The Amazing (volunteer) Archeologists

Anita Burns personifies confident anticipation. Each day on the dig she crows, "We're going to find something amazing! I feel it." Or she happily announces the "amazingness" of our team. Today proved her right. With the help of Aboud and K'sigh, we removed the last rocky half of our very rocky balk. In the process we found two cowrie shells with the tops neatly sawed off. Pretty amazing.

Later I worked the sift and heard a shout, "Rebecca, we found a nose!" Thinking sagaciously that noses are made of cartilage, I trooped towards the square wondering who wanted to pull my leg. But Anita made good on the claim and showed me the diminutive ceramic nose severed cleanly from the face of some lost figurine. Soon I was crowing about the amazing find and a group gathered to see what caused the hullabaloo. Back at camp, our nose was a show and tell item for the day along with a piece of potter boasting a potter's mark from another square.

This exciting little spurt of "amazingness" helped carry us through the long afternoon pottery reading. Kent Barmlet spent almost an hour with the ten pails worth of finds from field M. One surprising piece that I scrubbed yesterday turned out to be a fragment of ostrich shell. Hm! After the reading I sat in the shade with those already scrubbing today's finds. Ten pails from field M once again. From all that we collect, about 5% is considered diagnostic. The rest is scooped back into pails and returned to a dump site back at the tall.

For a broader view of what's happening this season, visit the MPP official dig site for weekly updates.