There Be Monsters

For the first day of excavation, Dan and I were allowed to sleep a couple hours past 4:00 AM—for a price. We were assigned the task of taking the shelves and school supplies out of our storage shed and setting up the dig workroom, which is where we all do paperwork and occasionally watch DVDs. You would think this is an easy task that involves grabbing a couple of boxes, hauling them up the stairs, and tossing out the contents in a reasonably orderly manner. Unfortunately, you didn't take the rats into account.

Every summer, rats get into the storage shed and chew through everything, and I mean everything. This year we lost a bunch of thermoses and found nests made of shredded colored pencils. I guess they do say it is healthy to have lots of color in your diet. Seriously though, after gnawing on all that plastic, even if it's just to file down their teeth, how do the rats survive? Aside from the chewing, the rats crap all over everything, meaning that whatever you touch is bound to be contaminated. One chest, the one that contained all of our leftover tracing paper, was filled with bugs, which spilled out onto the floor when we opened it. At one point I moved a box and suddenly mice were skittering everywhere, causing us to beat a hasty retreat. The room was also filled with mosquitoes and ominous-looking spiders with long legs and knees well above the rest of their bodies. We eventually emptied out the storage room and got everything up to the third floor, which is where our team is living at Anafora this year. We were gross afterwards:



Before we could set up the office, we had to decontaminate everything, especially the plastic shelves. Some of them were covered in teeth marks and no longer salvageable, but the rest were washed in buckets filled with water and disinfectant. It was nasty to watch all of the now-murky water being slowly sucked down the drain. After we set the shelves out to dry on the balcony, our archaeobotanist, Menna, helped out by putting them together.



Ultimately, though, we ended up with a nice workspace where we will be spending many hours this summer, so I'm glad we did it. And hey, I got to sleep for three extra hours and then spend most of the day inside!