Postcards from the past: Pella finds

Tags

archaeology, Jordan, objects unearthed, Pella

January 2001

The day before my dig experience at Pella began, a couple of things are found with “diagnostic potential”: the side of what was probably a cult stand decorated with a pattern; and a small piece with a Greek inscription. This prepares me for the minuteness of discoveries and knocks on the head any Tutankhamen’s-tomb fantasies I might have had.

My first trench excitement happens as I’m scraping out the pit in XXXIIG. Something the size and shape of a broken paddle pop stick emerges from the dirt. It is in fact shaped bone, polished to a gleam and is worthy of its own plastic bag.

Some days there is a lull for volunteers as the local workmen move piles of dirt. This is a chance to see what is happening elsewhere on the dig. In the next trench they’ve just exposed two loom weights, in a small room which may have been a loom room. In another trench, the lid of an amphora, more complete than any others found on this site so far. One trench is particularly giving: a ceramic horse’s head; a female figurine with poked-hole nipples; a broken but reconstitutable vessel; a piece of faience; a couple of scarabs; an iron knife blade. Abu Khalifa found a tiny blue frit bead – the trench men have eyes like hawks attuned by long practice to notice impossible things as they wield their picks.. In my trench, in my pit, a bowl. These are all designated “plot objects”, up to 100 of them halfway through this dig session.

Sometimes trench work seems pointless, scraping away, thinking I have a pit, only to be disappointed. No treasures for me. The sharp-eyed pickman is the one who finds treasures: a couple of loom-weights, and an almost complete juglet. Eventually I figure out that I’ll be happier if I give myself a goal – this square, self-designated, and now that.

The tedium is broken by a summoning cry: a basalt grinder and a grindstone; half a basalt bowl; and half a basalt ring; a copper alloy pin; and one day a huge piece of column being moved 20 feet down a slight slope by half a dozen men with crowbars, everyone gathering to watch, applauding as it’s angled upright against a baulk.

One day, large shards, emerge from dirt in our trench – a pot, about 900 BC, the time of King Solomon. One of the volunteers unearths it and the dreaded Maggie takes over “Because I want speed, not because I don’t trust you, or because I want honour and glory.” Oh, no.

Another day, as the trench foreman begins wielding his pick he exposes signs of a partially unbroken 12th BC pithos (a large storage container). The design around its neck may have been the imprint of rope. After pottery sort, three of us return to the trench until sunset to retrieve as much as possible: a whole base, bits of rim and handle, and heap of shards as big as my hand. This excavation urgency is to make sure no marauders helped themselves to bits and pieces when the site is unwatched at night.

The sorting and classifying of finds is in the hands of the experts. Each day’s haul is basketed according to materials: flint, groundstone, ceramics, shell and metal. Then it’s assessed and sent off for cataloguing, cleaning, drawing and photographing. Potential museum pieces are identified: good stuff stays in Jordan, but duplicates might end up in the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University.

Sometimes after work I return to the site. I watch the dig draughtsman as he draws the top of a piece of wall to scale, and look around taking in the site of 8000 years of human history. It is peaceful on the hillside in the late afternoon sun, absorbing the feeling of this place of Roman theatres, Byzantine Churches, late Bronze Age and Iron Age temples and administrative buildings, and towering Tell Husn.

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Here’s another version of life on the Pella dig, with excellent photos.

Eurobodalla beaches: around Tuross

Tags

Coila Bar, Coila Lake, David Henry Blake, pine trees, Plantation Beach north, Plantation Beach south

Another glorious winter Sunday, J in search of geological certainties, specifically the identification of gabbro-diorite, I idling along companionably. While he chips at boulders between Coila Lake and the beach with his geological hammer, I walk the edge of the lake, drawing in the mountains in the distance; a pair of plump pied oyster catchers; prickly sand plants, red and green succulents, and thin straps of dried weed; and its slightly mucky edge with a thick outline of foam; . I note a sign pointing to the Dreaming Track and conceive a future walk along the 5 kilometres to Bingie Headland.

Then we head, of course, for more rocks, along the sand bar, which has already taken the print of many feet, avian and human. Coila Lake is an ICOLL (Intermittently Closed and Open Lakes and Lagoons), like many along this coast. It’s astonishing to think that not all that long ago (and I’m not talking geological time) the sea was rushing into the lake and that the monster sandbar has formed again since then.

Shells gleam in heaps, thicker than last week’s scattering on a beach south of here, which I claimed then to be unique.

I sit on a convenient rock, feet dangling, and note the patterns: plaits, circles, square boxes, bubbles, clefts, intrusions. and the blue sea behind..

Tuross is noted for its Norfolk pines, and we walk through a grove of them, past a war memorial and the inevitable challenged lone pine from Gallipoli, that foundation place of an Australian myth. I no longer regard the pines as invaders: pollen analysis identifies their presence in Gondwana rainforest, as it adapted to a drying-out climate.

We descend onto the rocks of Plantation Beach, through grass and along sandy pathways and look down the coast to the pine trees of Potato Point, Gulaga lounging on the horizon. The rocks here, whatever they’re made of, have straight lines of pinkish rhyolite striping through, straight and parallel. We have been preceded by a professional geologist, David Blake who died in a cycling accident after a stellar career investigating rocks in Iceland, Canada, Papua New Guinea, and central and northern Australia. His memorial plaque is accompanied by a ten cent piece, a geologist’s way of identifying scale.

Then it’s back to Coila Lake, a bit further round the shoreline, where you can look towards the sandbar where this morning’s adventure began.

Postcards from the past: In the trenches at Pella

Tags

archaeology, in the trenches, Pella

January, 2001

My first job in the trenches is to knock down a Hellenistic wall using a pick. I chip away at fill to level off behind a string-line while large stones topple around my feet. Then I clear them away. After lunch I trowel out foundation fill, mainly pottery shards, but also a tiny piece of oxidised copper, and some minute pieces of flint. For the last 20 minutes I continue destroying the wall, keeping it cleanly vertical with a plum-bob.

I gradually learn that archaeology is another name for destruction. I bash away at a wall with a monkoosh and then clean up the mess I make with a hand shovel and a mustereen. I expose and smooth a silky grey surface: Electra demolishes it.

I become enamoured of my monster pit. There my job is clear: to delineate and excavate. It’s my pit, my familiar place, where I feel competent. After a Friday trip to Umm Qais I whizz back down to the dig site to look at it.

I’m not so competent when it comes to baulk-cleaning, where I have to be very sure nothing tumbles down to contaminate meticulous layering. I know I’m not good at this, so when Stephen yells “Straighten it up. It’s as round as a whore’s bum” I’m amused rather than affronted.

Sometimes I am snappy and tearful: I can’t manage the plum-bob; I crack the back of my fingers and make them bleed; and Electra calls me “Margaret”. Sometimes Maggie gives me a quick succession of jobs, none of which I have time to get stuck into. Sometimes when I clean a clump of rocks ready for photography, Steve says “Great job” and I suspect sarcasm. Sometimes it’s hard on the wrist: “scrape hard enough to make your wrist hurt” is Maggie’s standard.

But I become more agile, hopping around the trench as it becomes noticeably deeper, and gradually learn to yell “Bidi goofah” to summon a man to empty my bucket made from a recycled tyre. Try to do it myself so I don’t have to shout orders, and they glare at me. Sometimes four men line up, chanting as they pass the buckets along the chain.

On the second last day, it begins to rain. When I poke my head above the trenches at knock off time, I’m dazzled by the sudden greening of Tell Husn, till now quite barren.

Every time I look around the past is visible, and so is the meticulous task of unearthing it.

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Eurobodalla beaches: from Tilba Cemetery towards 1080

Tags

rocks, sea, Tilba beach north to 1080

Returning to Australian weekends is easy, in winter sunshine before the wind picks up. We drive the new car out along the spur towards Tilba Cemetery, and suddenly the Pacific Ocean sprawls before us. A sandy track leads us down to a wide beach, backed by grassy dunes, and, towering behind farmland, under bright clouds, sacred Gulaga.

The beach is distinctive. The tideline is marked by lines of small shells in curves and points, depending on the whim of the retreating sea.

The sea is smooth, lazy waves plopping on the sand and splashing laconically.

I’m fascinated by horizontality. J is far ahead as I snap snap snap, his leg functioning well again, the rocks at the far end of the beach dragging him along by his geological curiosity. I’m not focused on geology, just on the feel of Australian sand and wind and sun. I’ve lost any knack I had of geological analytics in my seven weeks in Warsaw. I have to relearn diorite, and … what on earth were the other -ites?

There are no rocks till we approach the northern end and then sudden outcrops and bluffs appear.

I’m easily pleased by sand and rock gardens; rock patterns; and traces of attempted ownership.

We sit companionably for a while in the sun, sheltered by the rocks from the wind.

As we head back, a flock of tiny birds announce their presence by mazes of claw-prints, and then appear, scurry-pause-scurry, shadows and minute sand-spurts in tow.

We return to the car up a different track, through a gate and onto a bare grassy hillside capped by the cemetery

Postcards from the past: daily routine on a dig

Tags

archaeological dig, cleaning, Jordan, Pella, sorting

My series of Postcards from the past came to a sudden halt a while back, mainly because I reached a point where I had plenty of memories, but no images. I’ve decided to deal with that hiccup by means of a words-only interlude.

The story so far: in 2000 I was a paying volunteer on an archaeological dig at Pella in Jordan, with a team from Sydney University.

There were three aspects of the work I did on the dig: cleaning a variety of finds; sorting the morning’s haul; and action in the trenches. I have photos of work in the trench, but for some reason the camera didn’t accompany me when I was cleaning and sorting.

Inside work

On alternate days we worked inside, or around the dig house. My first archaeological job was at the cleaning table, toothbrushing bones in water: camel or donkey teeth; a small lower jaw; some brown marbled bone; and heaps of slivers I didn’t dare discard. In the midst of bone I came across part of a small ceramic oil lamp. I cleaned mud from its spout gently with a toothpick.

There were two unexpected jobs. One was poking holes in cheap plastic sieves. The other was the manufacture of cotton buds: we sat there, intently winding cotton wool around a matchstick. We used the buds to clean glass with ethanol. This required deep concentration: the glass was delicate and often sharp. In my pile, there were a few very fine clear fragments, some with a subdued opalescent surface, some with dirt-filled tunnels below the rim; and a few heavy green bits. One piece stood out: a beautifully shaped handle, green with long swirls of red.

More energetically, we relocated boxes dating back to 1984 from between two mud brick walls, forming a chain and working in dusty camaraderie. I absconded before we were too deep amongst spider-webs, beetles and scorpions, fearful of the legendary camel spiders that gnaw hunks out of camel humps.

Pottery sorting

After a morning in the trenches, buckets of shards were lugged across to the yard of the dig house and emptied one by one onto mats for sorting.

Steve, the dig director, circulated, keeping an eye on volunteers and offering advice: “That big heavy clumsy piece is a tile. Keep it: it’s complete” or “That green piece there with rounded ribbing stays. There’s nothing else like it in this lot.” I was anxiously meticulous, until Steve explained the process in rigorous scientific terms: “Look at it. If you think that’s one of those, chuck it on on that pile. If it looks much the same as the other stuff in the pile, that’s where it belongs.”

All painted pieces qualified for keeping, as did any piece at all distinctive or unique. At the end of the session we counted the discards and dumped them in the pile outside the compound, carefully mapped as a scrap pile. When we left the dig, we each souvenired a few shards.

This work was necessary and sometimes exciting, but the trenches were where the real action was.

Returning home

Tags

journey, loss, returning home

I left Warsaw at 6.25 in the afternoon on a chilly day, after weeks of warmth. I had no seat choice: only middle of the row left. I slept all the way to Heathrow, head sagging, mouth open, sleep my familiar, a defence against misery.

The Heathrow turnaround was short and by the time I reached the departure gate via bus, train and brisk walk my flight was already boarding. On the way to my seat – 35D: the same one that brought me to London 7 weeks ago – I picked up a New York Times, international edition. I settled down for the 13 hour flight, pulling on my pressure stockings, creating a playlist of 40 pieces of music, and folding the broadsheet into manageable segments.

Unexpectedly, an article contained a summons back to my Australian life, the life in which geology featured large. An article recounting the ice-age origins of the New York landscape and although I have no knowledge of New York, it offered a template of desire: I want such an account of city landscapes I know.

I dozed on the London – Singapore leg, and somehow managed to lose my headphones. I only listened to two things on my playlist- Beethoven and Steve Reich’s Music for pieces of wood. The rest of my waking time I edited, discarded and collaged photos, and read junk on my kindle.

In Singapore there was barely time to get off the plane and back on for the final 7 hours. I watched a very atmospheric Murder on the Orient Express, with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot.

Just as I was ready to doze off we crossed into Australia somewhere near Port Headland, and I was riveted by the landscape on the flight path screen. That beautiful landscape of home: pale blue, green, ochre, darker green, khaki: the sinuous bends of the Shaw River, and the low contour lines: Mt Edgar, 373 metres; Mt Madley 534m; Mt Beadell 530m; Scamp Hill 594m; Mt Talbot 623m; Mt Rawlinson 605m. There were other waterways – rivers, creeks, lagoons, washes and lakes – and a few deserts: Little Sandy Desert and Gibson Desert. An intriguing large blue patch turned out to be Lake Disappointment, hinting at the travails of European explorers. There was even a trace of Polish footsteps in a name: Lake Gruszka. This is my country, but I’ve never been west, so for half the continental journey places named were as alien as Turda, Cluj-Napoca, Zalau, Alesed.

Bland Creek gave me pause for thought. Is that what my life will be back home, without the endless colour and delight of twins?

Suddenly we’re skirting the southern edge of the continent – Smoky Bay, Denial Bay, Saint Peter Island, Point Brown, Streaky Bay, St Francis Islands, Nuyt’s Archipelago. Place names become more familiar: Port Augusta, Whyalla, Murray River, Darling River (weekend camping when I was in Broken Hill, and a holiday with the family on a houseboat); Mildura (where I behaved very badly), Lachlan River (where once we were attacked by squadrons of mosquitoes); Murrumbidgee River (followed on a road trip after floods); Griffith (where J picked oranges the year our youngest son finished high school, and I began cementing my friendship with Annette); Wagga Wagga (where my first flight ever had to turn back and where I bought my Noritake dinner service in the late 1960s.)

By now the height of mountains is increasing: Mt Minjary 762m, Sugarloaf Mtn 774m, Mt McAlister 1033m, Yumatbulla Mtn 1485m, Bimberi Peak 1912m, although not so neatly sequential.

As the mountains get higher, the plane begins it’s descent, and soon we’re taxiing at Kingsford Smith airport. I activate my phone. While I wait at the carousel for my bag I text family to let them know I’ve arrived. And guess what? All messages are delivered.

It’s a cold Sydney pre-dawn. As the sky lightens I sit on Wolli Creek station after a friendly encounter with the guard on the airport train. I’m inadequately clad and the cold attacks my bottom in stripes through the metal slats of the seat. I’m tired now, and doze as the train heads south: sombre bush spins past and grey ocean heaves gently. A grimy man gets on and surrounds himself with his plastic bags and ripped backpack. He pulls out a mobile and I eavesdrop: he’s off to spend time with a friend who’s lonely.

Finally we pull in at Bomaderry, and there’s J rugged up in beanie and Warsaw jacket. I kiss him through the train window, and we make our entwined way to the car.

By the time we reach Moruya I’m dropping in and out of sleep. At home I greet son and dog, spread a piece of Australian bread with peanut butter, and fall into bed, freshly made by H who has a horror of spiders taking up residence in unused bedclothes. I sleep round the clock and then some, with a brief awakening to talk to my Australian daughter and eat satay chicken: my son knows my favourite food. He’s also stocked the frig with all my necessities: soy milk, orange juice, grapes, frozen yoghurt.

I went to Warsaw with the hope that I’d change the pattern of my days, establish a new routine, and come back virtuous in every way. I’d forgotten the lesson of Cavafy

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you. You will walk

the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,

will turn gray in these same houses.

My hope for the tripartite tourist day was forlorn, as was my determination to wean myself off my addictions to blogging and Netflix. My energy was limited. I was happiest when I was being entertained which is why the visit was one of museums rather than explorations.

What did change was the depth of grandparental delight and my relationship with twins who are no longer kidlets. Forget museums and failures. Remember only chatter, mischief and little hands in mine.

I relive the seven weeks as I skim my blog and process my diary chronicle. I glue a few odds and ends into my commonplace book, and contac the notebook Maja covered with stickers so they don’t peel off.

I read the latest edition of The monthly: a profile of Helen Garner, challenging as everything to do with her is; and an article by former Greens Senator Scott Ludlum about Rohingya refugees and the Australian government’s indifference. I’m back in the perplexities and horrors of the real world beyond the euphoria of travel.

At night I hear the continuo of the ocean and the flop of the dog at the end of my bed, and know that I am indeed home.

I’m linking this to Cathy’s wanderessence blog in response to July’s invitation to write about returning home.