Wittenberg in Egypt

Hey everyone! I’m sorry that it’s been so long but it took a while to get the internet connection set up here. So, we’ve been very busy this week! After we arrived in Cairo on Sunday, we headed out to our residence where we are living…Nikki will tell you more about that later.

We are currently excavating a Coptic (Eastern Christians in Egypt) monastery from the 6th century AD located in Wadi Naturn (about a half hour from where we stay). Every morning we wake up at 4:15 because we have to load our things and get on the road by 4:45. Even though that is incredibly early, it turns out that the desert does not get too unbearably hot until around 10 am, so we can get in a good four and half to five hours of work before the heat makes us collapse (HAHA nobody collapsed yet, dont worry). But really, the desert is actually pretty pleasant in the morning, and we are always surprised how awake we feel by the time we get off the bus and take a short three-quarter mile hike to where we are excavating. We spend about an hour reviewing our narratives from the day before and starting a new one for that day. An archaeologist’s narrative is a running commentary of what is happening in our unit (we each have our own 5 x 5 meter unit within the larger site). We take notes about the texture of the sand and mudbrick, as well as its color and measurements and dimensions. We also note if anything has changed from day to day. Sometimes in the morning, the presence of moisture on the sand helps define formations underneath and we are able to see things that we couldnt see the afternoon before.

After we describe our unit, we begin work for the day. Each of us is assigned a team of Egyptian workers who help us with surface scrapes. We are currently digging down 10cm at a time and we do this across our entire unit so everything stays level. In archaeology, the layers (or stratigraphy) is very important because the way artifacts fall in relation to each other paints a picture for us of what happened at our site. We have a ceramicist who catalogues our finds (such as plaster, pottery, glass, or organic materials) and is able to identify diagnostic pieces–those that help us assign dates to our finds. In our last blog, we talked about some arabic words we learned, but now we have had to learn words that help us communicate with our workers on site. We have a complex system of cataloguing in place, so knowing which finds come from which layers or areas of the unit is really important. Thus, we’ve learned the arabic words for “pottery”, “glass”, “level”, “here”, “there”, “plaster”, “five centimeters” and “please go slowly”. It’s really strange, but interesting, to learn a language in this way–not by things you want to say, but by things you have to say in order to accomplish anything.

Besides the actual supervising of the dig in our unit, we are also responsible for creating a top plan of what is happening in our unit. These are done on a 1:50 scale, meaning they are pretty generic in detail but still give us room to do accurate measurements and indicate where we have found things. These top plans are turned in every evening so Dr. Brooks Hedstrom and the other supervisors can create a master plan of the entire excavation site by piecing all of our top plans together. Therefore, we have to be really careful to take good measurements and good notes in our narratives so that the other people on the team will understand what happened in our unit each day.

We work until the afternoon, where it gets so hot that it is dangerous for us to be outside any longer. We have a few hours after lunch to rest, and then the remainder of each day is spent processing our data and updating our written narratives into the computer database. This takes A LOT longer than you would think…no matter how early we start, we still are working on things until 8 or 9 usually…which is kind of late when you have to wake up at four!

That being said…I need to get to bed! But everything is going really well and we are having a much better time than we anticipated. Even the hard work is fun because you get to uncover artifacts that haven’t been touched for over a thousand years! We will update again soon, it wont be as long of a lapse as last time!

Ma’as Salaama!
Erin