believe that we would reach a point where we would be able to make reasonable guesses about our site, but here we are, less than three weeks later, working as a group to make educated guesses about what we are looking at and what we might find next. The amount we have learned in our few weeks so far, and the amount of confidence in ourselves and others that we have gained, is astonishing. I look forward to what we still have to learn and find in the next week.
