Wednesday, July 20, 2005

curioser, and curioser...

today did not start auspiciously. first thing k. did after waking up was to burn herself on the coffee machine (one of those big silver, industrial ones, you know). big red, angry welt rose up on her pretty slip forearm in no time. the group of middle age german volunteers standing near by did not offer help, opting for a mysterious exchange instead. in german of course. europeans...

then we didn't bring enough jerry cans so ppl went thirsty till breakfast. at six o'clock the fog was still hanging around. sure sign of muggy heat later in the day. we weren't disapointed.

i'm left with one volunteer now. strangely we've accomplished more with just the two of us than with 3 before. i found something interesting though. a double handle that belongs, so says alex, to a bellshaped bowl from iron i. it's red burnish and black painted stripes on the external mini handle. apparently double handles like that don't exist in normal assemblages. nobody's seen anything like this before. seems to me all the weird shit has accumulated in my square 88A. i'll try to take a photo of it once it's dried.

but, so i don't get too happy, what i thought was a destruction floor (burned mudbrick and burned limestone) is staring to look like a fill used to level the surface for laying down a floor. so where is the floor, i ask? probably in archaeology purgatory together with the rest of that mutant bellshaped bowl. i certainly have no trouble coming up with six impossible things before breakfast around here.

anyway, i've taken to reading virginia woolf's "jacob's room" on the tell at breakfast (on loan from s.). imagining cambridge in the 1900s in the middle of israel's wild country is far less bizzare than i supposed it to be.
consider this quote:

"But intimacy -- the room was full of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech it rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and coating the mind with the lustre of pearl (...)".

how is everyone doing?
k.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Ms. K. I am fine, getting into the boring state of writing...I'm sorry you burned yourself, I hope it doesn't bother you too much. I love reading your blog, the dig sounds awesome, much more exciting than the lab. Missing you, Ms. M.P. xoxo

Anonymous said...

P.S.-am reading the Austen bio. you gave to D.