Things are coming in from the field now, about 50 yesterday and 75 today (Sunday) so I'm definitely busy classifying and bagging them, and recording them in our databases.

The excavation teams haven't really begun to dig yet (these things come from very near the surface), but we have several bags of pottery sherds, some pieces of broken glass, chunks of animal dung, seeds, pieces of wood, a metal fragment, various bits of plant remains, some assorted pieces of bones, a small dessicated snake head, and a scarab beetle (not nearly as big as the ones in the Mummy movies). All of this is typical and straightforward and unexciting stuff, but all will be used to analyze the site later.

On Friday, our day off, I didn't feel well at all (stomach bugs, like most people get in these circumstances) so didn't go swimming, but did join the group for dinner out at a local fish place. Everyone ordered either one kind of fish or the other, the first being a local one caught in the lake here, and the second being a kind that comes only from the brackish water where the Nile meets the Meditteranean Sea. I had the latter and found it quite good. Dinner included a Coca-Cola which went down real well -- cold and bubbly.

Apparently the hot weather we've been having is unusual for the time of year here, so there's still hope it will cool down and if so, I'll be a lot happier. I find the heat draining, with only semi-cool water to mitigate it. But as of tonight, there's a new resource to fight the heat. Down the street a little ways, there's a tiny corner store that we just tried for the first time. They sell soda from a cooler that's good enough to leave the soda partially frozen in its (tiny) bottles. I had three! Yay! *Little dance of joy!*

The walk to the store takes us past a variety of structures, most of which appear to be houses built of mud brick, and at least one mosque. There are four barefoot boys playing with a soccer ball in a dusty courtyard. There are men and kids riding donkeys -- one has a baby donkey following him. Two woman with veiled faces and covered heads walk by, one with a twig cage containing four black-and-white ducks on her head. A couple of water buffalo are led by, but turn off before we get close to them. Several mud splattered mutts trot along on their own errands. Some tired-looking guys sit on the stone bench by the store and watch us drink our sodas. Everything smells of dust and farms and animals and their activites (I'm very used to it through growing up on a farm so no problem).

Life here seems little changed from what it must have been like over the past couple thousand years for the most part. I'm told that many of the houses we passed, however, belong to foreigners and/or people who live in Cairo, and I suppose those are the nicer ones. One is apparently for sale, with the land around it. Men work long hours in the fields taking down one crop and putting in another. Right now, sorgham is being harvested. The farmers use a serrated sickle to top the plants, then allow the cattle in the field to eat the remaining stalks and leaves. Sesame is also grown here, and the farmers pull the plants out by the root, then while they're drying for seed release, they put in new crops.

Pictures of a batch of finds to-be-processed and my computer station follow. It's time for me to catch a lecture by our paleobotany specialist who will talk about various crops and how plants have been used by people in various ways through history.

(JournalScape had some technical difficulties that delayed this post, which was written at the posting time shown, although it may not have been posted then.)


My workstation (color printer, UPS, monitor, scanner, CPU)



My finds table. All finds come here for rebagging and sorting and label checking, then get entered into a database, then get put in boxes sorted according to item type.