Two whole weeks! Very short time to accomplish the amount of work that we have done, ladies and gentlemen, many people are saying this. Say, I’m up in Unit 7B, wonderful people, folks, let me tell you. There were a lot of roots up there at the start, Holm Oak is what they’re calling it, Holm Oak, a very nasty plant–but up here at Unit 7B, we get things done, we’ve been going in with the pickaxes and the pry bars and the root clippers, and we took all of the roots out and all of the rocks out, we’ve leveled down by quite a few feet, they’re saying that no other Unit on the Acropolis North Slope has made as much progress as us, ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to say that, the most progress in history!
I can’t keep writing like that but I am seriously proud of the work everyone in my Unit and I have put in over the past 2 weeks. Every day it feels like we only made a bit of progress, but then you step back and look at how much we’ve excavated and you can see that we are slowly but surely making sense of our unit. There are so many things that we’ve found that have really helped me get a sense of how archeology works, like the combination of slag we found and a possible burn layer a few inches below our current elevation. In isolation, those two discoveries amount to a formless metal lump and some discolored dirt. But when taken together and examined with the proper scientific and historical contexts, we have dozens of theories about what may have taken place near our unit. Was there a fire that caused our section of the house to become uninhabitable? Was our unit the place where burnt pottery and metal slag was dumped as trash? I was always fascinated how archeologists are able to examine such little evidence, but come up with so many theories and so many plans of action to uncover even more of their sites. Now I’m doing that. Not to say that we haven’t been finding much evidence, of course, we have found incredible amounts of pottery, glass, and bones, more than I ever thought I would handle in my life.
I have also been pleasantly surprised by just how social Archeology is. Working and talking in my unit has helped make the time pass very quickly, and it has been a blast to get to know my unit members better (hey Yahir! Abbey! Nico! You guys are great!). It has also been fun to watch the progress of other units, whether its looking awestruck at the beautifully preserved roof nails from 7A or my spirited rivalry with 7D over who has the better wall in their unit (they won). And of course, it’s always fun to go to tea break and tell all the people not on the ACNS how much better our location is than theirs (kidding. Mostly).
But it has not been all Byzantine glass and boulder-heaving: there have been some things I have found genuinely difficult. I was sick as a dog on Tuesday, fatigued out of my mind and barely able to talk without coughing. Normally, I would have passed on the physical challenges of the dig site in that state. But I realized that I needn’t fear, for I had a Fellas™ High-Protein bar with me. The Fellas™ does not melt, does not go bad, and never fails to energize me, no matter what challenges the day might bring. So make sure to stop by your local Migros Jet or BIM and buy a delicious and healthy Fellas™ High-Protein bar today!