Sidebar I figure I ought to put something in here about the usual routine. We worked six days a week, with Friday “off” though we usually worked on Friday, just not with workmen. Usually stuff like checking out other potential sites, photography, planning, registration, catching up on notebooks, etc.
Anyway, we usually all rolled out of bed between 6 and 7:30 just as it was getting light. Very light breakfast of tea or coffee, bread if you wanted it, tea crackers, grapefruit, or whatever else you could scrounge rather than a formal meal. When we were working at HG we’d all load into the Land Cruiser no later than 8 to be on site at 8:30. When we were digging the cemetery we just walked out to the site.
Lunch (which the workmen all called “breakfast”) at 11:30. At HG we had a box lunch. Bread (always), oranges or grapefruit, and stuff to stick in the bread. Usual things were hard boiled eggs, this egg-scramble thing with tomatoes and onions, salad, etc. Also, usually had a round of processed cheese (which wasn’t that bad despite the LOUD complaints of a certain person). Finished up with hot tea served in the usual way – small drinking glasses with lots of sugar.
Back to work until 2 or 2:30 when it started to get hot and the workmen needed to get home to do whatever they needed to do at home.
Usually had the time from getting home until 3:30 or 4 free. “Free” meaning washing your laundry in the basins, filling your shower, catching up on notebooks, fixing things, etc. After 4 it was usually back to work, either around the house in the sherd yard or something similar. Depending on the day, people often went back to the site, especially when we were within easy walking distance, sometimes with workmen, sometimes not to continue excavating or to draw plans until dark. I used this time to catch up on field work and also to do registration things.
Around 7:30 or so (a while after dark), AW Power and Light usually fired up. Also by this time the flies were mostly dead in the WC and so people who’d been holding it all day could go in relative peace. I gotta say, having flies on your ass is not cool. Anyway, the lights came on (most nights) and stayed on for 2 or 3 hours. Most people showered around this time as the shower room was really freakin’ dark otherwise, even with one of the battery-powered lanterns. In my case, this involved getting T to hang up our sunshower since I couldn’t lift it over my head as it was filled with enough water for 2 people. Or, when T was sick, swallowing my pride, deciding not to risk breaking my neck falling off a stool, and asking someone else for help. (“I have always had to rely on the kindness of strangers…”) If you caught it early enough, the sunshowers were usually pleasantly warm having been heating all day (if you remembered to fill it in time). Otherwise, it was freakin’ cold – always on the nights when it was really damn cold too. Aside from the hot spells we had, when the water was practically boiling. Couldn’t hang the sun showers high enough to actually stand under them, so I pretty much spent the whole season performing all intimate functions in a crouch or semi-crouch. I can probably whip out some badass yoga moves now. Damn squat toilets.
Dinner was usually around 8. After the first week or so we banned okra stew. Bread was usual. White beans, lentils, occasionally pasta were typical. Meat once a week or so. Plenty of food, just not a lot of fat.
The water filters crapped out, probably because despite the manufacturers claims, they were not meant for “extreme conditions” unless getting some bacteria out of a perfectly clear Rocky Mountain stream is “extreme.” Nile silt, on the other hand, will mess that shit up good. So, we wound up getting bottles of water from Karima. Water for washing, etc., was brought from the Nile a few times a day by the water guys who served the rest of the village and stored in big plastic barrels.
After dinner, some people go to sleep. Other people sit in bed and read. M lights up his shisha every night and T and R usually join him. Depending on how tired I am, I usually sit in for a few rounds. This is actually an excellent arrangement, as the following anecdote will demonstrate. They usually sit fairly close to the toilet-room thing. This is also, for some reason, near where the few scorpions we had liked to hang out. I can’t remember what day it was, but the first sighting was by the shisha-circle. I was laying in bed at the time reading. I heard T come into the dining room which led off to D and Mg’s room and say “hey there’s a scorpion out here if anyone wants to see it.”
D says she does and yells through the window to see if I do. As I was all warm and cozy in my mummy bag and I’ve seen scorpions before, I declined. So, I’m sitting there listening to everything outside. I hear D go out, T say something to R about not throwing more sand at it because it’s getting pissed…then I hear D sort of yell and come running back in, wondering aloud where her bug-spray is. I yell back that that won’t kill it just as I hear the clang of the shovel and amend “but that will.” So, having the guys smoking shisha near the toilet was actually a much needed service for our safety. Or something.
AW, Thursday, 8 February Started work yesterday on site. Very rich finds from surface collection. Probably primarily Neolithic and Kerma. Hot, long day, but good. Circular collection units with 3 m radius.
AW, Friday, 9 February Couldn’t finish entry yesterday. Another day Thursday of surface collection and topo mapping. Finding lots of enormous, mostly broken grindstones littering the site. Trouble writing. My hands are so badly sunburned that they’ve been threatening to blister since yesterday afternoon. Just brushing the backs against anything is excruciating. Woke this morning to find them swelling. Hope staying (mostly) out of the sun today and tomorrow will help. T got horribly ill around 2 AM, spent most of the night in the latrine. Woke me at some point for Pepto and more TP. He’s slept on and off much of the day but seems to be doing better. Probably just the usual “welcome to a totally foreign country” variety of intestinal trouble as he doesn’t have a fever. G and some of the others are also ill, just nausea and exhaustion it seems (probably something we caught on the plane rather than the food here or anything like that). He wants to start formal excavations tomorrow. I’ll have to miss out. Just a few moments in the sun today threatened blisters on my hands. I’ve torn a bandana in half, wet it, and wrapped it around my hands, but that only helps so much. I assume it’s the sun-sensitivity from the doxycycline causing the problem. I just hope it goes away soon. The feeling of pulsing, radiating heat in my hands is not pleasant, nor is the threat of infection if they do finally blister. The idea of having to stay cooped up in the house for the next month out of the sun is even more unpleasant though. Plan to try to set up the recording database tomorrow while the others are on site.
The house is going to be very crowded when the rest of the team shows up. B usually sleeps in the courtyard, but stores his stuff in the 2nd of the sleeping rooms where M also sleeps, (D and Mg share the other), Bomba sleeps in or near the kitchen. G and R have beds on the veranda. It seems the whole village has the run of the house, regardless of whether the gate is shut, which is a bit wearing. Our neighbor/landlord is almost too sociable. He insists the women must go to visit his wife. We will, eventually, but as I have the most Arabic, it’s likely to be an awkward visit limited to “hello,” “thank you,”, “good,” “yes,” and “tea.” ☺ I’m beginning to think that I will risk malaria (with no meds), insanity (mefloquine), or bankruptcy (Malarone) next season rather than take the damned doxy again.
The crowd of strangers forever talking outside or wandering through the courtyard is threatening to make me display some unpleasant ethnocentric behavior. So long as I don’t wake to find a face in our “window” or have an audience while I change I guess I’ll be fine. The looks of surprise/disapproval as I made my way back to the room after my shower yesterday (fully clothed) of course were a trifle irritating. This is our house for the time being.
The difference in this dig from my past experiences is remarkable, at least in terms of director. G is easy-going, good tempered, tries to be clear, asks for and considers input, and is, in general, a decent human being. How novel.
AW, Saturday, 10 February Another day spent at the house. My hands don’t hurt quite so much, but start to when I go out in the sun. Mg is down with a cold. Everyone else seems okay. They’re starting excavations today. I threatened T with dire punishment if they find anything good without me. Told him to keep and eye on G and vice-versa since I wouldn’t be there to bitch at them in person. I think I’ve got the database worked out. If not, it’ll just been more data entry or more fiddling. I’ve no idea how to cope with some of the data right now, but so long as it gets recorded somewhere we can figure it out later. Worked with ArcGIS to display maps of surface collections and grinding stones from the past few days of work.
The radios don’t work between the house and the site, but I’ve little doubt that G is warbling nonsense into his every now and then to see if he can get a response from me.
I despair of ever learning the ceramic typology here. Between a certain someone’s tangential expository style and the fact that it ALL seems to be impressed with some pattern (or at least some is in all periods) I’m a bit frustrated. I’ll puzzle it out eventually, though.
AW, Sunday, 11 February Unpleasant day, though I did find an Egyptian (style?) seal impression in one of my surface collection units. Starting having awful stomach pains during the morning, so returned to the house with the driver after lunch. Some unpleasantness with Bomba the driver that has, hopefully, been resolved as merely having been a misunderstanding.
AW, Wednesday, 14 February Back to work yesterday to start excavation with 4 workmen – Asir (who has worked in the past with the British team), Idris, Babakir, and Gamar. Asir is serving as a sort of unofficial “Gufti” for me, as he has several seasons experience and speaks fairly good English. Bit of a false start. I wasn’t helping much with the heavy physical labor because that was something I was strongly discouraged from doing in Egypt. Here, however, my helping shift buckets of sand, etc., is met with great approval, so once we got over that hurdle, the guys started to warm up to me.
I got so thoroughly filthy yesterday with sand blowing into my face that at one point G broke off in the middle of a sentence to ask me “How the hell did you do that?”
My thumbs hurt – weird, I know. I’m convinced that I’m sunburned through the nail. Bleh.
Hoping to find something of moderate interest tomorrow. So far just random sherds, bone fragments, etc, and mirages of mudbrick that turn out to jut be compacted (natural) soil, despite digging around the place I found the sealing in the hopes of finding more. G says my most recent area will only be in the middle of nowhere until I find the Napatan city center. I told him he didn’t ask much of me, did he? I guess digging far away from everyone else does have the advantage of forcing me to improve my Arabic.
