Day 48

It’s day 48 of 74 and we are definitely focused on the end game. We have 15 days left in Iringa, half of which we will spent excavating and half washing artifacts. We also have to fit in office reports and backfilling somewhere in there, but I’ll leave that for my supervisor to worry about. The stress out here is palpable! Given our present situation, we really threw ourselves into artifact washing and sorting today. Our new antiquities officer, Anthony, finally arrived the day before yesterday and we immediately put him to work scrubbing and counting. Anyone we can bribe, cajole, or trick into helping us is fair game at this point. Sometimes we’ll even try to con the hotel staff into carrying basins of water upstairs for us. However it’s been getting harder and harder, so I think they might be on to us. It must have hit 35 degrees with no wind while we were washing artifacts after lunch. While sitting on the hot cement counting shell fragments into bunches of 50, I felt like I was in a battle of wills with the elements. It was a race to finish counting each level before falling over from heatstroke. How can one place possibly be so hot during the day and so cold at night? It seems as though Africa has no intention of easing up on us during this final stretch. What a little minx.

It sounds like we might really strike it rich later this week because our newest member of IRAP, Frank, might be joining us from Dar es Salaam. Frank is starting his PhD with Pam this September, but since he lives in Tanzania and we’re helpless foreigners, he’s been lending a hand throughout the summer. He’s the one who has been working with the National Museum to retrieve those artifacts from 2002, and he organized our meeting with the Provost in mid-July. Now he might even sacrifice spending time with his family to give us a hand in the field. If it’s not already obvious, there is a pretty active Frank Fan Club here at the Isimila hotel. The thought of acquiring another fully trained archaeologist so late in the game makes my mouth water. Furthermore, he’s a zooarchaeologist (i.e., he specializes in archaeological animal bones) which means he can shoulder some of the burden of identifying bone fragments. I guess we’ll just have to be extra good for the next few days and hope for a miracle. In the meantime, we can look forward to another day of artifact washing tomorrow.