Day 14

  10 August 2017 Alas, the final day of the field trip. Them being a top bunch o’ students I had been made to feel as one of their own in the past three weeks. Yet, being a member of ‘staff’ and the designated driver, I was somewhat betwixt and between, able to observe as…

Day 13

09 August 2017 (Women’s Day) The second last day. My field notebook (as most of the team knows) is not very descriptive or helpful when writing this blog – even less than usual. According to my notes, we arrived at 2 to 9. At 11:28 we had our tea break, and at 14:28 we finished…

Day 11

07 August 2017 Hello from the other side The calcrete group have affirmed our separate identity, from those on the mainland(site). We arrived at our STP(shovel test pit), once again relieved by the slightly shorter walk than the others, only to find the south wall half collapsed into the pit. After some careful sleuthing we…

Day 12

08 August 2017 To start this day off, Amy, Michael, Nick and I had a really deep convo about politics before we had even left the morning traffic behind. The rest of the drive was completed in almost silence as each dealt with their fears and realisations in private. Arriving at Deanofontein, it was a…

Day 10

04 August  2017 To earn that field participation mark, the excavators from the previous day were keen to get straight back to excavating as soon as we got to the site. It was sunny, mostly clear day and everyone was eager to get Friday started. The Calrete group abandoned us for their ever-growing STP again, which…

Day 9

03 August 2017 When the rain both happily and sadly decided to dissipate we once more head out to site. Side note explanation of confused emotion about rain: Sadly, because we need as much of it to fall as possible for the current water shortage being experienced in Cape Town. The sadness has absolutely nothing…

Day 8

02 August 2017 Today was another rainy day, so we found ourselves enjoying civilisation back in the lab. If one can call an archaeology department civilised. The tutors set up a quiz for us, sort of like a pub quiz, without the pub. They split the class into teams according to the project each person…

Day 7

01 August 2017 So, starting the new month with a rainy day, we had to spend the day in the lab. Today, we received bags, either from the honours class’ field trip in April or from our own field season. We had to sort the sieve finds into lithics and identifiable & nonidentifiable bone fragments. We…

Day 6

31 July 2017 Today was gonna be hot. Well, 27°C is not the hottest this region can get, but compared to what we have been acclimatised to these past few days – it was sweltering. In addition to the warm weather, berg winds blew, threatening to throw our gazebos off their legs and sand into…

Day 3

26 July 2017 So, today was the day. The day we opened up the site. Now, as excited as we were, we had not taken into consideration the actual act of opening the site. So, needless to say, we were given a slight reality check upon trying to each lift our first sandbags, which Tamara…