It's been quite the busy and exciting (but mostly busy) few days! I think I should be more tired than I am, so I'll have to go to bed early tonight.
Saturday was our weekly day off (since we're such badasses we only need one...?), and most of the crew went to the nearby town of Sarlat for the big weekly open-air market. It was hot, busy, and full of lots of things to see--there were tons of stalls selling weird things...like AC/DC t-shirts and African masks...but there were also tons of stalls selling gorgeous produce, various jars of duck and goose parts (oh, how the French love their confit), and all kinds of food, tablecloths, porcelains, and pretty much anything else you might imagine. I tagged along on a few dig errands, bought some postcards, and got myself one of the little wooden-handled folding knives that apparently you need to be a REAL archaeologist in France.
That folding knife came in handy on Sunday--I went to the dig to work, and it was the first day of real layer-by-layer excavation, not the bulk dirt removal that we had been doing to get the site ready. The layers that we were working on held tons of little chips of flint and animal bone--a lot of the latter had been burned, which was interesting. About halfway through the afternoon, I uncovered a weird-looking object which looked like layers and layers of stacked stone, but not quite. I thought it looked a lot like a tooth, structurally speaking, but it was too big for me to take that idea seriously. I worked on it all afternoon, picking away with a trowel, brush, and my little folding knife, and finally got the sediment levels down to the base of the object....which turned out to be a TOOTH FROM A WOOLY MAMMOTH!!! So...THAT was a highlight. :) It was a great thing to find on my first day of real excavation. I hope I did/continue to do a good job with excavating, since that's really what matters, but I can't help being really excited about uncovering something so freaking cool.
Today was incredibly hot (something like 35 or 38 Celsius, which is around 100 Fahrenheit...ergh.), but I was at the dig house doing lots of artifact washing, labeling, and data entry, so it wasn't too bad. I kept having to stick my head under the faucet because I felt overheated, and after our work day ended, several of us walked down to the river to swim. That was the best I've felt all day--the river was cold and refreshing, and we splashed around until we felt normal again. Then we came back and had dinner--I really don't understand the logic behind the meal plan here...today's dinner was pot au feu, which is pretty much stewed beef and vegetables. It's supposed to be a heavy dish for the middle of winter, so having it on a hot sultry evening was a little uncomfortable. I was really hungry from swimming, though, so I managed.
Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back at the dig...and hopefully it'll be a bit cooler! I'm going to go have a nice cold drink of water and see if anybody wants to make things out of flint with me. :)
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