Home Sweet (New) Home...Kind Of.

As I mentioned yesterday I was moved to a new square; ZZ-Zero. However, today we spent a lot of time working in other squares it seemed...



Our first task right away this morning was to move some of the dirt and rocks out of squares C and D-6. The squares were excavated last season, but over the past year a lot of junk had fallen in. It needs to be clean when they come to do the new survey of the site next week. So, after working there for just about an hour, and after the excitement of finding one of the biggest scorpions I've ever seen, we headed back to our own square...not so fast...ZZ-1, the square next to ours needed some help moving a few big rocks...another chunk of time not spent on our square, but they found the floor (and two column capitals) and might even have that square mostly cleared by the end of the day tomorrow.

Finally, just a little bit before breakfast we got to move back to our square and really begin work for the day...

Then, breakfast was called...



Finally, back at it...

ZZ-1 has more stones that need moved...

Toward the end of the morning we did have a good chunk of time where we were able to focus primarily on the task at hand, ZZ-0. We moved a lot of dirt in a short amount of time, and made a couple more significant finds. First, we believe we've found a column "in situ." Which means it is sitting where it would have been sitting when the city was thriving and when people could have actually seen it sitting there! Unfortunately, it is directly underneath the east wall of our square, and we only have five or six centimeters visible - if it truly is in situ we will have to move the square out in order to fully expose it.

Our other find came as we were dismantling what looked like (and maybe used to be) a wall. Darryl was clearing some dirt and rocks away when he came upon this...











It's a beautiful Corinthian capital. At some point we'll have to have the tractor come over to take it out, but we need to clear more around it first. All-in-all, it turned out to be a pretty good day in ZZ-0...now if we could just get those rowdy neighbors to stop digging up so many rocks!