ლუდი არ არის ცუდი (Beer is not bad)

'Ludi ar aris ts'udi' is the transliteration of this post's title. As you can see, this fitting phrase for a refreshing beverage on a hot day also has a nice ring to it. It also was one of the many new actual sentences I have been taught over the course of the last week at Dmanisi. Also, helpful phrases like 'where are you going?' and 'Go!' have now been added to my Georgian vocabulary. I really wish I could speak it and understand more of it because I would really like to ask questions to the people in the village that are also on the excavations. None of them speak English, or are limited to 'Thank you' and 'Hello,' which isn't too much different than my level of Georgian. It would also be nice to hear what the others are talking about in the camp. It is amazing how much fun they have at the camp and how much they smile and laugh at all hours of the day. Although I don't understand most of what their saying (I say most because once in a while someone will translate for me), I can't help but smile and laugh along. Which may be ironic because my current facial hair situation may be the butt of their jokes. Ha. But I digress...

The last week has been pretty fun but exhausting. We arrived in Dmanisi last Saturday to some newly uncovered bones in M5, which I got to partially dig out at the end of the day, since Reid had to pay the workers and there was no one else there. It turns out that that square produced about a dozen bones, including a bear mandible and a rhino humerus. Pretty cool stuff. There are also two pelvis halves in the ground that should come out this week. Getting there Saturday also meant overlapping time with one of the field school students from last year. He was leaving on Monday so Saturday night we drank up the Chacha that Sergio gave me and about a third of a bottle of vodka. Not too much, but enough for bakhmelia the next morning. (You can figure that one out I'm sure. :) )

We had only planned to stay until Monday, but as I was getting prepared to catch the Marshutka (small bus) back to Tbilisi, we decided that it would be better for me to stay behind while Martha and Julia went back. I was happy with this since it was nice and cool in Dmanisi and I would get to excavate. I was hoping to work in the square with the bones, but since I am not so experienced with taking fragile bones out of the ground, I was assigned to a different square. I was fine with that and started to go to town with the rock hammer. At Dmanisi, the sediment is so hard that a rock hammer is really the only way to get through it. Some layers are basically cemented together and they are taken out by Hilti, our resident jackhammer. I usually have no trouble moving dirt, as I have had a lot of practice in my teenage years (Thanks Dad!) so I was going back in time at a pretty good rate. After about 30 centimeters down into my square, and about 3 or 4 meters below the actual ground surface, I reached the line that separates the two different types of sediment. The line is indicative of a magnetic reversal on Earth, which has happened dozens of times over the last couple million years. This reversal means that the magnetic north of the planet had actually switched from the north pole to the south pole, and these reversals have very reliable dates based on a dating technique called Paleo-magnetism. This concept is way over my head to explain any further so I hope you got the gist of it. Anyways, this line basically means that I had reached 1.78 million year old sediment. These sediments from this line and downward to the basalt, which is 1.85 million years old, were all ash layers from volcanic eruptions and are the reason that a lot of the bone preserved so well, because they were buried right after they were deposited.

So, before I had reached this line, I found a pebble or two. Nothing very exciting for a day and a half of swinging a rock hammer into the dirt. After the line, my luck didn't get much better. I found one unidentifiable bone fragment that crumbled if touched and a few cobbles, or larger stones. Finally on Thursday I found an artifact, which was a nice piece of stone that had flakes taken out of it, which could be from early humans flint knapping, or making stone tools. On Friday, I reached a lower sediment and found 6 artifacts in the same 10 centimeter layer. Pretty exciting stuff. Of course after things start heating up, the day ends and I was summoned back to Tbilisi.

I knew that my time excavating wouldn't last very long, but it was fun while it lasted, and the physical toll it took on me did not go unnoticed. Maybe that's why people weren't going as fast as I was, but I'm leaning more towards the fact that I didn't find much. On Saturday we washed artifacts and I had a break where I went to the site and met Martha and Dr. Bernard Wood, who is a professor of Anthropology at George Washington University in DC and one of the big names in Paleoanthropology... and my roommate for the next few days. Ha. Martha gave a tour to a bunch of people from the US embassy who knew very little about the site and even less about archaeology and they were apparently pressed for time because the tour took about half the time it was supposed to.

Sunday was when the field school students arrived, which consists of 10 Americans, all girls, and 3 Georgians, two boys and one girl. Adam, the field school instructor and a professor at Wellesly in Boston, and Zach, the field school assistant, also arrived then and it was nice to see both of them again this year. We ate dinner with them at the camp and then took the museum bus back to Tbilisi, with Zaza driving, who has been driving for the museum for a long time, and we arrived in about half the time it normally takes that trip. ha. It was really bumpy. That's all I have to say about that.

I was summoned back to Tbilisi to look at more bones in the Museum, which are all fragments of limb bones. We are taking measurements of the angles of the breaks and are going to compare them with the previous measurements we took on the elk bones that I broke last fall and compare them also with other papers. We are planning on writing a paper on bone breakage this fall and submitting it to a journal of some sort. This paper will be a chance for us to publish our experimental data, some of our field data, and some of our problems with methodology and inconsistencies in the previous studies. It should be a fun paper to work on and a meaningful first publication. We spent most of the day measuring bones today and will tomorrow as well, until we have to go to Dmanisi for Dr. Wood's lecture, and then come back tomorrow night.

It's pretty hot in Tbilisi and I miss the scenery at Dmanisi already.

Another long winded entry but I hope you enjoyed it.

I will write again sometime soon.

Nakhvamdis

Reed

თბილისში (in Tbilisi)

Gamarjobat!

I am glad to be writing again from Georgia. It has been a pretty relaxing first few days of assimilating myself back into the culture. Mostly that means tuning out the non-stop honking of horns on the streets outside of our apartment at all hours of the day. Ha. More relaxing as it sounds since it is done while lounging around the apartment.

Our apartment this year is a little bit further from the museum and other things than last year, but it is still nice. We have a fifth floor apartment and I only took the elevator the first day, hoping that I can at least match the 15 pounds I lost last year (and found since then, ha). We also have about a mile extra of a walk. Not too bad so far, but I'm not looking forward to when it gets in the high 90s and I start sweating as soon as I step out of our air conditioned apartment.

Anyways, the flight here was pretty uneventful, except for a little turbulence and it was completely packed. Lucky for me, I got to the airport early enough and got moved to an exit row seat so I didn't have to have my luggage in my lap. That was pretty amazing, since my knees always touch the seat in front of me in the other seats. Hopefully I will have similar luck on the way home, although I doubt it will be as packed. At least I hope not.

My goals of the first day were not realized as I woke up at noon after arriving at 4AM, started my laundry, went to the store to get some food for lunch, and had to wait like 2 hours for the washer to finish. After that, I put my clothes out on the balcony to dry and realized that the air conditioner was dripping on our other balcony for days probably and there was about a half inch of standing water since there was no drainage hole for some reason. Being the pragmatist that I am, I vowed to do the apartment a solid and remedy the problem. With a trusty role of duct tape I found, I went to work. I tape it to the wall and it was just long enough to reach over the edge of the balcony and drip on the cars below. haha. Better than seeping into our living room. After this, a storm was brewing so I had to hang my boxers from the coat rack and my other clothes in the bedroom closet. Thus, my nightly excursion was put on hold. And boy did it storm.

Martha and Julia arrived at around 4AM the next day and woke me up with the doorbell, since they didn't have a key. Their flight was fine as well. We went to the museum yesterday and today to see lots of people that I met last year and socialize and get updated on the gossip. All is well in Georgia at the moment. Nothing much has changed since last year, except a few new faces in the form of babies, including Irakli's, our driver from last year. He also has a great new job, but he will not be driving for us, which is unfortunate but I am happy for him. We also saw his father, Sergio, who is the museum mechanic, and he made me take a shot of brandy. It's like I never left. People all seem to remember me, or at least pretend to, so that is very welcoming.

I am very excited to get to the site. Under the skulls from last year were some elephant bones including a fully articulated foot that is in the museum. It is really cool and big. We found part of an elephant humerus right by there last year so hopefully there is more of the skeleton laying around. We are trying to find a driver to take us there tomorrow, so we will see.

Most importantly: I have uploaded pictures! Follow the link below.


http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.552645054573.2044918.185200036&l=ca2e28f760

I will try to write again soon.

Nakhvamdis!

Reed

Castles and Pizza

Hello again from Munich!

The trip has flown by and I am in the lobby patiently awaiting the shuttle to the airport and passing time by drinking some delicious hell (light/lager) beer and updating my blog.

This trip was many things: fun, exhausting, infuriating (only for a short period), to name a few. But it can probably be characterized by one of two things. You guessed it, just what the title says. We saw a few castles, but none as exravagant as the one we toured - Neuschwanstein. This castle is everything I thought it was going to be and more. It was crazy big, and built precariously on the top of a mountain. It was the grand idea of "mad" King Ludwig, who was declared mad shortly before his suspicious death because of his love for spending money. An odd symptom for diagnosis, yes, but that was the case then. The castle was started in 1869 and stopped in 1886 when King Ludwig died, to which the circumstances of his death remain unclear, but the common theory is that he drowned himself in a lake not far from the castle, shortly after drowning the doctor who diagnosed him as mentally ill. The circumstances are eerie simply because King Ludwig was an excellent swimmer and it was very unlikely that he would be able to drown himself. Anyways, dead or not, the castle remains, and he only lived in it for 6 months over a 2 year period. The castle was not completely finished because, when the king died, he was in so much debt (somewhere in the ballpark of how much the castle is worth today, and he was still building four castles at the time) that they stopped construction and it was turned into a museum some six months after he died. What is in the castle is original, including a bed that's canopy is wood carvings of gothic spires and cathedrals throughout Europe, a room dedicated to swans based on one of Wagner's operas, a giant ballroom/ concert hall (which now has concerts once a year and the roof literally shakes from the acoustics), and a man made cave that links his study with his chambers or some thing like that. irregardless of the connected rooms, he has a freaking cave on the fourth floor of the castle, with stalactites, stalagmites, and all. No bats though. Speaking of bats, and on a tangent, I went to the zoo today and they have a bat house where they just have it open and the bats are flying around your head in the dark. I got buzzed by a few of them.

Anyways, the castle was really cool, and I'll post pics in Georgia, since I can't here because the internet is really slow. There was also another castle on another hill by this one, called Hohenschwangau I think, and it was really cool too. We didn't tour it, but it looked awesome from up on the castle. There was also a trail up into the mountains behind the castle, and it had a really narrow foot bridge which Ryan dared not go on, as it crossed a gorge and was a couple hundred feet up, right above a river and a string of waterfalls. I can see why this castle was the ispiration for Cinderella's castle at Walt Disney World.

The second thing that defined this half of the trip was pizza. Ryan discovered Neopolitan style pizza for the first time, and we ate it quite a bit. At least three nights, but I bet we would have ate it every night if it was his choice. We did eat at some good restaurants in Budapest, and here in Munich. I hate sauerkraut but I decided to try it out over here. I like sauerkraut here, it was so sweet and delicious that I ate a giant plate of it. If only I had known this at the end of the year department party. Maybe I would have a different view of the choice in ordering 50 pounds of sauerkraut. Ha. Back to the pizza... Ryan ordered the same pizza everytime too. It was called Pizza Diavolo, which was cheese, hot peppers, and a spicy salami. I think Ry might put money down for his own Punch Pizza restaurant when he gets back to the states (For those who don't know, Punch Pizza is a chain that specializes in brick oven Neopolitan style pizzas. It's good, but it's not the pizza here, that's for sure.)

We have done a lot of walking over this trip and I am ready to relax my first day in Georgia, although I plan on waking up and getting some Khachapuri and then probably feast on some Shashlik at night. Mmmmmmm... I think I said what those were in my older blogs, so y'all should be up to speed. If not, it's a great excuse to go reread all my blog posts. Ha :)

Anyways, we saw some great things, some awful things (especially at the House of Terror in Budapest, which is about the Nazis and Secret Police in Hungary and the ensuing massacres of the Jews, and Dachau outside of Munich, which was one of the first concentration camps), ate some great food, and survived without strangling each other, although we had some close calls. Now I remember what it was like living with Ryan, haha. No, it was a great trip and our over-reactions can probably be attributed to our hunger (don't say anything Katie).

This was a long one, and I hope you enjoyed it.

Bye from Munich and I'll write next from Georgia.

Nakhvamdis!

Reed

ps. same spellcheck problem so don't be too harsh on my spelling :)

First Days in Europe

Guten Tag!

We arrived safe and sound with a few uneventful flights and are now in Vienna, Austria and are heading to Budapest, Hungary in the morning.

Ryan and I met in Amsterdam and got to Munich around 11AM, got our car, a nice little Kia six speed, and went to our hotel. We tried to check in but we were early so we grabbed a bite to eat and some beer to kill some time. I fully immersed Ryan into unfamiliarity as soon as I could by choosing a tiny hole in the wall bar where no English was spoken. I ordered us a few beers and we tried to decipher the menu, and eventually order. The food was good, I had some hot dog like sausages and Ry had a currywurst. We went back to the hotel and tried to check in again, and they couldn't find our reservation. That was because there were two hotels of the same name and we were at the other one. Luckily, the other hotel was only a mile or so away, and we checked in and took about a 4 hour nap, as neither of us really slept on the plane.

After waking up from our hard earned naps, we walked around our neighborhood, which was near the river that runs through Munich, which at this time the name escapes me. We walked along the river and then found a traditional Beer hall to dine at, called Wirthaus or something like that. I had some pork chops and a potato dumpling, which was delicious, and Ry had some Knodel, or dumplings, which were also very good. All in all, a pretty good first day.

We both woke up on Sunday at about 6, got ready, ate a large breakfast, and hit the road to Vienna. We decided to take the scenic route and avoid tollways so it took us about 4 and a half hours to get there, although the GPS told us it would take 6 and a half. Our first 70 miles or so in Germany were on the highway, also called the Autobahn :) Since I was driving, I decided to try and keep up with traffic a little bit, but even at 160 km/h people were still flying by us, so I kept it at a cool 140 km/h... For those who want to know how fast that is, you can do the math, since I don't want my mother to worry about it. haha. After we got off the highway, we went through a lot of small and beautiful towns in the rolling hills. We saw some mountains in the distance but they were further to the south and we should drive through them on our way back through Austria in a couple days.

Vienna is a really cool city with so much interesting history. We walked around in the rain yesterday to a large Versailles like complex called Belvedere. They had an art museum in one of the buildings and we saw some cool paintings and sculptures. This place was about 1/50 the size of Versailles and another place here that we saw called Schonnbrunn, but it was still pretty cool. We also went to a cool church, called Kritzkirche I think. We took a lift up to the dome and then some stairs to the very top of the dome and saw a panoramic of the city, which helped us to orient ourselves a little better.

Today, we saw the palace of the Habsburgs, the royal family that ruled for centuries, the natural history museum, a bunch of churches and other places of interest. Later we are going to walk around some markets by our hotel and go to a music museum. It was cloudy this morning but luckily it didn't rain much and eventually cleared up. It's pretty cool here, probably in the 60s.

Tomorrow we are off to Budapest and I hope to update y'all further in a few days. I am getting excited to see the mountains in Austria and to get back to Georgia.

I will post some pictures in the near future.

Auf Weidersehen!

Reed

ps. Apparently my spellcheck for this is in German so forgive any spelling errors :)