Thursday, June 4, 2009

6/1/09

Today was our first day in the field.  We left the hotel at 8 AM on one of the truck bench things.  A big one.  Shiny.  Like a schoolbus.  Our drive to the site is pretty cool.  Very flat except for a few small, sharp, rocky mountains.  Rice paddies all around.

 

The site is on the grounds of a Buddhist temple, so we have to wear pants, not shorts.  It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty nice.  We took a really short walk to acquaint ourselves with the area.  We saw a teak tree (huge leaves!) and a tamarind tree (mimosa-like with pods).  I’d seen plenty of them before but didn’t know what they were.

 

There is a 6x6m trench about 30 feet away from where we were to set up the new one.  It was probably 5 or 6 m deep.  There were 5 or 6 skeletons already exposed.  It was really cool to see them, but we’re not going to be messing with them.

 

First, we staked out a square under the shelter with string, divided it into quadrants, and cleared the surface debris.  We found a few pot sherds which were everywhere.  We dug down to the first level.

 

One of the Thai students, San, is going to be our lunch cook for the field school.  Based on today, I’m excited.  We had green curry with chicken and extremely sticky rice.  The curry was nicely spicy.  We also had whole tuna fish.  They were about 6 inches long.  Alpes (another student) had to show us how to split them with the spoon along the spine and tear half the body off of the ribs.  It was really tasty.  At around 2:30, they also made us a watermelon slushy that tasted like it had grenadine in it.  It was so good.

 

We had our first class with Thanik (the Thai professor) at 8 PM.  Before that, we got street food from across Tesco.  I had two fried drumsticks which were so good.  So greasy though.

No comments:

Post a Comment