The days available for excavation, lecturing, and paperwork grow increasingly short now that we're on the downward side of the project. Each day, now, about four inspectors stay at base camp and rotate through the specialists (conservation, databases, archeozoology) to see what they're doing. Some of the specialists take them all at one time and need to give the same demo/talk just once each day.

Given the limited space around the computer and desire to involve the inspectors directly with getting information from paper unit sheets or find tags into the database, I go through the process with each one individually. Therefore I'm giving the same 45-minute show-and-tell four times each morning for five days straight. This is somewhat wearing on the voicebox, but should result in much better understanding of where information flows and how useful databases can be on a project.

And just in case you haven't been on a fieldschool recently, let me remind you that as archaeologists dig trenches they record meticulously every nuance of the soil and things they find in it. All of this gets recorded on various forms and item tags, which then must be transcribed into the database for quick and efficient retrieval. If you think reading handwriting written in field conditions can be hard, try reading handwriting written in field conditions by people who don't know English that well... :-) (Hard as that may be, it's not as hard as reading handwriting written by people working under water when they're very cold and using stubby little pencils.)

And if you wonder why we're not using some kind of nifty little palm computers to record things digitally straightaway, let me explain. No, that would take too long. Let me sum up: Willeke thought about it, but decided that we don't want to wow our inspectors with technology in the field. We want to show them that they can do good archaeology with pencil and paper, so they should make records and worry about getting the facts first, then later they can put them into computers or what have you. Handhelds would work well here because of the dry weather and would save a lot of time, but might discourage anyone who thinks they're necessary to do the work.

I haven't felt well the past two days -- another stomach bug of some sort -- but back to normal today. Between that and our photographer needing to enter information into databases every afternoon, it's become harder to post updates to this site as often or as timely as I prefer. Willeke will have the latest weekly report soon, which has a nifty panorama that will be fun to look at.


Here's lunch from a couple of days ago


OK -- back to work bagging finds from yesterday. Still nothing of great interest. Got a third coin, but as badly corroded as the other two, so not much hope of it providing any useful information.