First is the worst...

Before we left we took our nephews and niece to the park and the zoo. At one point we were "racing" and my youngest nephew kept singing "First is the worst, second is the best, third is the one with the treasure chest." Now, I remember this rhyme from when I was young, however we used to say "third is the one with the hairy chest." In the context of the dig so far I have to say I like his version better, and it seems much more appropriate as we made some neat finds today in our square. It should also be noted that the first day was not necessarily "the worst" and the second was not necessarily "the best," so all that really needs to be taken into account is the fact that, in respect to the first week, today was somewhat of a "treasure chest." Did you get all that?

The day started just like the first two days...cloudy, and somewhat comfortable for working in. The sun stayed away until breakfast, so we waited until then to put up our sunshade. Even before this we made a cool find - a piece of braided glass, probably some sort of ornamental piece, we will have to wait and see if we hear anything more about it.

After breakfast we made two more finds; a (formerly) round stone flattened on both sides. One of the sides had a groove cut into it. At some point it had been broken as one of the sides that should have been round was flat. There are still some questions as to what it is, or was used for, but the thought is that it might have been some kind of mortar stone. The other find, which came right at the end of the day, was a piece of a grinding stone. The stone was smooth and had been worked into a round shape. There was also a "foot" attached to it. At one point it probably would have had four feet to stand on...

The "wonderful" thing about all of these finds is the break from work that generally comes along with them. In some cases, most specifically with the important items, Kristina (the Assistant Director and Small Finds Registrar for the dig) has to come over and take field notes about positioning, etc. At the same time Dr. Schuler comes over to way in on what it may be and to photograph the item where it was.

In other news, we have been working this week with Arny (a dig veteran) and two guys from Concordia University Irvine, Eric and Will. Eric and Will have been a lot of fun to get to know and to work with. The have dubbed our group "Arny's Army" and come in every day humming the theme from The A-Team...

This post has gotten rather long, but I wanted to address a couple of comments from the past days. First, I changed the permissions on Flickr so that you should be able to look at all sizes of any given picture. Second, I will do my best to post photos, but I can't make any promises. It will depend on whether or not I remember to take some while we are up on the site, it's not always the easiest thing to do...