Desert Living: Part 2: The Conclusion

It is a sad thing to write the last blog in a seemingly endless stream of blogs depicting foreign episodes and acts of stupidity on my part. This is the last blog to talk about this trip to the other side of the world that I began six months ago (can you believe that I've really been gone that long? It doesn't seem like that at all). I hope that there will be more adventures and there will be definitely be more blogs to come, but probably not quite as exciting for the next little while. Keep tuning in though, because you never know. Now, on to the real reason any of you actually tune in to this page...

Jordan...The Final Half of Field School

I left off the last blog entry some where around the mid-way point, with our trip to Petra and the subsequent return to camp life from there. As time invariably went on, everyone settled into a routine that became natural...with the early mornings, long days, and short evenings. We all became proficient in our areas of excavation and had found niches for ourselves in the lab. Everyone was coming together like a well oiled machine and life was passing by swiftly.

My area, T, quickly started to expose its hidden secrets to the steady working of excited undergraduates and diligent supervisors. The rock piles disappeared and a four-chambers building was revealed. Everyday some small, seemingly inconsequential find would be unearthed, sending a flock of eager students to the dusty pit to see what it was. These little treasures made the days more exciting and meaningful, for they were a sign that something existed beneath the tons of dirt and slag that we were removing.

I was assigned one of the rooms myself, with the help of a few Bedouin. After 2-3ft down from the top rock pile, I ran into a heavy slag/ash layer. This layer turned out to be 2.5m (or there about) deep and produced 2,046.13kg of slag. My room was L-shaped and approximately 4m X 1.6m. I was literally picking slag out right and left. I used up about 20 gufas (buckets to carry dirt) and then decided that there weren't enough left for the amount of slag that was coming out, so I built a slag tower. I took the gufas that I'd filled and made a circle that was 2 gufas high and then piled excess slag inside. Even this wasn't good enough. The slag weighers and counters had to weigh and discard the first 1300kgs and then have me build a new tower. I believe that my small locus produced the most slag of any locus anywhere else on the entire site. It became a joke among us, cause people would start telling me to stop producing slag and that we didn't need anymore, that we had enough...I told them, I'd try, but it didn't look like the room was ready to stop spitting it out.

By the time that I reached the end of the never-ending slag layer, much of the rest of the building was exposed and there were many new and exiting finds. The remains of a stairwell were found in the alleyway between my room and the main corridor of the structure. The slag that I went through is believed to be fill that was used to support a staircase that went all the way to the top of a possible guard/lookout tower. This stairwell, the additional wall that truncated the width of my room by half, and the fill, were all part of a later occupation layer. It was really cool to be able to see the clear delineation between the different time periods. Elsewhere in the building were found; the remains of a plaster floor that traveled from the entrance all the way to the back (cultic?) room (two large standing stones were found on either side of a doorway and there is evidence that different activities occurred here than elsewhere in the building), an oven that was possibly used for a human cremation, date seeds (that are wonderful for dating time periods and practically had the Director peeing his pants in excitement), and some Cypro-phenician pottery (which provides cultural links and some contextual dating).

After the main structure was exposed, we starting opening trenches all over the place to see how many occupation layers were underneath the building itself, and whether we could find bedrock. I dug trenches within trenches within trenches in my little room and eventually ended up in a 1m X 1m hole 3.5m underground. My friends would come over, laugh and then leave. I was at the mercy of whomever had the ladder, because I couldn't climb out on my own. This only added to the mirth of those around me. But it's okay...I really enjoyed digging in my own private corner and the fact that my unit was so unique and different than everyone else's.

Towards the last few weeks on the dig, you could sense the tension in the air and people's waning interest in desert living and excavation. Many people were loving what they were doing, but colder whether and ice showers were taking there toll. By the time that the final week popped up, most everyone was thinking of home. It was a crazy end to the dig, because in that final week, we arbitrarily stopped digging on a specific day. We didn't stop cause we'd acquired all the information that was there to find, but because we were out of time and that's the way it goes. It kind of made the taste of accomplishment bitter. But such are the way that things go sometimes. We can take solance in the fact that we did uncover the entire structure and that we did get a ton of information and data from our unit and that we weren't as abrupt in our completion as a few of the other groups on site.

We spent the last few days on site drawing wall profiles to scale. This took a lot of tedious measurements and immense patience, but the final products are beautifully rendered renditions of the various walls in the structure and all the straitigraphic levels that were dug beneath them. A few students then took the drawings and scanned them into photoshop, cleaned them up a bit, added labels, and wham, publication ready, to scale, portraits.

Those not working on drawings crunched down on their specific areas: pottery, metallurgy, dirt lab, GIS, groundstones, bones, and inventory. We all worked well and against expectations, we were done, loaded, and waiting hours early on the last day. The Directory and all the other supervisors were shocked and excited because this was something new. They were used to having to rush on the last morning and be in fear that something would get forgotten or remain undone, but as it turned out, we were efficient and fast. I believe everyone was just looking forward to their explorations after camp or their flights home and as a result, worked better and faster as if that would make the end appear sooner.

This field school was a great experience overall. I gained further knowledge in this crazy field of archaeology that I seem to be drawn to; I learned what it's like to work on a huge excavation with actual free-standing buildings to uncover; how it is to live and breath archaeology for months, with really no breathing room; how to go without many of the perceived amenities and concessions that I, as an American, had become so used to; I made some great friends; and I discovered some more about myself and went further down the road of self-exploration.

This field school concludes a trip I set out on practically nine months ago. This trip began with the packing up of my life into boxes and putting them into storage as I drove myself and a few minimal processions to Colorado. In Colorado, I spent three months learning what it's like to teach younger generations about the past and what it's like to see one of those kids get a spark in their eyes that with a little encouragement might lead to great things. From Colorado, I took a few less of my remaining possessions and set off for the Middle East. There I learned that perceived notions and irrational fears based on second-hand information are unfounded and lead to people censoring and limiting themselves in their lives and wishes and goals. I meet people from around the world, all with different backgrounds, different religions, different beliefs, but mostly, with the same philosophies in life in regards to meeting and socializing with others - that you should base a person's worth on their actions and ideologies and not on those of their culture/country/or religion. From the Middle East, I went north and west and ended up in Eastern Europe, where modern day and the past meld together to form a comfortable middle ground. There there were more life lessons and nuggets of knowledge to gleam from midnight conversations and city wandering. I visited my host family of old and re-treaded my old hunts in the illustrious city of Prague. I said goodbye and re-entered the world of academia in the mist of a country where many of it citizens live the same now as they did hundreds, possibly thousands, of years ago. I joined a 24/7 field school where I spent time learning the past through the uncovering of ruins and the story exchange with locals. I found some kindred spirits and realized that less can sometimes be more. This trip, this exploration, this travel, has taught me many things, while re-enforcing others, re-arranging ideals, changing pre-conceived beliefs, and allowing me to get a few small steps closer to determining what it is that I really want to get out of life.

I want to thank all of you that have faithfully joined along with me in my adventures, lent your encouragement, advice, jokes, and moral support. It's been a fun ride, but like many things there comes a time when the ride ends and you need to get another ticket to go again. So stay tuned and don't just stop reading, I will purchase that new ticket and be on the ride again soon enough.