Today was a short day on site. Thursday is basically like Friday in the US, so everyone wants to go home early. Not only are we not allowed to stay late if we want (like Tasha and I normally do), we tend to end a little early to pay the workers. I got to help today by counting out money.
Today was rather boring, but the sun was shining and there was no rain. I was able to get over 20 blocks photographed, so the number is down to 116! I'm starting to run out of little, one-sided blocks that I can do by myself. Saturday, the ladder will come out so I can get some of the larger ones, and soon I'm going to have to ask for a few workers to help me position the blocks and roll them over after I photograph a side. Oh well, that's what they are there for, I just kind of like my solitary time in the morning while my brain boots up. I'm a little ADD in the early morning.
I'm sooooo close to finishing bread mould stats (though Lindsey keeps adding more to my pile, silly girl). I should be able to finish them up on Saturday and then start drawing some of Tasha's pottery. I've promised you an explanation of what statistics actually are, so here goes:
The archaeologists assign layers to the area they are digging. These layers are based on several things, but they basically try to keep everything that goes together, together. For instance, the things laying on top of a floor will be given a different number than the things under the floor, or in a fireplace, or outside the wall. Archaeology is all about phases, so we try to be really careful with that. Once the layers have been assigned, the workers start clearing out the area, layer by layer, removing bones, pottery, and stone objects. Those things get sorted by someone (in this case, the wonderful
Lindsey) onto mats:
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| This is something like 1/168 the number of mats and pottery Tasha has. Her dissertation is on all the forms of the late Middle Kingdom through the 18th Dynasty, plus she's basically the head ceramicist for the site, so she has a TON of pottery. This is why I'm learning as much as I can from her, since she's being doing this for a while and is super nice/awesome to boot (plus, she's my roommate). |
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| A single (small) context layer. See those long thin things? Those are my cylindrical bread moulds. |
Each mat is a different layer. Then I (or some pottery person) goes through and records what we have in each layer. So for my bread moulds, I pile all the similar rims together (I get to decide how similar simliar actually is, which is sometimes hard), then all the similar bases together, and all the body pieces together. This all gets recorded with some very brief notes. So I might say something like: flat rims x 4, min= 3 (because 2 rims go to the same pot- this is the minimum possible number of pots we could have), the diameter, any information on the clay or slip used, and finally a little drawing so I know what I mean. Eventually, I'll draw a few of the rims and bases, but it's not possible to draw EVERYTHING, so as long as I know that I have 4 others like it, I can get away with drawing only 1 of a specific type of rim, but be able to publish more information than just that drawing. Does that make sense? Thankfully, I don't have to do it for everything, as it takes FOREVER! Tasha has to take even more info than I do (all of my sherds are made of a similar clay) and I do not envy her. Well, now you know what I do. Hopefully, I'm doing it right, as it's a bit of a make-it-up-as-you-go guessing game, and I'm sure I'll look through things and go "why did I do this?" or "what does rounded flat mean?" or "crud, I did this one way for the first half and another way later on", but I'll make it work. In the end, it's my first stab and all exposure to the material is good exposure.
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| My statistics notes on top of a larger context layer. Look at all my pretty bread moulds! These guys I like a lot, since they are really interesting and there are so many of them. There are other bread-related pottery that I want to throw at a wall... multiple times... |
