The Accidental Archaeologist

Je nes comprend pas

When I left y’all in the last story, I was bundled in the Landie heading to the little French town which is our home for this two week project. The accommodations aren’t posh, but relatively comfy and we’re all getting along famously. We’ve been given run of the local school building as our “home,” which means sleeping on the floor (thank goodness for the air mattress I bought in Scotland!) and hiking to the local sport center for showers. Nonetheless, it is fun here. Someone goes each morning to buy us fresh baguettes for breakfast & lunch. Breakfast is eaten at an improvised table of school desks pushed together into a long surface, and then we take turns riding up to the site in the Landie. We are working in a lovely, shaded spot on top of a hill with a stunning view of the French countryside below us, and, if you look closely, you can just make out the part of Germany I lived in as a kid just across the border. The tiny village which is host to or hill fort site has graciously given us use of their town hall (or “mairie”) as a base camp for storing our lunch food and for chilling on the front steps with a beer at the end of a long day of digging.

Tuesday was my first day of digging, so I spent a lot of it getting acquainted with the particulars of this project (they all tend to have their individual details that are always tricky to get used to) and doing a little bit of the work. Since most of the digging is by machine, we spend a lot of time cleaning up the walls and floor and mapping what we see. It’s easy work, as excavations go, and our group is never at a loss for conversation. The day fairly flew by. Before I knew it, it was down tools and start toting everything back down to the mairie. There was a flurry of abandoning shoes and opening bottles, and in short order we were all basking in the warm French sunshine and toasting a good day of work.

Since we can’t all go in one trip back to the school, Sarah and I stayed behind at the mairie and had a second beer while we waited for the Landie to come back and take us home. On our way through the village, though, we saw Mr K who is kind of a local liason/sponsor for us and has been extremely kind and helpful throughout the project. We thought it only polite to stop and say hello. He quickly recognized that I was a new face, and I had to fumble my way through an introduction, since I have no French and he has very little English. Sarah and the prof. did some translations for me, but once the two men got to talking, I found myself quietly swiveling my head and only able to catch the occasional reference to a town name or archaeological term. We were graciously invited in for an aperitif on the back patio with Mr K’s wife and teenage grandson. Since I was the only one who couldn’t hope to keep up with the rapid-fire French conversation, I mostly resorted to sipping my drink and trying to recognize if I was being addressed directly. Our hosts were wonderful, though, and did their best through sign language and good-natured teasing to keep me in the conversation every now and then. It was an ideal example of the kind of French hospitality they seem to excel in in this area. Eventually, though, we had to bid them goodbye and race back to the school for a quick change so we could make it in time for dinner. We have an arrangement with a local restaurant where we can come in for supper at 8:00 each night and get an excellent three-course set meal which is cheap enough to fit in the project budget. It means most of our evening is taken up with a large meal and conversation…which is just about right.

To be continued…