It is Friday July 7, and I have officially finished my first week of digging at the Vigla site. What a wonderful experience! This week I got a serious work out. Monday started with throwing bucket after bucket of rocks off the side of the hill at the south end of our dig site. This was in order to have a clearer workspace which was then cut back and marked out to become the third of our open trenches on the site. In one week a 5m-by-5m flat piece of grassy land became a half foot deep trench. This was a very dusty, and to me any, very impressive endeavor. In order to uncover the mysteries that lie below, we began by using pickaxes to break up the earth and then, using a terrae (a tool very much like a hoe), scooped up any loose dirt which would be taken to the sifter where any pieces of pottery, shell or metal were separated, placed in plastic bags and labeled. The job of sifting almost never stopped, and one week in I imagine we collected and sifted hundreds of buckets full of rock and dirt which have produced many bags full of pottery sherds. Once the plot had been cleared of most of the loose dirt came the job of using brushes to sweep up any leftover loose pebble, rock or dirt, which also went through the sifter. My favorite find from the week was a wonderful jug base which was mostly intact and left a wonderful and shapely mound in the packed dirt once it was removed. One of the many things I learned this week was how to use a Munsell soil color chart which is used to indicate the color of soil at given depths in our trenches and is recorded along with a great deal of other information such as coordinates. The site is stunning! We overlook Larnaca Bay and behind us are plateaus and hills cut by winding white roads, but by the end of the day we are far from anything so beautiful (well, I think we’re all totally beautiful people we are just beautiful people thickly coated in dirt and sweat). While physically challenging the work is deeply gratifying. I am looking forward to the week ahead and all the new discoveries we are sure to make.  

-Grace Simonsen