18th
In the classroom and back in the field!
Saturday 17th September 2011
Saturday afternoons are now our chance to work in the classroom together with the students on the fieldschool! On Thursday afternoon the students finished up at 1pm to enable everyone to visit their families on Friday and then re-assemble in the local university at Shibin el-Kom on Saturday afternoon for lectures from the fieldschool teachers!
So, on Saturday morning, the smaller team headed up to Quesna to continue with the excavations, drawing and recording ahead of the lectures. Most of the work focusses on T9 - within the Ptolemaic - Roman cemetery, as we continued to work to lift one of the burials and also draw another. Work also continued with the local workers in T10 where we continued to work along a long thin trench aimed at tracing the results of the radar survey earlier this season! At 12 noon we all finished at site and headed home for a quick change before going to the university. We arrived at 2pm and met the students and were greeted by our old friend, the head of the archaeology department, Prof. Ahmed Deraz!
There were three talks this afternoon - attended by all of the fieldschool students - the first from Jo giving a brief history of work at the site and techniques that have been used in the past - from geophysical survey techniques to drill coring on the low ground around Quesna - where we have been investigating signs of ancient settlements! Having heard much about these techniques the week before, the students were very interested to see the equipment itself! The second talk was by G. J. Tassie on excavation methodology - giving a brief history of archaeological excavation techniques and recording and running through the recording systems that are available and that we have been using at Quesna. The final talk was by Larry Owens - a lively lecture which really captured the students attention and which looked at different perspectives and approaches to studying humans - on local and wider scales - and the importance of looking beyond royalty and the elite!!
The students learning how to record and excavate a burial in the field!
