My Trench, or My Life Covered in Dirt

Archaeology is a dirty business.

I guess I've been training for this type of job since I was young, playing for hours upon hours in the sandbox. Essentially, doing archaeology is a grown-up version of playing in the sandbox. Only dirtier. And for many hours in the hot sun every day. This was the first week of excavations and I am in what we think was a former pantry/kitchen for the synagogue complex.

A view from the north entrance of my trench

We know it was partially excavated by Squarciapino in the 1960s but we did not know how much of it had been done. The first thing we did when we started working on the trench (there are three of us working in this location--Amanda, Tony, and I) was to take detailed and precise measurements of the area we were excavating (we started with the southern half...we open the northern part tomorrow) and to draw them out on a plan where we could mark various features of the locus (basically a level of dirt) that we were working on. And then we opened the trench. The first thing we had to do was remove the layer of topsoil and grass and within the first hour of removing the topsoil, I found a floor. Now floors are very fun things in archaeology because they mean that whatever is below the floor can be used to date that level of building (hopefully coins, but pottery works well too).

Floor!

We continued excavating around the floor and found further fun finds in pot shards. My first pot shards. That makes me a real archaeologist because all that archaeologists love are pot shards (a small exaggeration).

I'm a real archaeologist!

Anyhow, by the end of the first day, we had found a shelf of original flooring that was only 5 centimeters or so below the topsoil. When we came back the next day, we were quite excited to articulate (dig down into the backfill from the earlier excavation) the floor that we had found so that the floor would stand out in the photos LMW takes of various stages of the excavations for documentation purposes. 

The floor, articulated.

We came back today (Tony and I had been pressed into duty digging out an old trench after we took this picture...we moved 15 cubic meters of dirt in a couple hours) and started work on pulling out the rest of the Squarciapino backfill and we found some really awesome stuff--two more layers of floor which will hopefully allow us to date the early structure more precisely than we have. Plus we dug a pretty deep hole--and there's a hole within the hole that seems to be some sort of small cavern (perhaps we will find some ancient evil a la Indiana Jones?). So things are going really well with this trench and we're excited to see what else we'll find when we start digging down on the rest of the trench.

Our fearless trench supervisor shows just how deep the trench has gotten

Our trench at the end of the day. On the left you can see the top floor level. The next level down is another floor and at the bottom you can make out what seems to be a base floor. We’ll have to pickax through that to get a sense as to what’s underneath this entire structure.