First Dig Day!

Hello all. No pictures because I don't have much time before I have to go to the first lecture of the season! Today was our first day of digging! Well...except that no digging occurred. Come one, this is archaeology: things never go exactly on time, never go exactly how you plan, and starting up always takes longer than expected.

So to begin, I'll explain our set up. We have two fields of excavation, A and B. Last year I was placed in the northern most square of Field A. This year I'm in Field B. We were all told that there would be enough squares opening up that we would all get our own squares, which made me super nervous. However, we got up there to find out that in Field B, this may not be so. We don't know. It seems that everything going for Field B right now is "we just don't know yet." It's quite frustrating. Elliot, our supervisor, hasn't really been around enough for us to ask questions and learn things, so we've been asking Sam Wolff and Steve Ortiz instead...but they don't exactly know because Elliot isn't around to discuss things with them. Well, we all went up today, cleared out the central balk to provide a wheel barrow path and begin markings for square divisions and bench marks for levels and height measurements. We all went down for second breakfast, had the volunteers separated out into their fields, and told to begin with whatever the field was going to do.

Except that there was no Elliot. We had no idea what to do. Luckily, most of the squares were mapped out with steaks, so we started by clearing out all the weeds. Finally Elliot arrived 15 minutes before fruit break and had us start setting up shade cloths. But he wants us to sow them together...and there's only one needle. I felt so lost the whole time and kept asking the other supervisors what we should be doing, but they had no idea. All in all, both fields were in total chaos today. However, I learned the hard way (meaning being slightly reprimanded without it seeming like I was being reprimanded and thinking for a long long time on it) that "supervising" means "finding things for other people to do" not me looking for things to do. So I shall be keeping a closer eye on the volunteers and doing less work myself, I guess, which makes me a little sad. I like doing the digging. But I do remember last year my supervisor said that he wished he could do more hands-on stuff in the square instead of writing notes. *sigh* oh well.

Our new conservator is super awesome. She's a total sweetheart and I love her already. her name is Heather. She's a ton of fun but also can be very serious when discussing theories and when it comes down to conservation. And due to last year's events with titan clashes between a certain professor who's name I shouldn't mention and one of the field supervisors has lead to a slight switch in supervisor positions.

But now it's lecture time and I must end. See yas!