Being a grimy archaeologist... and LOVING it!

So here I am on my dig in Populonia, Italy. I've only been here two days, but they have been so fantastic. I'll start from the beginning...

I left Florence on a 9.30 am train that I nearly missed, and changed after 45 minutes in Pisa to go to the nearest station, Campiglia Marittima. The train ride from Pisa was about an hour and a half, and I really just stared out the window the whole time. We passed through green rolling farmland and tuscan villas and towns. Suddenly, the rolling hills made an abrupt, rocky descent and the sparkeling, deep turqoise water of the Mediterranean came into view. From then on, we dribbled along the coastline, making this one of the most beautiful train rides I've been on.

I arrived at the station totally fine and waited for the organizer of the dig to pick me up. When I got in the car, she said "We will stop at the accomodation for a few minutes so you can drop off your luggage and change into pants and then we will go right to the dig for lunch. We're sharing townhouses with about 5 people per town house stuffed into two small rooms. It's small, but totally livable and pretty nice. It's a 30 second walk from the main street in town (which has a bar, a supermarket, and one other store) and a 5 minute drive from the site of the dig.

The dig site is SUPER cool. It's this ancient Roman villa right on this hill overlooking the sea. The beach is a 5 minute walk away. There are two groups of volunteers on the site. I'm in the student group which is all archaeology/anthropology/classics majors from the US and Canada. The other group is from an organization called Earthwatch. Earthwatch is a major non profit that does scientific and cultural stuff all over the world. Their program is significantly more expensive, so it's mostly older people. They also take more trips, have less crowded rooms, and get lessons in archaeology. They are working on a different part of the villa. The part they are working on may have been part of the guest house and borders on the central garden. We are working on the cistern (to collect water), the baths, and a part of the villa possibly used for making iron products. There are no other villas as far as we know that have a labor section such as this. We are really digging up history. There's this other underground thing that is rumored to have a mosaic floor at the bottom of it. Unfortunately we don't have the funding to excavate the structure safely.

Several years ago, the University of Florence excavated part of the site and found a mosaic floor with a depiction of Medusa. That has since been recovered by soil and plants as there has not been excavation for a while. We are not able to re-excavate it because the likelihood that it would get damaged or destroyed by weather and stupid people is very high and there's not enough money to protect it at this point.

They let us really jump in and do a lot of the work. We used this machine to survey the ground before excavating the layer, checking the height of different points, etc. We sketch it into this book. Yesterday, we uncovered the full floor of the cistern. Unfortunately, we didn't find much, just a few pieces of broken pottery that was pretty unimportant it appeared. Today however, they found the bottom of this pot in what may have been part of the main house. We couldn't excavate it fully because it was part of the next layer.

Each layer of the soil is from a different period. You can tell the difference through color, consitancy, etc. of the soil. We excavate one layer at a time and fully survey and take notes about the layer before digging through it. The next layer is supposedly full of pottery, or at least it appears so. I think we'll be doing that tomorrow, which is MAJORLY exciting.

After lunch, we walked down to the beach. It is SO gorgeous. The water is this rich azure in the middle and a brilliant aqua toward the shallows. I can't wait to go swimming there.

Everyone on the dig is really nice and so wondeful. A bunch of people are leaving soon, but I think new people will be coming too. This work we're doing is SO exciting and everyone is so intelligent and passionate. The week before I came, I seriously debated not coming because I missed home so much, but I'm so glad I did.

I'm going to go eat dinner now. As an added perk, the food's AMAZING and the wine comes in giant jugs from the vineyard directly next to the dig site. This weekend, we may go trekking on the Isle of Elba and see Napolean's villas and a Roman villa that's there. We'll have a picnic lunch and hang out on the beach. I'm excited!