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

Aaaauuuggghhhh, vertebrae!!!

Gamarjobat,

Tbilisi is hot as ever but we are still plugging away at the museum. Unfortunately our AC units are on the fritz and only work for about 5 minutes before blowing out hot air, but they go back to blowing cold after several minutes off. Oh, the first world problems I have.

We were in Dmanisi over the weekend and got to see some of the new areas of excavation as well as some of the new finds. M11 is now approaching the basalt and they have come upon a bone bed that has yielded dozens of bones so far, and they just uncovered the tip of it. A large skull is sticking out as well as a few carnivore mandibles and many other various bones. We may go down there for a day or two in the next few days to see the progress. The field school starts on Monday so we may go then to meet the students and stress the need for them to excavate carefully and not to damage the bones, because it makes our job of examining the bones that much harder, since the more marks on the bone that are new obscure the ancient bone modifications, like cut marks and gnaw marks. Anyways, it should be an interesting visit.

Our time at the site over the weekend was fun. I went for a hike with Reid's two students and we hiked to the highest mountain behind the dighouse. I estimate the elevation to be somewhere around 5000 feet or so, or about 2000 feet above where we started from. That is a complete estimation and I will check to see if I can find a more accurate measurement. We hiked up in about four hours, through acres of raspberry bushes and other various thorned plants. My legs have cuts and scrapes everywhere, as I chose to wear shorts. Most of the raspberries were not ripe yet either, but I survived. We found a large sheep skull and a badger skull too. We had some lunch on the way back down, which consisted of bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, and plums, all of which are staples in Georgian picnics. Our walk back down took a little over an hour and we got to take in some great views of the southern Caucasus and the site. Some snow was visible on the higher peaks in the south, but that was a little more ambitious of a hike.

I took part in the excavation a little on Monday before we left, as I helped screen the sediment, looking for the smaller bones and stones that the excavators may have missed. I also spent some time in the lab cleaning sediment off the bones. It was just nice to be out of the Tbilisi heat and pollution for a few days.

Reid came back from a trip to Shatili on Sunday, which is a town near the Chechen border in Khevsureti, a region in northeast Georgia (click the link to read more about this awesome region). It is a very mountainous region and they have very different customs then the rest of Georgia. Reid was saying that they were leaving the day of a large Pagan ritual, which are commonplace in this region, as much of the people still practice these ancient Pagan customs. Each village has a shrine, which is usually an enclosure with several smaller enclosures within, each smaller enclosure being a different shrine in which only certain people, usually different levels of shamans, can enter. These rituals are still driven with animal sacrifice and the offering of blood to the Pagan gods. Apparently, as I learned a little last year from some linguists who had been studying these regions and rituals, the shamans in the villages have been slowly dying off and the younger generations are not taking part in the ceremonies as much. Therefore, entrance to some of the shrines is no longer possible because these 'high-ranking' shamans are gone. They still need to make offerings in these forbidden shrines, so they take the blood and soak a snowball in it, then heave the snowball into the shrines that they cannot enter. This appeases the gods and life is good in the Pagan world. Reid said he saw into one of the shrines and there were dozens of large skulls of bulls and mountain sheep and goats, all in various stages of decay. He also said that Jesus is a key part of one of the myths about there gods, in which he wrestles one of the gods and loses, thus leaving the region and spreading his word elsewhere (although they later incorporate some of the Georgian Orthodox religion). It is fascinating that these rituals are still in areas of the world and have changed very little over hundreds if not thousands of years. Anyways, it was an interesting story and especially so because Reid is a great storyteller.

Back to the present, I am fully immersed in vertebrae at the museum. I have been teaching myself the subtle differences between all the families of mammal and have been looking at and sorting hundreds of vertebrae. I have finished the cervical vertebrae (the ones in the neck) and am about halfway done with the thoracic verts (those that ribs are attached to). It has been daunting but I am making a lot of progress. I knew I have been looking at them too much when I had a dream about sorting vertebrae last night. Now I can't escape my work, in the real world or the dream world. Alas, the life of a zooarchaeologist. Back at it tomorrow and hopefully approach finishing one aspect of the assemblage before we leave, which is only two and a half weeks from now!

Time has been flying, but I'm still plugging away,

I hope you enjoyed my rambling and wish me luck with my vertebrae.

Nakhvamdis,

Reed

Fun with Stalin

Gamarjobat!

Reality has finally set in here in Tbilisi. Mid 90s and steamy. Well, the cool weather was nice while it lasted. Luckily we have portable AC units at the museum so I can blow cool air on myself all day while I am working.

Besides the warmer weather, things in Tbilisi are great. We have been making more progress on the assemblage and have found more hominin cut marks. We said goodbye to Katrina last week and will say it again to Sean tomorrow night. It sure will be quiet next week. Things are going to start to get a little busier though, as the excavations are coming down on some bone beds. We will probably go out to Dmanisi this weekend and check the status of everything and stay for a few days. The field school will start in two weeks and we will be going back and forth a bit more once bones start coming out of the ground. In a new area of the excavation, M11, they have recovered some very big vessels, or pots, which were used for storage and some were used for cooking bread. They are about 3 feet tall and maybe 18 inches in diameter at the greatest point. These vessels are Medieval and are much later in time than the bone beds, which are almost two million years old (1.85-1.77 my to be precise). I am excited to see this new area and examine the bones that are ready to come out.

Today we made a trip to Gori, which is about an hour west of Tbilisi. Gori is home to the Stalin museum and birthplace, as well as a number of interesting archaeological sites. It was also one of the cities hit the hardest during the war in 2008, but they have rebuilt most buildings and we saw no evidence of the bombings in the town itself. There was an area just outside of the down where some large oil drums were damaged. On the drive to Gori there are are a few places that have rows and rows of small houses for refugees of South Ossetia, the autonomous region of Georgia that is currently occupied by Russia. It was a pretty drive to Gori, as we had a good view of the northern Caucasus.

The Stalin museum was interesting in that it was built in the early 1950s when Stalin was still alive and the exhibits are the same as they were when the museum opened. It is a museum which preserves these exhibits as is to show the Soviet propaganda and the praise of Stalin from the Communist era. We had a tour guide to take us around, as everything was in either Russian or Georgian. Stalin was born in a one room duplex in Gori, which is still preserved and at the museum site. His given name was Iosef Jughashvili, which loosely translates to 'child of Jugha.' Shvili is a common ending to Georgian last names, that and 'idze,' 'adze,' and 'iani,' among others. There were many great paintings and tapestries of Stalin and a hall of gifts given to him by foreign diplomats, most of which were of Communist persuasion. Also on site was his train car, which he used to travel about. It was not as gaudy of a vehicle as I was expecting, but gaudy and flashy was never really the Soviet way, was it? Anyways, the museum was quite interesting and I took many great photos, which I will share a link to below. And I saw Stalin's death mask, which is a mold made of his face minutes after he died and then recast in bronze.

After the museum, we drove to Uplistsikhe (which, yes, is as impossible to say as it looks). We got a brief glimpse of the Gori fortress which rises tall over the city, but no opportunity for a photo, which is why it is linked to the wonderful and all knowing wikipedia page, although it doesn't do it justice.

Uplistsikhe is an archaeological site carved out of the sandstone bluffs on the outskirts of Gori, on the banks of the Mtkvari River, the same one that flows through Tbilisi. It was carved in the 3rd millennium BC, or roughly 5000 years ago, and shows intermittent occupation of various groups of people throughout history. The original founders were said to be pagans, then Christians, when Georgian Orthodox began to sweep through Georgia in the early centuries AD, ca. 300-400 AD. A citadel now sits on top of the site, built in around the 9th or 10th century. The caves and structures were quite amazing and had several different uses, some being storage and some being living. It was especially windy on top of the hill, as in upwards of 50mph winds, which were blowing the sand everywhere, including at me and sandblasting my skin. Besides witnessing Aeolian processes firsthand, I had a great time exploring the hand carved caves and structures, as well as chasing lizards, of which I saw three... Well, four if you count the dead one on the foot path. Nah, let's just say three. :)

It was another fun trip to an area of Georgia that I had not seen in my three visits. Hopefully I will be able to see a few more places before I leave in a month. Time sure is flying, but I am having fun, as I wouldn't want to disprove that old adage.

I hope everyone is surviving the heat back home and elsewhere, as I am beginning to feel your pain.

A link to pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.599876582213.2052639.185200036&type=3&l=a3b7d85344

Nahkvamdis,

Reed

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

Gamarjobat!

Everything is great in Georgia, including the weather. As everyone is sweltering at home, we have been enjoying beautiful 70s weather with occasional rainstorms. If any one remembers my previous blogs, this is completely atypical of weather in Tbilisi and it should be as hot as it is in the states. I am happy to delay that part of Georgia for a little longer but it looks like it will begin to heat up at the end of this week.

Our museum work is going well, and I've looked at almost 200 bones already, so I have gotten a lot done in my first week. We have many more carnivore chewed bones and are on a three day streak of finding human made cut marks! Since we only have a dozen that we have seen so far in our 5000+ bones that we looked at, it is especially exciting.

Over the weekend, we took a day trip to Kazbegi, which is now called Stephansminda, and a Georgian town close to the Russian border and in the middle of the Greater Caucasus mountain range. It was about 32 degrees there and rainy/snowy. Unfortunately we only had a brief glimpse of Mount Kazbek's peak, which is just over 16500 feet in elevation. The clouds were hanging very low, but that was a beautiful sight in itself. Our drive there was really beautiful and we went through a mountain pass that was 7200 feet. Our journey north ended at Gargeti Trinity, which is a beautiful church perched on the edge of a mountain facing Mount Kazbek. We did not spend much time on top since it was so cold and rainy. We drove down the mountain a little ways and found a nice place to picnic. Irakli had packed some pomidori, kitri, puri, atame, kveli, da ghwino (tomato, cucumber, break, peaches, cheese, and wine... See, I know some words). It was a nice 'picnic' out of the back of Irakli's jeep and we headed back to Tbilisi. I was happy to get to see Kazbegi as I had wanted to for the past two years. I am not satisfied yet, however, and hope to go back on a clear and sunny day.

On Monday, we explored some other parts of Tbilisi that I had not seen before. There is a new park in Old town that is near the walking bridge and a new gondola that takes you from the park up to the fortress near Mother Georgia. It was only 1 lari (~60 cents) to go up top and we walked through the botanical garden behind the mountain on our way back down. There is also a 100 or so foot waterfall behind the fortress and in the botanical garden, which was a complete surprise to me. We then stopped and had a beer with a few Germans that were accompanying us, one a botanist that was looking at the pollen from Dmanisi, and the other was a documentary film maker. They were both very nice and had good stories to tell.

We will be heading to Dmanisi just for the day on Saturday, just so one of the new students can see it before she leaves. I will probably be spending more time at the site later in the summer, as the field school starts at the end of July. The field school is a bit small this year and is run through the University of Zurich in Switzerland. There are two American students and two Georgian students. Many other people will be arriving later in the season as well.

We have been spoiled this year with internet in the apartment, so I will try to update my blog more frequently, since I have no excuse to not do it. I also have been able to watch Netflix, which makes my nights a lot less boring.

Also, I have posted pictures of my weekend trip and some other things, so feel free to check them out at the link below.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.599876582213.2052639.185200036&type=1&l=a3b7d85344

I have this grand idea of making an online photo collection through a website other than Facebook, but I have not started it yet. I will post the link if and when it is ready.

I hope everyone is keeping cool in the States. Happy 4th of July!

Nakhvamdis!

Reed

Gamarjobat,

I arrived safely in Tbilisi after a long trip from Minnesota. I had a short layover in Chicago followed by a long layover in Munich. We landed at about 3:05AM local time. My flights were pretty uneventful, although they switched planes for my flight from Chicago to Munich to a smaller plane, so I didn't have a seat until after half the people had already boarded. I received my ticket eventually and was happily surprised when I realized that I was bumped up to Economy Plus, which was rich with leg room and, somehow on this full flight, no one was seated nex to me on the one side. It was very nice.

I took the train into the city when I got to Munich and went to a paleontology museum that boasted a large collection of saber toothed cats and mammoths. I got there and there was one big room with about 20 skeletons of different animals and a second floor balcony with some information on early humans and some replica casts of their skulls. Needless to say, I didn't kill as much time as I was hoping at this place and was a little disappointed that I had to walk quite a ways for this place. So, after 15 minutes in the museum, I began to explore Munich on foot a little bit. I walked a couple miles and looked at some areas that we didn't get a chance to explore last year, so I had a good time. I also had a delicious Bratwurst. I spent a couple hours in the city and decideed to head back to the airport to find a bench to nap, which I did.

Irakli and Martha greeted me at the airport when I (and my luggage) arrived. I went to the museum and worked for a little while yesterday and actually didn't feel too jet lagged. It is really nice to see so many familiar faces again this year. We will be working at the museum until next week, then we will take a trip down to Dmanisi to see the site, as the other two students have not been there yet. Reid's excavation of M5 will start next week as well.

Our apartment is in a nice location, about a half a block from where we were last year. It is a two bedroom and 1.5 bath, but the living room and dining room are quite large so we are not too squished with five people.

Not much else is going on here yet, but I will keep posting as we have internet in our apartment this year.

Also, the Twins were on tv here last night for some reason, but I'm not complaining.

Nakhvamdis,

Reed