All these pots are made with a paddle/anvil technique. That means they are shaped by hand and then you put one hand inside holding the anvil (a hardened clay curved piece with a handle) and you beat the outside of the pot against that anvil with a paddle (which is often wrapped in cord, here, giving the outside of the pots some texture). It takes real skill to get the pot to be an even thickness and a graceful shape this way.
After I dug out the pot I washed all the pieces. They had to dry overnight and then in the sun for several hours Saturday morning. They hold a join better if they are warm when you work with them.
So it was Saturday afternoon before I could try to find pieces that fit together. Once you find a match, you brush off the edges that match with a dry toothbrush (in case there's any dust settled there, though you washed those same edges with a toothbrush yesterday), and then use a wooden skewer to spread ordinary white glue on one edge. You align the pieces and hold them together while the glue begins to set, and then prop them up in a basin filled with pig food pellets (looks like rabbit food--works like sand) and put small pieces of masking tape over the join to support it while it continues to dry. I was able to find about 20 joins that matched. Those have to dry before they can be pieced to each other, so someone else will get the pleasure of trying to finish the pot this week!
There are several intriguing features in the pits that have to do with how people lived at various points. One pit has a complicated set of ditches and trenches that are some kind of water feature; another has a layer of crushed pottery and shells making up a sort of floor, where there might have been industry of some kind; a third has a set of wobbly ridges of much harder substance than the surrounding dirt which might be a wall at the edge of the mound. This is just speculation--I'm told that the ratio of lab time to dig time to figure out what is going on is at least 3:1. Mapping of all these features accurately on paper is crucial. Carefully drawn maps on graph paper are created every 10 cm of depth, with all artifacts marked with location and tagged and bagged with a unique catalog number, along with a pit number, a spit number (depth marking), and whether the artifact came from a 'feature' or just the general dirt. Each object is also listed in an artifact catalog for each pit. All these then are entered in a database, along with photographs that are taken of every significant feature at any depth. They've found more than 13,000 artifacts so far...
People who can draw really accurate pictures of what's in the ground before it's moved are very valuable on the dig--we didn't have anyone who could do that until the end of the week, and then a professor from the archaeology/fine arts department at one of Bangkok's universities came out. He spent two hours drawing the sherds that were 'my' pot and several others, all mixed together in the ground, before we took any of it out. It's a remarkable drawing.
No new burials were found while I was at Ban Non Wat; but since they already have 674 skeletons from this mound in storage in the 'bone house' in town, that's OK. There's been a whole crew of Aussie students here working on them. It's possible that some burials will show up this coming week, but in no way do I feel shortchanged to have missed that. I did get to see both a human skeleton and a dog skeleton in situ early in my time at the dig. It's just astonishing how productive this site is.
Most of the staff running the dig are New Zealanders and Aussies, which has been fun. They will keep working this season until February 14, and will be back next year. My coworkers included a young British couple, a wonderful young Danish woman who is studying archaeology, an American woman who was in the Peace Corps in Thailand 38 years ago, a woman from the Chicago area who is a retired software engineer who goes on 5 or 6 digs a year (some in the US, but she's also worked in Guatemala and England and Africa); and a CT couple who have been to this dig several times before.
The daily schedule involved breakfast (usually fried rice) at 7, leaving for the site at 7:45 in a songtauw, which is a small truck that has bench seats in the back and a roof. We arrive at the site about 8:30, and wait until we're given job assignments (while the villagers open up each pit and make sure to deal with any scorpions or snakes before we get there). We work from 8:45 or so till 10:15, take a tea break, work till lunch at noon, work from 1:00 to 2:15--another tea break!--and then 2:30 to 4, when we board the songtauw for the ride back to the Phimai Inn. Dinner was at 7 each night, followed by a brief talk about some aspect of the research. I was often in bed by 8:30 and up at 4 to do two hours of Cambodian language study before the day at the dig got underway. Rest assured, there was plenty of time in there for beer and the occasional dip in the pool...
We also took a little side trip to the largest banyan tree in all of Thailand. The thing is amazing. This is the kind of tree that sends roots down from branches, so it looks like a forest, but it is just one organism. This one is 350 years old and covers 3,500 square feet. I haven't figured out how to post pictures on the blog--but there's also no way to do the thing justice in a photo. Very cool.
We've seen a bunch of other things while out at the village. The older woman who lives right where the headquarters for the dig are wove reed mats the second week. She collected reeds, stripped them down in half and took out some of the pith; dried them; dyed them four different colors, and then wove them into a patterned mat (about 4' by 6') using a wooden loom put together with wedges on the ground. The warp is just thin orange string. She has no pedals but can create two different sheds by tilting the wooden heddle toward her or away from her. She will sell them for about $3 each.
Some of the girls in the village helped one of our group learn how to fold and sew banana leaves and petals from marigolds and bougainvillea into the elaborate tiered offerings that are given to the Buddha for special merit. That was a full day project.
Villagers taught us how to use dried rice stalks to make round wreaths; these will be used in the coming week to stabilize pots (most of which have round bottoms) for display when a group of 100 local officials and teachers come to the site to learn about what is going on. We all sat together on the ground to do this. A man who had been working at one of the pits where I'd been digging--they really know what they are doing but they are patient and friendly with us inexperienced types--showed me how to do this even though we couldn't talk to each other, and once I passed muster he set off to make elaborate figures, like corn dolls, but bigger.
So today, Sunday, we traveled back to Bangkok by van. Then I took a taxi to my budget hotel near Khao San Road--the backpacker's market area. It was an adventure to find the place, especially since it's tucked back in an alley off the road, and addresses in Bangkok are fairly erratic. But I'm OK with adventures in highly populated places at midday. Finding the place required the best efforts of a taxi driver, some phone calls, a street bookseller with some English, and a doorman from a nearby and larger hotel. This is a VERY spartan place. I'm writing this sitting on my bed in a room that is, well, monastic: or the old-fashioned Thai version of a pod hotel. It's about 5' wide and 9' deep, with nothing in it but a bed and a small bamboo ladder for hanging a few clothes on, and a light. The bathroom is just across the small lounge outside my door. The fact that it's off the street means it's quiet, and there's a little garden downstairs where I can hang out, so I think it will be fine. And it's just $12 a night--with internet!
This afternoon I went walking in the area to explore, and lucked into an outdoor traditional dance/music event at the National Museum. I sat on the grass and watched people--I was one of only a few Westerners there--and stayed for the first hour of the spectacle, which was going to last nearly 3 hours. Tickets cost 75 cents. There were food stands set up, and lots of the audience were women my age or older, but there were also families and groups of teenagers. The show used live music with sung narration telling parts of the Ramayana story. I didn't stick around long enough to see the Monkey King do his thing, but did stay long enough to see some of the women's costumes. The program was in Thai, but it was my sense that this was a professional troupe, maybe appearing here since the National Theater next door is closed for reconstruction.
I have two more full days to explore Bangkok before heading to Phnom Penh. Not enough time to appreciate all the different aspects of this city, of course! I think I'll steer clear of the cosmopolitan commercial centers of the city in favor of more historical sites. Off to bed!
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