Long Tuesday

Gamarjobat!

 As I write this, I am now eclipsing the 24 hours awake mark from when I woke up in Tbilisi to go to the airport, which was 1:45 AM local time. Currently, I am cruising at 400mph 30,000 feet above sea level. I have slept as much as three hours, sporadically, including a nice nap on a bench in the Munich Airport (Flughafen Munchen for you Deutsch speakers), and through the last half of Tommy Boy on the trans-Atlantic flight from Munich to Newark, NJ. So it should prove to be an enjoyable blog post, what with my insomnia infused rambling and all. Ha.

 My last week in Georgia was definitely a great one. When I last had updated everyone, I was heading to the site to look at the bones that just came out of the ground and to escape the stifling Tbilisi heat, which was hanging between 97-99 degrees for the last week. We showed up at night and had some laughs around the table, playing some cards and drinking some ludi. I woke up the next day, ready to start working on some of the bones that had come out, so I went in to the lab to scan the bones and see where I wanted to start. It took about thirty seconds for me to spot a small, conspicuous looking vertebra, which I knew immediately to be human.  It was a great start to the morning and along with some other great finds (human) it turned into a great day.

And any great find does not go unrewarded. We were eating dinner when our good friend from past years, Giorgi, showed up to visit everyone, mainly his wife, and celebrate his birthday. We also learned at dinner that we would be having a second dinner of mtswadi (skewered pork) and wine to celebrate our great finds. We did indeed have a celebration, of Giorgi’s birthday, of our finds, and of our great team. I stayed up long enough to see the 20 liters of wine disappear and to sing many of our favorite Georgian drinking songs, which are mostly not Georgian, but are just fun to sing. I was the only American to make it to 11PM and stayed up late with dozens of Georgians. It was so much fun. I am obviously not fluent in Georgian, but I am getting better at understanding words and figuring out what everyone is talking about. I still am lost most of the time, but Nika, Giorgi, and Teona are all nice enough to translate for me. Maestro was our tamada for the night and did an excellent job. Many a gaumarjos’ later, I was in bed and ready to face the bakhmelia I was sure to have the following day. We looked at more bones that day and I stopped at bone number 1000 for the year. It was an awesome trip to cap off a relatively monotonous, although very productive, year. We said our goodbyes to everyone at the site and headed back to Tbilisi for the weekend.  We spent more time at the museum wrapping things up and looking at some more bones, as well as looking at all of the rhino teeth and aging them. It seems we have maybe a dozen rhinos at the very least, which is really cool to see. We had a few more meals and received more wine from Sergio, which I hope is still in its bottle and not all over my luggage.

 It was another great year in Georgia, and I know I am going to miss it. I got to explore new areas of the country and really take in the breathtaking beauty of the country I am beginning to think of as my second home. I have added another couple dozen words to my vocabulary, which include left and right (martskena da mardjvena) and I understand (gavige). Hopefully I will remember them and perhaps spend a little more time learning more words before I go back next year. This is one of the first years where I am certain that I will be going back next year, so I am a little less sad to leave than I have been in years past.

 Only a little while left on the plane, and I couldn’t be more excited to be done with this August 14^th, of which I will see probably 30 hours of. Ugh, and I’ll have been awake for most of it. Oh well, it’s the journey not the destination, right? I’m not so sure.

Thanks for following the blog this year, and I will be sure to post in the fall or winter if anything big comes up. I hope you enjoyed my ranting and raving and rambling and run-on sentences as much as I have enjoyed recapping my events.

Nakhvamdis until next year!

Reed

Home Stretch

Gamarjobat,

Only one week left in Georgia. As year three comes to a close, we are inching closer towards a completed database. I am approaching the 1000 bone mark.  To put that in perspective, that is roughly 10% of the collection, which is growing bigger everyday. To put our collection in perspective, I was recently reading about the La Brea tar pits and their excavations, and they have over 3.3 million bones. Our task seems a lot less daunting after reading that. I have looked at many interesting bones, from all different species (even Paleotragus, which is a short-necked giraffe that we have very few of so far but the numbers are growing).

This year has been very different then the past two years. By next week, I will have spend only 1 week at the site and have yet to touch a trowel, although I did use a brush to clean a few bones. I feel really dissociated from the excavations this year, which is really no surprise, considering our time spent in Tbilisi. As much as I enjoy the city, I really miss the solace of the countryside. Dmanisi, as different as it is from America, really does remind me of home. The simplicity of the countryside (and the silence, of course) has a soothing effect on my psyche, probably because I spent so many days in the stillness of the forest and so many nights staring into the vastness of space during my tenure in Balsam. And it was as desolate as that sounds. Ha. I do owe much of who I am to where I grew up and am happy to find that other places in the world are not so different.

Anyways, we have had a pretty productive week. We went to Dmanisi for a night and saw some of the new test pits, M12 and M13, the latter of which didn't pan out. We will be heading out tomorrow afternoon and staying until either Thursday night or Friday morning. The lab workers are out there already prepping the bones and removing the sediment, so we will have plenty to look at for a few days. The field school has also kicked off and the students are all really nice. It will be fun to spend a few days and get to know everyone better. We will come back and work over the weekend and then mentally prepare for our long journey back to the States.

I had a good time this weekend at the market and looking at all of the odd and interesting things for sale. I could have bought hundreds of Soviet medals or a large painting of Josef Stalin or any number of random electronics, but I refrained. I did buy some nice skewers so I can make so shasklik when i get home, and so we have nice skewers instead of the weak and small bamboo ones that we currently have. I also bought some gifts and enjoyed the selection of art that was available.

Well, bed time is drawing near and my eyelids are getting heavy so I will leave you with a shorter post this week.

Tune in next week for my final thoughts.

Nakhvamdis,

Reed