Qué Linda, Qué Rara, Qué Buena

Fearless Readers, the digging is done.  We have finished at the site we dug in the necropolis of Las Ruedas in Pintia.  The 4x8 meter pit now sits open and empty amongst the brooding stone stelae marking the tombs of the ancient dead – devoid of activity, awaiting what fate I know not.  There are still tombs there, for sure; being such a small group of six volunteers, we were only able to fully excavate three of them.  I assume the good people at the Centro de Estudios Vacceas here in the tiny village of Padilla de Duero will spend August finishing up with what is left to discover in the remaining tombs, but even that is open to question.  In order to dig, they need people – it is a team effort to safely and scientifically excavate tombs 2 meters down in the earth.  Putting a team together requires funding, and money is scarce in Spain right now as is true elsewhere, especially for ‘academic’ pursuits such as archaeology.

Jessie pointing to one one of the first pots
we uncovered in what would become tomb
263. Below: Two minutes later, she found a
perfect round top of a ceramic bottle.
See my more complete album of the
Tomb 263 Excavation.  See also my
Artifacts Album

I put quotes around ‘academic’ because I feel that the term conveys the connotation that poking around in the past, digging the dead and puzzling out the mysteries of history is somehow an unneeded ‘extra,’ something that we can do without.  I would contend otherwise, for I feel that it is an urgent necessity, this securing of our shared history as human beings.  Consciousness of past and future is an inherent, perhaps unique trait of us homo sapiens sapiens; it is an integral part of what makes us human.  We are the only extant species that possesses this sharp consciousness of being, of existing, and of mortality.  To ignore the past, to neglect history, is to diminish our shared humanity.  Just sayin’…

So anyway, I had mixed emotions about ending the dig portion of the four-week program here at Pintia.  I love the process of excavation in all of its steps, from the heavy pick-and-shovel grunt work of getting down to the artifact-bearing strata to the meticulous, painstaking task of oh-so-delicately revealing, defining and removing artifacts.  (Okay, so there is one chore I really did not enjoy at the site.  Cleaning.  In order to see what is going on in the site as a whole – what areas are darker, or lighter or of different composition of soil and sand and rocks – and specific target areas in the pit, we had constantly to sweep the dirt clean.  Right.  Clean dirt.  Who knew?  Anyway, that was a dusty, unrewarding, often seemingly meaningless, almost Sisyphean task as you swept an area ‘clean’ only to have more pebbles and dust trickle down from elsewhere.  But I digress…).  Therefore, to reach the end of that phase, especially given the uncertain future of our site, was a bit of a let down, the end of the exciting work.  On the other hand, we ended the digging phase with a huge bang – excavating a tomb that the folks here viewed as one of the richest and most unique in terms of specific artifacts that they have seen in a while.  Tomb 263.

I uncovered this beautifully incised
rectangular piece of ceramic as we
were about to close up for the day.
I had to wait until the next morning
to discover that it was the handle to a
large ladle (below).  The staff arch-
aeologists got quite interested at this
point, since such a large, decorated
 ladle is rare.

As with my first tomb – number 261 – it began with our interpreter and staff archaeologist, Rita, pointing to a dark spot in the pit and telling me and my fellow volunteer Jessie, a.k.a ‘Kiwi’ (a wonderful young aspiring archaeologist from New Zealand) to get to work.  So we got our basic excavation kits together and got to work on a fairly unprepossessing patch of dirt which was undistinguished save for its nearly perfectly circular shape, not quite three feet in diameter.

N.B. The basic excavation kit, by the way, consists of the following: a trowel, the brush end of a broom, a dustpan and a bucket.  Lots of buckets, actually.  This is what you use when you put away the pick and shovel.  Later, when you have uncovered artifacts, you mostly put away the trowel and dustpan and broom in favor of the little dental tools, a small soft paint brush, and a little scoop fashioned out of the top of plastic soda bottles.  Archaeologists are great borrowers and improvisers of tools. 

So, Jessie and I got to work.  Scrape-scrape, scoop, bucket; repeat as needed; lug full bucket to edge of pit, hand up to the screeners above; repeat as needed.  And so on. Our little hole didn’t seem promising initially, and we both started to express doubts as to its fertility in terms of artifacts when a half hour or so passed with only dirt and rocks to our credit.  Then I felt my trowel scrape on something non-rock-like and suddenly the orange curve of a bowl emerged. We paused for a quiet and cautious woo-hoo – one pot rim does not make a tomb – and started gingerly excavating around the bowl.  Another curve of orange appeared and then, so suddenly that she let out a startled squeak and started back a bit on her heels, a small hole appeared in the dirt in front of Jessie.  She had uncovered the perfectly round top of a bottle, a complete one judging from the void into which the dirt and sand trickled.  It was at this point that our little circular hole became tomb 263 of Las Ruedas. 

Day two of digging tomb 263.  Jen, Jess and I spent the morning working
feverishly and excitedly.  Smiles such as Jen's were the rule of the day.

After uncovering a third pot – for a total of four items in our newly designated tomb – we began to try to define the extent of the hole.  To do this, Jessie worked backwards and eastwards from the north end, while I started to explore the southern portion.  Just as the morning’s work at the dig was coming to a close at about noon, my trowel once again scraped on ceramic. This time, however, it was not the familiar curve of a pot rim or the edge of a bowl, it was rectangular shaped and beautifully incised with a typical Vaccean geometrical pattern.  (Carlos the potter later taught us the technique used to create such incised patterns; we got to make our own little salt boxes.  What fun!).  Unfortunately, that was it for the day and we had to cover the tomb with a tarp and cover that in turn with screened dirt.  This was to protect the contents from the weather and, hopefully, fool overly curious potential grave robbers.  The people here have in the past come back to a site in the morning only to find that thieves in the night had pilfered the very artifacts that the archaeologists had uncovered the previous day.  Once safely covered and disguised, we broke for lunch and siesta until our evening shift at the site.

After lunch, another volunteer was added to our little team.  Since the piece I had uncovered digging back was some distance from the first group, there was a suspicion that either the tomb was big, or it was a double tomb.  Thus the welcome addition of Jenna, a.k.a. ‘Blondie,’ a.k.a. ‘Rubia’, a Minnesotan studying at my own alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.  We carefully uncovered the tarp and, trying to keep as much of the ‘clean’ dirt in it, gently removed it and lugged the heavy, awkward bundle to be screened above.  Then began the process of cleaning the surface of the remaining loose dirt, sand and rocks before continuing.  We had just finished this task when the wind suddenly picked up and started whipping the awning above us around violently – and then it began to rain.  We had to rush to retrieve the tarp, get a few buckets of clean dirt, and cover up our tomb again.  Sigh….  But wait.  Ten minutes later, the wind was back down and, although dark clouds still lowered overhead, the rain had stopped.  So, back to removing the tarp, cleaning and then, of course, the wind and rain began again and we had to rush to cover up again – this time more efficiently, as we had wisely made sure we had clean dirt on hand just in case.  It was like a fire drill – we got pretty good at it after the first couple of times.  It was disappointing, having to abandon our work for the time being and spend the rest of the evening cleaning pottery in the lab.  But, there was always tomorrow….

And tomorrow came bright and sunny and the three of us began to work in earnest on our

As we dug further and further back from the
original four pots, we uncovered artifact
after artifact, some quite rare and beautiful.
Below: the end result.  1.5 meters of tomb
with a total of 17 artifacts, including a painted
duck egg.  Angeline's bar was hopping that night!

tomb.  I continued to scrape my way southwards while Jen and Jess worked the other edges.  First, I found that the incised, rectangular piece of pottery was the handle to a ladle – and a big one too.  Then the real fun began.  As the three of us scraped away, it seemed that every five or ten minutes one of us let out a whoop of discovery, and then another, and another as pot after pot after bottle after bowl kept emerging from our lengthening grave.  All morning we were lost to the world, almost unaware of the discomfort of our cramped, crouching postures as we struggled to find the right angle to approach the multiplying artifacts.  In the end, when we broke for the day, we had uncovered a total of 17 artifacts: from the first bowls, to the rare and beautiful ladle, to a pinch-pot type of wine pitcher in burnished black ceramic (something nobody there had ever seen before), to a tall, Phoenician style pitcher that they also oohed and ahhed over.  But the most amazing find was something that Jen uncovered.  At first she was unsure what it was – she kept muttering, stone? pottery? stone? – until she finally shouted EGG!  She had managed to uncover a partially intact, 2,000 year old painted duck egg!  We all marveled at this – we had seen one in the collection at the Center, but to discover one of these exquisite, fragile, almost ephemeral objects was a stunner.

At the end of this exhilarating, exhausting shift, we three were hot, dirty, and achy from the unnatural, contorted positions into which we had forced our bodies to get at the precious artifacts.[1]  And we couldn’t have been happier or more satisfied with our work that day.  The rest of the team shared our excitement and sense of accomplishment as well.[2]  Angelina’s bar down the street from the center was lively before lunch afterwards and the three of us were unable to pay for any drinks that day.

Carlos 'El Jefe' doing some emergency field conservation to preserve a
particularly fragile pot.  He performed the delicate tasks of bringing that and
the duck egg out; the entire team took turns taking out most of the other artifacts.

The next day, Carlos ‘El Jefe’ returned from a conference to see our handiwork.  He immediately jumped into the hole – to some horrified gasps from, well, me among others – and after a brief examination he was beaming and exclaiming ‘qué linda, qué rara, qué buena.’  We all felt, I think, like a high school team upon winning the championship and basking in the approval of the coach.  Then, with the projects documentarians again recording events on video, we each took turns – the entire team – gently, tenderly freeing the pots from the ancient earth and handing them up into the safety of the curators’ hands until the tomb was empty and, finally, silent.  

End of the day, end of the dig.  Now: to the lab...

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[1] I have experienced this post-crouch achiness before at Montpelier as well as with tomb 261.  One discovers muscles one had entirely forgotten about while straining in a dig; after my first tomb I found that there was a large, blue-black-purple-y blotch on the inside of my right ankle.  It was not tender, as most bruises are, and I had no idea when or how it had appeared.  I chalked it up to the natural hazards of unnatural archaeological crouching and stooping.

[2] One always has to remember that each artifact one discovers belongs to the entire team; the person actually in the pit with trowel and brush relies on others to screen, to lug full buckets around a maze of no-go areas to hand up top, to bring fresh, empty buckets, to fetch new tools, to force preoccupied diggers to hydrate and stretch now and again.  Not to mention people to map, draw, photograph and measure everything.  Nobody digs alone.