Digging Again!

Greetings!! I write to you with my last week more than halfway over! It is so strange that the trip is so quickly coming to an end, but looking back at this past month, I have certainly learned a lot, experienced a lot, and dug a lot of dirt! Dr. Schuler calculated the amount of dirt that was in the room that I dug in for three weeks: it was a lot of dirt!

Today at the site I was digging again! It was nice to get back to the dirty work. In the beginning of the day I was working with Paul and Mark in a square called E2. It is in the back of the church (to the west of the aps, or the front) and is where the atrium would be on a normal church. This, however, is not looking like a normal church right now! We have been digging back there for about a week, looking for a floor or some signs of an atrium, which should be there; however, we are not finding anything! So, I worked in a small section in the morning. My section is directly to the right of a wall. The wall separates the area we were working from a series of a couple of rooms that were excavated for the past two weeks. To the right of the wall were I was working, it was starting to look like there was evidence of a staircase because about 1 meter has been dug down from the ground level and this staircase seems to ascend to that. I cleared around where we believe the staircase to be, but we're still not sure if it is a staircase or not.

After breakfast and after not finding much in the square, we decieded to do a probe in this area. A probe is when we dig down in a small area to figure out what is below. This way we didn't have to make our way down slowly, slowly, slowly with the whole area, but just work on a small bit. So after breakfast Marc (a different Mark from this morning) and I worked on the probe area. We got down about a foot in a 2.5x1 meter area. It was slow work because there is a lot of plaster we have to hack through, but hopefully tomorrow something more will come up. Thus far, we haven't found much!

So, that is about it for today... it was a day of hard work and a little dirt moved. Tomorrow is our last day of work and then on Thursday we will all turn into Dirterellas, cleaning the sqaure and taking photographs of it! Stay tuned tomorrow for the closing developments of this digging season!!

...peace...

(the picture at the top is the square I was working on today in the probe area... sorry I don't have any more pictures.)