The Accidental Archaeologist

AccArch the artist

The rest of the week fell into a bit of a routine. Progress on the dig has been in fits and starts. It seems to take ages to clean the walls and get the trenches ready for photos, and then another age to draw the profiles. Then a bulldozer comes in and scoops out a whole ‘nother section in a matter of an hour, and we start the whole process over again. Because we have a team with a range of talents, everyone has a particular speciality to contribute to the project. It seems mine has become drawing. I never thought I was particularly “art-y,” but I appear to have a knack for drawing exactly what I see in the right proportions. This comes in quite handy in archaeology because, not only do we have to draw detailed stone-by-stone plans of what the walls look like, but this project also has a need for some of the more high-profile artifacts to be illustrated. I found this out when it rained on Wednesday. Sometimes we work in the rain, but drawing and bulldozer-ing don’t go with rain, so we stayed in the school for the morning and waited an assignment. Eventually, the prof. came back with a handful of artifacts which were found last year on this project and asked who could do illustrations. A couple of us (including myself) had been taught how to do this in a brief training session or two, so he gave us the artifacts.

Mine turned out to be the “crown jewel” artifact found on this project, a beautiful little bronze pin with a lot of detail. It is only about 3 cm long, so I was asked to enlarge it to twice the size. The drawing would be difficult enough, but enlarging the thing was a nightmare. It meant drawing an exact outline at actual size, and then transferring all the points on graph paper to a bigger box. At one point halfway through the day, the rain eased off, and the prof. took everybody else up to the site to wash artifacts and try to get a little work done in the trench. I was left behind to continue drawing. About half an hour later, he came back to do some paperwork and check on my progress. This is when I was told, in effect, “No pressure, but this illustration is probably what will be published and it’s the most important artifact of the whole dig…so it better be perfect.” That was the word he used…perfect. Then I was left by myself for the rest of the day. I spent ages getting every detail of that tiny little thing right, because I dreaded the critique I knew was coming. Luckily, I had lots of time and no distractions, and the end result came out amazingly well (if I do say so myself). In fact, after close scrutiny and some small corrections demanded, even the prof. seemed quite pleased, and let me make a copy of the finished illustration to keep. I’ll post that sometime when I have the chance to photo and upload it.

So that brings things up to this weekend. We’ve worked all the way through to Saturday, which was still a full day, though we started an hour later. Unfortunately, we have to work Sunday, too, this week because Tuesday is a national holiday (Bastille Day), and our tight schedule means we can’t miss two whole days of work in one week. At least for Sunday’s work, we’ll start in the late morning and finish early. We have plans to have a barbeque up at at little house we’re using as a base camp near the site (simply called the “white house”). Tuesday means no work because it might be taken as somewhat offensive for us to carry on like normal on such a major French holiday. Instead, we’re hoping to arrange a second vehicle so we can all head over to Trier in Germany for the day. I’m very excited about that idea because I haven’t been there since I was little. That, and I’ll be so relieved to hear a language that I can kinda understand (German). I’m doing OK with the French language (though I can’t speak it, I can sometimes get the gist of what’s being said). Occasionally, the prof. (who is from the Saarland in Germany, very close to where I used to live) will try to have a conversation with me in German. I can understand him pretty well, but the student from eastern Germany is almost unintelligible to me. With three languages going pretty much all the time all day long, it’s mentally exhausting at the end of the day, but my brain is getting one hell of a workout! Now, if only I could pick up enough French to make hanging out in Paris for a whole day on my way home seem not so daunting.

To be continued…