Second Half

Gamarjobat!

Well, the half way point of my trip has come and gone, and I am now on the home stretch, with quite a bit of work ahead of me. I just returned to Dmanisi from Tbilisi last night and have a few days of work in the museum before going back to the site on Monday, for Dato's birthday party and supra. As usual, that will probably be a great time and there will be an ample supply of mtswadi and khachapuri.

Not much has really happened since my last post, besides my adviser arriving, although without her luggage. It still hasn't shown up and she arrived last Friday, but I guess it is because there is only one flight a week between Paris and Tbilisi on Georgian Airways, so she may get it tomorrow. Otherwise, her three week trip will be limited to a few changes of clothes, most of which she had left in her suitcase in the museum. Besides that hiccup, things are going well.

I worked all of last week in the museum, except for Friday because Maia said they were closing the museum because the police were going to search the premises with dogs. What she neglected to tell me, or didn't know herself, was that the prime minister and the head of some bank were getting a private tour of the museum. Frankly, my work was probably more important. HA!

We went to Dmanisi on Monday and spent a few days there looking at some of the bones that had come out. There are many coming out of the ground now, since the field school is in its second week. I was able to talk to the students more this trip and they seem like a good bunch. They are a pretty diverse group in comparison to the previous years, with students from China, Japan, the Philippines, Switzerland, the UK, Georgia, and America. There is a good mix of graduate students and undergrads from all facets of anthropology, making it an interesting group.

Sadly, that is really all that has been happening here. Pretty uneventful as of now, besides the usual work with bones and things. I have mostly been examining the unidentifiable bone fragments, which are pretty much all that is left to look at. They are generally uninteresting, but we can get valuable information from the degree of bone fragmentation in the assemblage. We also can get interesting information from long bone shaft fragments (fragments from the humerus, femur, radius, tibia, metacarpal, and metatarsals), which we are currently writing a paper about the breakage mechanics of bone when struck with a hammer stone. I also found some to have carnivore tooth marks on them and even a few cut marks, which was exciting. Hopefully, we can keep finding some of each type of marks and at least have some reward for all of our hard work.


Sorry for the brevity of this post, but I will make it up later on!

I'm sure I will have some more stories next time, after my next trip to the site.

Nakhvamdis!

Reed