Here in Turkey our day begins before the sun comes up. Every morning, at 5 am, I wake up to the increasingly annoying sounds of the alarm. I am not a morning person. 5 am is my enemy. I am not very functional at 5 in the morning and every day I groan and rollover, contemplating the glorious prospect of going back to sleep. Yet every time I eventually give in to the inevitable 5:30 departure time and drag myself out of bed. By 5:30, thirteen drowsy Oles have boarded the bus and have promptly fallen back to sleep. I catch an extra little bit of sleep on the way to the gas station where we purchase the day’s snack supply.
After arriving at the dig depo, we have breakfast (while desperately trying to avoid the incessant flying insects) and get our caffeine fix through delicious Turkish tea. Then full and marginally more awake, we all hike down to the site and then up to the acropolis. Before starting work, I slather myself with a year’s supply of sunscreen and scramble for my tools. We start up our dig playlist to get ourselves pumped and awake and then JuliAnne and I climb down into our unit (affectionately named Hobbiton due to the size of the unit and its inhabitants-seriously, the two of us are most likely the only ones who could work side by side in that unit comfortably) and get to work. Then we dig, dig, dig stopping periodically for water breaks and the welcome relief of the shade of the tent. Hydration is key in the 100-degree heat. As we dig, we pull piece after piece of pottery out of the soil. Sometimes we find other things, stop and call Professor Howe over to try and figure out what they are. Usually the answers to our questions are ‘keep digging and find out.’ So we do. It is amazing how invested in our unit we get. JuliAnne and I just want to keep digging to uncover the story of our site.
At 1 pm, we all pack up and trek back down the hill, carrying our finds from the day. Sometimes, if we are lucky enough, we catch the bus back up the depo. If we aren’t, we traipse back up the hill to the depo, which always feels really long after a long day of digging. We all flop into chairs and eagerly consume bread, rice and whatever else is for lunch that day. All of us are covered in dirt and sweat and we all look like we have been through something but we are proud of the progress we have made each day and we keep laughing, enjoying one another’s company.
While our schedule is consistent day to day, no day at the dig site is ever the same. Our conversations and conceptions about our site change depending on what we find each day and the conclusions and theories we come up with are reshaped based on those findings. Take last week for example. While articulating the western wall, JuliAnne discovered that there was no foundation. Based on that information we were able to determine where the floor was when the structure was repurposed. Based on pottery that we have discovered around that wall and the fact that the wall we unveiled was less uniform in its construction than the others making up the structure, we have been able to determine that the western wall is Byzantine era rather than Roman like the other walls. Another day as I was digging, I discovered a circular coarse of stones and we have now determined that this structure was most likely repurposed as a baptistery. Each day I am eager and excited to see what there is to discover and to alter the narrative of our site based on new evidence…even if it does mean I have to get up at 5 am.
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