Day Off!

It's Monday here and I have just a few minutes to post before leaving with part of our group on an excursion Earthwatch has set up for us on our one day off. We're headed to Phanom Rung, a hilltop temple site somewhat south and east of here, a bit closer to the Cambodian border.

So here's a quick update on my first week of work at the dig: I've actually dug in two of the four pits currently underway. A third pit (which contained the human skeleton and the dog skeleton we saw when we arrived-some 15 burials were in that pit) is now finished; a fourth pit, quite deep, has been quite wet and muddy at the bottom (about 4 meters down) and will now be reopened and finished. A four meter square is standard pit size, and both those pits were that size. The two I've worked in are bigger, but not yet as deep, in part because they are near the edges of the mound.

In one pit, I've sectioned (cut in half) a feature that may be a hearth of some kind. This required me to try to notice soil type differences--something I felt a little too inexperienced to do well, though the sticky black stuff was easy to spot. Finding the edges of an area of a certain soil type is harder.

In the other pit, I spent yesterday exposing an area where pottery sherds are embedded, using dental tools, a small trowel, a brush, and a plastic tea spoon. I was working with a Thai woman my age--no English, but she tried to teach me some Thai--who was very skilled and good at showing me how it's best done. Fun! Except for sitting on the ground for long hours in cramped positions leaning over. But it's good for a laugh for everyone when I try to get up. And I'm far from the oldest volunteer--that prize is held by an 80 year old English woman who lives on 3 acres of land outside Oxford and grows all her own vegetables.

I've also washed lots of pottery shards and cleaned up bronze artifacts (with dental tools and acetone, gently), bone artifacts, stone artifacts, and a few shell things.

Saturday was national Children's Day in Thailand so we all pitched in and bought school supplies and balloons and some candy and bagged them up and gave them away to the 27 children below age 12 or so in the village.

All these children had clothes--tops and bottoms--which is not true of the village where we work in Cambodia. This village, though in one of the poorest districts of Thailand and quite rural, has a paved road, electricity, running water, and even a street light. The contrast between rural Thailand and rural Cambodia is quite stark. Subsistence rice farming is the rule in both places, but the systems surrounding in Thailand seem MUCH more functional: four lane paved highways (many of them!), schools, hospitals, water, electricity....

More later--I'm off on our excursion!

Karen