Friday At Last

Hi everyone its friday!!! Yay, last day till the weekend. Today i was in the lab with Kelly and Emily. We labeled pottery why listening to some crazy girlie music. I dont think Bill the lab directer really appreciated our taste in music. So after that i went out to the dig site. We are still all working on LCZ.  I got to dig which was different. I was working in an area that is really hard packed with rocks, and cement.  My team has to take a mini pick axe and take  it out layer by layer. It took forever and i have huge blisters on my hand. This section of the site is new and we are not sure what we will find so we have to go slowly. We did find a continuation of a terracotta pipe from the 1700s ish. We also found some brownish dirt, don't worry ill explain what that means. In Salemi dirt that hasn't been dug through my people, is this light gray color, and is called bedrock and its really hard packed. After you pass through what is called the modern soil or top soil, you might hit this bedrock. Bedrock is soil that hasnt been touched my humans for the most part. So most likely no matter how far you dig you wont find anything man made. We did hit some bedrock but we also found some brown dirt, see how this is important. In the brown dirt we found modern pottery and a ton of medievel roof tiles. The brown dirt has had human activity, We aren't sure how deep the brown soil goes, if it does go deeper it could be an old trash pit. Which for an archaeologist are like one of the best things to find. Why? Because think about this, let say that in the iron age they built a trash pit. They start to fill it with an old potter bowl maybe some food, or broken tools. Then time passes and now the Greek are here and they start throwing out their stuff in the pit. People don't usually mess with what they think is trash so the pits are usually left undisturbed. This is great because then the artifacts are in layers which are great for determining a time line. In this site last year they found an old Roman Cystern which was used at a trash pit. This pit is huge and was full of pottery, and its only about three meters from the spot we found dark soil. So it could mean another pit, and i did find something that could indicate that. When i was digging i found a Tesserra tile. Those are what they call the pieces of mosaic the Greek use. I also found a Bronzes coin. However they where both found mixed with modern pottery and medievel pottery. The Greek period was before the Medievel period so this means that the tile and coin had been   somehow mixed up to the modern level, so they are out of context. Also the coin is only renaissance period. Which hear is relatively early, even though its older then anything in the Sates. Here in Salemi Medievel pottery is literary garbage, and renaissance is kind of cool to look at but nothing special. It the Greek, Roman, Elymi stuff we want to find. So my finds weren't the best but it indicates hope so we should keep digging and see what we find. After digging we had dinner got cleaned up and took our pottery exam. It wasn't that bad got a few silly ones wrong though. After the test a bunch of us went out to a Club aka what they call Bars that have permits to stay open late. It was only nine or so when we went out, and it Salemi people don't really start going out till 11 or later. So it was a little dead out but it was fun having the place to ourselves. All in all a good day i learned a lot about digging, and now i cant wait till saturday, so with out further ado, A Domani “till tomorrow”