In the past week, I have grown so much as an excavator and archaeologist. Physically, I can feel myself growing stronger and more capable of carrying larger rocks and heavier buckets. In the same vein, I have really found my niche in doing refined work in the unit. While we all remove rocks (and I do have quite a lot of fun with that), I have found myself to be particularly skilled at brushing and cleaning up areas of compacted dirt that have been picked away at by my teammates. I still have to take breaks while working, but they have become fewer and further between–I have also noticed that I have been less thirsty and drank less water as a result. I love learning as many new skills as possible, and now I know how to soil type and take elevations using surveying technology, which I think is really cool. I have grown a much stronger appreciation for the physical difficulty of archaeology, but I have also observed just how much knowledge is required to be a truly great archaeological researcher. So many scientific fields (i.e. biology, geology, chemistry, physics) are required in order to be a truly knowledgeable archaeologist, and I hadn’t really considered that in full before this week. This point was driven home by the conversation we had about geology this week, and how much Dr. Howe was able to teach us off the cuff about the rocks and mountains of turkey.
I wanted to point out just how proud I am of the work done by my team in the past two weeks, and how much progress we have made on our unit. We found a second wall that joins with the original wall of our courtyard, and in just 4 working days we have excavated a significant amount of this new wall, enough to be able to make observations about its construction and age (spoiler: it is a poorly constructed butt joint with the original wall). Our team has really grown stronger and I feel like we have all learned so much from our supervisor Olive. This was really showcased this Monday when Olive had to leave the site early due to sickness, and we were able to continue our work as normal without her supervision. While Tim did come and give us advice on a few things, the three of us that were left generally operated independently, and were able to not only level out our unit, but we took elevations, did calculations on those elevations, took photos, and opened a new locus all on our own. While we missed Olive greatly that day, it was really inspiring to see just how much we have all learned already–we were able to make decisions about what steps to take next, about which rocks we should touch/leave in place, and we were really proud of the work we had done by the time we cleaned up. We’ve dug so far that we needed to construct steps to exit our unit!!!! I can’t wait to keep learning more skills, but I know that I’ve already gained SO much new knowledge and interesting stories that I look forward to sharing with my loved ones.