Tesseritaville

That’s right. Today I spent my day in Tesseritaville. We had music and everything, so it was like a party down at the mosaics.

First off, tessera is a small square of stone used to make a mosaic. And the work done in Tesseritaville is much different than the work done on the rest of the site. In the squares of the site, large tools are used most of the time. Pick axes, turreahs [kind of like a weird shovel used to scoop dirt into the buckets], buckets. Occasionally, smaller tools such as trowels, dust pans, small pick axes, and brushes are used. But in Tessseritaville, the tools are much smaller. Scalpels and that sort of thing are much more common, as well as paint brushes are the more common tools. Maybe a squirt bottle for seeing the pattern more clearly. Another important tool…knee pads. Although, sometimes they are more of a hindrance than a help. The hard part of Tesseritaville is finding a comfortable position to work in, because it won’t be comfortable for long…plus, you need to watch out that you don’t sit or put your feet on the edge of another section of mosaic. So, the question is: are you going to kneel, or sit facing the area, or sit facing the other way, or squat, or maybe even lay down on your stomach? But, no matter which position you do choose, you will not be in it for very long. And that’s only the first part. Next comes the actual work. While sitting in the position that you have deemed comfortable, it is time to slowly scrape away at the plaster above the mosaic you are trying to get to. You see, there was mosaic floor down, and then just like laying on a new linoleum floor or something…they just put plaster down and put a new mosaic floor on top of it. So the section I was working on was getting the plaster off the bottom layer. Which is slow work. I don’t want to explain how small of a section I got done all day. But the interesting thing was I started to see these black tesserae among the white [there are also red in the Northeast Church for sure, I don’t know about other colors there but in other places there are a wide variety of colors] that weren’t in a line, or in any pattern that I could make out. Part of it was cleared before, and I was revealing a little bit more of it. So, out of curiosity I squirted a little bit of water on it to see what would appear before my eyes. And lo and behold, it said, “Happy Birthday, Nancy!” [In Greek, of course] The people who laid the floor knew that there would be crazy people digging up their flooring nearly 2000 years later, and so they left a message for the mosaic supervisor. Amazing, eh? [I had to add the “eh?” to help us all remember the Canadians. They will sadly be leaving us, some today…some tomorrow. They are amazing people, it was great to get to know them. And I loved the treat they had for us singing “Oh, Canada” last night. But not the regular version. Oh, no. Dan’s wife, Connie, found awesome lyrics off the internet. Thanks for that, Connie, that was great!!]

But back to my story, there was obviously not a birthday message to Nancy in the mosaic, and what the black tessera was, I have no idea. It didn’t look like a normal pattern, but there was way too much that still needs to be uncovered before we’ll be able to truly see what it is.

Today was very windy, which would probably sound like it would be nice. And it did create for being a little cooler. But the amount of dust was crazy. We were eating it all day long.

Photography was very interesting today. Since this seemed to be the week for things breaking for me [my body getting sick, my computer] it only seemed fitting that the excavation camera would choose today to break. We should be able to fix it with some superglue. But for today, I went around changing and setting up the sign, and Dr. Schuler took pictures with his high resolution camera.

And, since I keep talking about me being back up at the site today…I hope y’all can tell that I am feeling much better. My stomach does still hurt a little bit, but I’m pretty much back to normal.

But the question of the day has been, “Amanda, how are you feeling?” I wish I would have begun to count how many times it was asked. Andrea, Cameron, and Stephanie were around many times when people asked…so they began jokingly ask me questions kind of relating to how I was doing. There were multiple people in on this, but here’s kind of how part of it went, “How are you feeling? What are your thoughts on cucumbers and tomatoes? What are your thoughts on food? What do you think about this rock? What about life? Any thoughts on life?” Yeah, lots of fun.

Quote of the day: “She’s a closet crazy.”
[Andrea about me, in relation to those who are more obviously crazy]


And I just had to re-write all of that after losing it the first time [another thing that kind of broke on me, I suppose...], and although I feel like I had a little bit more to say this is going to be the end.