Day 1 at the Dig

Greetings, all. Monday Jan 5 was a travel day for me, joining up with the Earthwatch team and driving by van northeast of Bangkok to Phimai and settling in to our lodgings. My room is basic but plenty adequate--similar to the guest house rooms we use in Siem Reap--and in a much larger establishment with internet access in the entry, a pool, an outdoor restaurant, and performers singing karaoke till later than I wished last night.

We made it out to the dig today, about 45 minutes from the inn. It's at Ban Non Wat. (Ban = village; Non = mound; Wat = temple.) They've been digging here for some 6 seasons, and it's just one of several neolithic/bronze/iron age sites within 20 kilometers. The way they chose the site was to fly over by helicopter, looking for mounds with evidence of moats around them. This is one such. The moat wasn't deep and probably wasn't defensive; it was more likely part of water works, separating the surrounding rice fields from the village.

The current village on the site has memory going back about 130 years, but it has probably been occupied for nearly 4000. Many of the villagers are employed by the dig--at least one member of each family--and so the project is popular, and we are very welcome, though not all families have granted permission to dig on their land.

The archaeologists here have dug (and refilled) multiple sites in the village, including one very large site that yielded hundreds of human burials. They find burials most everywhere they look, and many shell middens. (Three village women spend all day every day washing shells and sorting them.) They are also looking changes in soil texture that (to the trained eye--I certainly can't see it yet) suggest structures and water elements. This year, they are digging in a series of smaller sites, hoping to establish where the edges of the village were at different eras. Today I got to go down about 4 meters into a pit where the bone expert was getting ready to lift a skeleton that had been exposed. She was taking really careful measurements, but wasn't yet ready to determine sex. Small ceramic pots had been buried near the person, as is true in most of these burials, and other people were cataloguing and bagging these. Really beautiful and accurate drawings are made of each find in situ before things are moved, and exquisite mapping is done of the whole pit each 10 cm of depth.

In this same pit there is a dog skeleton, clearly a deliberate burial, with no grave goods. So probably a pet....about 2500 years ago.

What I spent most of my time doing today was sorting bagged and labeled artifacts into groups (clay, shell, bronze, iron, stone, petrified wood, carbon dating samples, coprolites, and a few labelled 'enigma') and then cleaning shell artifacts using a toothbrush, dental picks, and water. It was really fun and satisfying, and meant I got to see a lot of examples of things that have been found already this season, including bangles made of shell or bronze, small bells and beads, stone axes, clay pellets and spindle whorls--which are small weights made of clay used to twist cord or thread.

Lunch out at the site was locally grown rice and pineapple curry. REALLY tasty.

Jobs will rotate throughout the time I'm here, unless and until someone finds something they love to do and wants to stick with it. There's a longtime volunteer here who is the ceramicschief, and she supervised a group washing sherds today. I saw a couple of pots she'd pieced back together (using masking tape!) and hope at some point to learn more about how this is done.

I'm enjoying myself!

Karen