I have some reservations about trying to describe an average day for the excavation. One of the biggest reasons why is that nothing about being here is average for me. Life here is clearly different from life back in the United States and with our short amount of time here it is a challenge to describe anything as average. Of course there are some things that happen during the dig that are constant every week. Our days are fairly strictly scheduled which gives a sense of stability. If I could strip a day of excavating down to the absolute basics of the schedule than perhaps that could be considered an “average” day.
The weekdays always start with two or three alarms going off, some more annoying than others. Sometimes people neglect to hit snooze on these alarms which allows them to continue well past the socially acceptable amount of time to leave an alarm running. These alarms usually do a good job of waking everyone up, but people still like to stay in bed for 10 or 15 minutes. I try to get up to change into my reliably dirty dig clothes at 5:05 while the bathroom is still open. Then at around 5:35, the apartment group gets on the bus to ride to Antiochia. We eat breakfast and walk to the acropolis where we dig until 1:00. We eat lunch and ride back to the apartment for a break to shower and rest before going to the dig house to work with pottery. At the dig house we then eat dinner and fill out our notebooks and try to get to bed by 10:00.
The problem with this description is that this standard day never happens. There will always be many things that don’t go according to this typical layout, like the time we found three scorpions in one day at AC-7, or the time that I saw a donkey bee kill a wasp in flight and fly away with it during breakfast. Nowhere does the schedule factor in time for water breaks or time to discuss the new wall (or potentially buttress) that we find and how it influences our interpretation of the site. A discussion of the typical day for the archeologist is useless when there is no telling what is ahead at AC-7.