Reflections on "the dig: week one"

July 5th 2009

Tomorrow begins week two of digging. My week last week was full of moving rocks and dirt. Lots of rock and dirt. We have to clean everything out of our trench before the actual excavation can be. Unlike traditional digs my trench was first cleaned out, down to the floor level, using a backhoe. They did this, rather than the usual careful removing of each stratigraphic layer of dirt, because the area was greatly compromised as it was used as a dump heap in the 1960s. Also there are massive collapses from the baths themselves making things difficult. Thus we actually have quite a lot that you can see…but that also means lots of things like rooms that are still FILLED with debris. The backhoe couldn’t excavate everything, as some of the rooms have delicate arches, or unstable collapses that have to be cleaned and excavated by hand. So we move lots of dirt. Goody.

I spent a day clearing out a room that is filled with collapse debris. By filled I mean…to the TOP of a tall arched ceiling filled. Probably several meters. In the course of one day 4 of us managed to remove a full 1.10 meters of a room measuring 2.75 meters in length! Yes we are that good. And this was dirt, small rocks, and small boulders as well. Debris from the collapsed ceiling, plaster, etc. We exposed the tops of two archways that lead into other rooms, one that is blocked by a collapse, but the second arch you can actually see the other side of it in another room. We also found tiling and marbling to indicate the ceiling and walls were heavily decorated and mosaic-ed. But they won’t let us dig to floor level. Very sad. It would be to time-consuming and labor-intensive apparently, even though we would probably find a decorated floor and some interesting things in-situ. Tragedy abounds.

We also had to stop working there because one of the arched columns wasn’t stable enough. They will be putting in metal support beams tomorrow, so we can go back in the hole to take measurements, clean, and draw, but not to dig out further. It’s a bit sad. Ah well.

Beyond that, I didn’t do much of great interest. I moved more rock and dirt. Spent a full day cleaning a wall…meaning I used an excavators trowel and a small brush to remove lots of dirt, dust, and small grit from a wall. Oh yes. Then I had to use my trowel to scrape plaster (that had been used to hold marble paneling on the wall, but the marble was all plundered during the gothic invasions, so not much is left) off the bricks and mortar to see what color they were. Keep in mind that this plaster has been in place for…about 1600 years…so it is well and truly set. That stuff does NOT want to come off. The noise you make scraping metal on brick is quite quite quite horrific. And I ate more plaster and brick dust in an hour than you ever should in your entire life. Oh. My.

Actually the physical labor of moving dirt is much better than the standing still in the blazing sun and brushing dust off of one brick. The dust mostly goes onto another brick or into the air where it simply settles back onto the original brick. Or goes in your face. Sometimes both at once. At least bucket-hauling you can think about how heavy the damn buckets are, shoveling you can think about how many enormous rocks you keep slamming into, brushing a wall all you think about is the heat and the dust.

Though it was quite nice as all last week we had thunderstorms, and RAIN. Rain in Rome. In summer. Very odd, but really really nice. It meant we had a bit of a breeze, and the rain on Thursday and Friday helped to keep the dust down. Yay! But I think it’s all over now, next week will be a marathon of heat, dust, and rocks in buckets! Bring it on!