Gold Rush

While surveying this week, I have gotten to map in all kinds of exciting things—mysterious mounds topped with potsherds, architectural features, and the locations of this year's pottery and plaster dumps. (Some artifacts, like weathered potsherds and pieces of white wall plaster, are so ubiquitous that it's pointless to keep them all. So our experts record, identify, and rebury them in set locations.) One point, however, is tied to the big excitement of the summer so far. A gold coin managed to work its way to the surface of one of the unexcavated mounds, and a worker stumbled across and reported it. We added a point to our map to mark the exact location of his find.

When precious metals are discovered at archaeological sites, there is automatically tension. Locals who hear about such finds have been known to sneak onto sites and dig holes in search of buried treasure. This habit poses special problems for surveying. Fixed points that are used to map our site are usually marked with a circle of rocks, but those circles cannot be too obvious because a curious passerby might uproot our stakes in hope of finding valuables. They would instead find a bunch of sand and inadvertently destroy our entire grid. There are horror stories about archaeologists leaving visible pegs in the ground for mapping purposes, only to find their site destroyed overnight by locals digging for something of importance. It's illegal to go treasure hunting on archaeological sites, but if you are poor and desperate, that might not be enough of a deterrence.

The coin has also excited our inspectors, who represent the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and monitor excavations in Egypt to make sure regulations are followed. Ever since the coin's discovery, we've been swamped with inspectors—precious metal finds are considered glamorous and exciting, and it's pretty clear they are hoping we discover more. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will. So far most of our finds have been "boring" by buried treasure standards. But one of our rooms is producing glorious painted plaster, and even the construction of our walls has something interesting to tell us about monastic life. I'm sad that it takes something extra sexy like solid gold to grab people's attention.