Super Supra

Gamarjobat!

Another week has gone by and things are still great in Georgia, including the weather! I am amazed at how nice it has been and I sure hope it stays this way all summer so we can tolerate working in the museum and really putting a dent in our research. We have gotten a lot done so far and are really starting to increase our counts of carnivore gnawed bones and hominin cut marks, of which we have about a half a dozen new bones so far. Not a lot, but definitely interesting to see how much the humans had accumulated in this vast assemblage.

Over the weekend we took the trip to Dmanisi and stayed for the night. Martha, Julia, and I came back on Sunday while the other two students stayed to experience the excavations and the exciting life in the field at Dmanisi. They found out really quickly how boring it can get at the site when there is no one else around. Many of the Georgians that were excavating in the previous years are excavating elsewhere so it is very quiet at Dmanisi, even more so than normal. It was fun to go back to the site and see what they had done since I left last year. They had taken down one wall of the excavation and uncovered a lot more of the basalt as well as a fully articulated juvenile deer torso, including almost all of its ribs and vertebrae. There were many more bones sticking out of various places so it will be exciting to see what is uncovered this season. In M5, Reid's excavation, they have started to bring down a few squares to the basalt and will come down on top of what we think is a carnivore den, since nearly all of the dozens of bones that have come out of that feature are gnawed on by carnivores, and we found baby hyena teeth, which is usually seen in their dens. We have only uncovered a small part of that feature so I am especially excited for that part of the summer.

Reid's students arrived on Friday night (at 5PM somehow, instead of the 3AM that I always arrive). One was here last year and the other was here for the first time. We bought a few beers at Lamara's 'night club' in Dmanisi (just a small shop with a small cooler of beer and other necessities), and we went to the top of one of the hills behind the dig house and took in the beautiful vista and enjoyed our cold ones. It was a pretty fun night and we found some wine in the refrigerator and tried it. It was rough but we had a few glasses, seemed like a good idea at the time. Who knows how long that wine was in the fridge, and I think everyone felt a little sick the next day, some more than others. Regardless, the night was fun and we went back on Sunday afternoon.

On Tuesday, there was a party at Dmanisi for the US ambassador, who is leaving Georgia. He has been out to the site at least once each year that I have been here so I knew who he was and had met him a few times. We had a supra, or large feast, and enjoyed some fine Georgian food and drink, sans chacha, but heavy on the Mtswadi, which was too my liking. There were probably 60 people at the dig house, mostly people from the US embassy. I rode out in a van with two paleoanthropologists; Ian Tattersall from the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and Jeffrey Schwartz from the University of Pittsburgh. We chatted a little and learned that they were going to be working in the museum for the next few days looking at the hominins. We took advantage of the hominin bones being out of the safe and got a chance to look at various parts of the 5 individuals uncovered from Dmanisi, including their clavicles (collar bones), humeri (upper arm bones), skulls, and mandibles. It was pretty cool to see the real bones, as I had seen the skulls many times teaching Anth 1001 at the U of M. We only saw three of the skulls, as the one from 2005 has yet to be published on and was unavailable and I'm not sure why they were not looking at the toothless individual (luckily I had seen the big beautiful skull from 2005 two years ago, still waiting on the publication, coming to a peer reviewed journal near you). It was interesting to also hear Tattersall and Schwartz's opinion on the variation between the specimens. (For those who want to geek out about what provocative things they said about the specimens, I will elaborate more once I get back to the department :) ).

We went to dinner with these two gentlemen and were talking about some of the collections at the Museum in NYC, and this prompted me to say that I read "Dinosaurs in the Attic" by Douglas Preston, which is about how some of the collections at the museum were accumulated. Ian Tattersall then said that he knew 'Doug' and remembers that he was researching about the collections and referred me to another book that was previously written in the 1930s on the same topic. I successfully held back my urge to gush about Douglas Preston and how much I liked his books and that I had read almost all of them. Maybe when I see him again. ha. So I now by association know Douglas Preston and Michael Crichton, the latter because Philip Rightmire went to Harvard with him in the late 1960s. They happen to be two of my favorite authors.

Back to dinner: We had a lot of food and some great conversation about paleoanthropology and our ancestors and some great gossip about some of the big names. ha. That was probably the best part! No, it was all very interesting. Towards the end of dinner, the restaurant we were at had live traditional Georgian dancing and singing, which was really cool to see in person. We stayed for a few dances and called it a night. Here is a link to the dancing: it is unbelievably cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWJiXAfPEcI

One of the other students is leaving tonight, so our crew will be reduced to 4, and the other student is leaving next week. We have been looking at so many bones with this bigger group so our production will drop off pretty quickly once they are gone. We have a lot of summer though, and I am confident that we will get a lot more done than we anticipated in the outset, especially if the weather continues to be tolerable.

I am not sure when we are going out to Dmanisi again, but I expect it to be when the field school starts in a couple of weeks.

I will post more pics soon.

Thanks for reading!

Nakhvamdis

Reed