Last Week On Site

This past week was my last at John the Little this season, and it was busy. We had to make sure to shoot in all necessary architectural features and then smooth out the final version of this season's map, which was unbelievably troublesome. The program we use, Pythagoras, is always coming up with new ways to thwart us. But while Pythagoras may have bested us in a skirmish or two, I think that the survey team won the war. Here is our awkward group photo, desert loner edition:



Overall this week was full of scary moments that fortunately turned out all right in the end. On a spontaneous trip to Dandy Mall, one of my worst nightmares became reality. You know how when you insert your ATM card into a machine, you feel slightly afraid that the machine will eat your card and never give it back? Yes, it happened to me—I typed in my PIN and the machine just...froze. Fortunately the bank remotely reset the ATM and it spat my card back out, but I was seriously panicked for a good twenty minutes.

My birthday was also one of the more eventful ones I have had. I spent most of my morning dangling off of ladders and standing on top of crumbling mudbrick walls on my quest for a beautiful site map. At one point, I stood on the sand next to one of the rooms, not on the wall where my weight could cause a niche to collapse. Unfortunately, my "safe" perch was not safe at all—suddenly the ground underneath me disappeared and I was falling into the room through the back of one of those fragile niches. Fortunately I managed to claw my way out, but it was a terrifying experience. Nothing was actually damaged, although one of my friends ended up with an extra giant pile of sand in her unit where it had fallen in through the niche.

By this point I thought I was home free and had been through quite enough birthday terror. I went about my business mapping more features, until suddenly I felt an uncharacteristically cool breeze blow across my right leg. I looked down and, sure enough, the crotch of my pants had utterly disintegrated. There I was, my underwear partially exposed in front of my friends and not a few Egyptian workers. I tried not to draw too much attention to myself, held a water bottle in front (but there wasn't much I could do about the back) and scurried to our tent, where I asked Gillian, our ceramicist, for help. Fortunately she is a brilliant problem solver and made me a makeshift sarong out of some stray cloth. To complete her fine work, she wrote "Birthday Girl" across the bottom in permanent marker.



After all of that chaos, it was only breakfast time, and I have to admit that I was feeling bummed about having such a crappy birthday. But then, a miracle! Dan had remembered my b-day and thought to put a coke in the breakfast cooler, just for me. It was chill, crisp, and exactly what I needed. My whole day turned right around. Who needs trustworthy pants when they have incredible friends?



Dan had a few adventures of his own this week. After a couple of workers got into a fistfight and caused some chaos, one of them brought some lovely pink flowers to site—flowers Mohamed, our chief archaeologist, distributed only to the men. Dan was a great sport and a potential model for the cover of National Geographic.