This past weekend we got the opportunity to go see some popular sites. We visited Perge, Aspendos and Side. It was incredible to see sites that were finished or close to being so. Perge was our first stop and the site that was the most similar to our site. It was crazy to look at all the pillars put back up, the baths fully excavated, and the streets and shops defined and walkable. We know that the populations of Perge and Antiochia were similar so it’s exciting to see a site similar to ours that’s almost fully excavated. It’s awesome to think that all of this stuff is at our site waiting to be dug up! I think sometimes we forget where we are when we get in the groove of keeping your head in your own trench, swingin’ that pick, using that shovel and hauling those buckets. On Monday when we returned to work, walking to our trenches on the acropolis became a whole new experience. I could picture walking down a beautifully collanaded street with shops cluttering the sides instead of just walking past a rock pile and weaving around open trenches. It’s exciting to know that we are some of the first people to be excavating at this site and in 50 years or so we will be able to come back or Google “Antiochia ad Cragum” and see a whole excavated city and know that we helped start that and we saw it transform ever since its early days.
During this past week, we have been doing the same old same old picking, shoveling and hauling buckets and rocks in our trench on the acropolis. We have continued to remove fill layers in our building. Each day we see more and more of our walls which is exciting but we definitely have a ways to go before we hit floor. We see that more as motivation to get to the floor before we leave than as a defeat or an impossible task. We are determined to see floor before we are done here and I think our trench can do it. I didn’t believe the TAs when they said you get attached to your trench, but you really do. I absolutely love working with the members of our trench and we all get very protective of our trench and the work we have done. Can’t wait to see what progress we can make during these last few days!
