PKAP 2012 First Day Challenges

Part of the fun of archaeology is that it compels scholars who tend to work in fairly controlled environments to encounter the uncontrollable, the physical, and the real. For example, my lovely GIS maps which seem so secure, accurate, and clear when produced for publications seem incomplete and barely legible when carried out into the “real space” of the field. A datum that appears so clearly on the map disappears into the tall, dry grain on the height of Vigla. The edges of backfilled trenches are no longer even hints in the baked, buff earth. Features so visible in our geophysical prospecting remain carefully buried beneath half a meter of earth.

What could this possibly mean in real space?

The invisibility of our cartographic landscape has become apparent this year as we are moving from using a very fancy Trimble R8 GPS unit to using a total station. So we need to ground our virtual landscape in a series of visible features to locate our total station in real space. The ideal way to do this is to place it on a known point and back-sight to other known points to check for the accuracy of our placement. Even as I type this, a legion of eager students are combing through the grain stubble looking for a 1 inch pipe that has served as our datum since 2008.

This is all in advance of laying out trenches on the height of Vigla for our 2012 excavation season. These trenches will continue the work we’ve done in 2008 and 2009 to document the history of the fortified Hellenistic site and to establish a clear chronology for the fortification walls there. The additional challenge of working at this site comes from its position on a British military firing range. As a consequence of this location, we will have only very limited time to excavate. In fact, we’ll lose most of our first week of the season to British military exercises. This will necessitate some long days digging when we are allowed to be on the site. Let’s hope our students (and the senior staff!) are up for the challenge of  a series of 10 hours excavation days punctuated by days when we can’t go into the field at all.

Compounding the uncertainty of our schedule and the need to reconstruct our geo-spatial orientation is that I’m sick. I caught some crazy cold after spending 15 hours breathing other people’s air while on my flight to Cyprus. So, I have been left back at the hotel while the students and staff have gone out to the site for orientation. While I enjoy the challenges that GIS and databases can provide, I do miss it when I don’t have a chance to go out into the field. I’ll begrudgingly admit that staying out of the sun this morning is probably for the best. The quicker I recover from my cold, the easier the challenges of fieldwork will become.