| Entry: | Today was an odd day. I felt like I accomplished some things while excavating in Unit 14213: I uncovered several areas with mud brick, which I properly identified rather quickly, and defined the borders between the mud brick and normal packed soil quite easily. However, I felt as though I was working inefficiently throughout the day, much of this due to the fact that my tools were regularly being ‘swiped.’ As the unit was quite cramped with 4 people working in it, I was frequently unable to find an easy surface to work at, and as a result, dumped quite a bit of dirt, sifted through it, and dumped it in the spoil heap via wheel barrow, so that the others wouldn’t have to slow down.
(The others excavating with me at this point were Alex, who was semi-supervisor, having worked in this area the longest, and Ray and Katie. Katie and I worked together most of the time, while Ray and Alex also formed a sort of half-team.)
The point with the tool swiping being this – I understand the site has an informal organization as far as tool use goes, and most people don’t mind if their personal trowels and brushes are snagged from time to time. Americans, by contrast, are usually quite protective of their own trowels, due to the quasi-mythological (*ahem* scientific) properties assigned to them (one thinks of Flannery and the Golden Marshalltown) which was a bit of a culture shock at first for me. I adjusted to this generally, as the trowel attachment IS a bit silly, but today I was incapable of holding onto my own brush and trowel for more than 15 minutes, which often resulted in my coming back after emptying a bucket to no tools, and spending the next five minutes hunting down new tools I could use and get resituated. Now, five minutes of scrambling for tools for every fifteen minutes of work means that my work time was cut by a quarter. This is even more frustrating when the general problem is access to things that I own and brought here myself! It’s fine when the team leader or other team member grabs them temporarily to clean an area as both of you discuss it, but when things regularly end up on the opposite side of the trench…
Most of my work-day reports take a more narrative structure, but I really did spend the day in the field doing one thing – taking down the unit 14213 while identifying mud bricks and preserving them. Maybe rather than linear time or cyclical time I experienced static time today.
I find myself listening to music in a more immersive, self-indulgent way lately. It really is about shutting things and people out while creating my own auditory space. This is strange for me, as music is generally more of a social thing for me – I most often listen with others, sharing music, or playing it loudly throughout the house with the recognition that strangers may catch odd bits of sound here and there walking along the sidewalk in front of it.
I wonder what voices sound like in mud brick houses. Going in the experimental house and either talking inside it with someone, or playing music in it, or having others talk outside and seeing what I pick up on does seem a bit on the corny side, but I think acoustics are fairly solid dividers of social spaces – sound blocking structures being effective for isolating discourse through the routine time-space-paths of those individuals which interact through sound and create society in doing so.Entered By: BK |
