Last year At the Dig we started digging in a square that had been opened the season before. We just had to clean up the vegetation that had grown and died during the last year and we were off and digging.

This year we opened up new squares so it was a new experience.

Here you see the square supervisors along with the logistics manager preparing the Sunshade that was erected over the squares we were opening.

After the sunshade was erected the area supervisor explained the process that we would go through to open the new squares.

We were opening four new squares that were each 5 by 5 meters.

One of our first steps was to line each square with Sandbags. We used topsoil from the square to fill the sandbags.

Here are the four squares at the end of day one. You can see that they are all outlined and that we are starting to dig down below the surface.

You can also see that we have a few stones peeking above the surface.

Here is the square we are working in after the second day. You can see that we have removed a lot of material from our square. You can also see the stones that were peeking through the surface at the end of day 1. Tomorrow we hope to find out whether the stones are floating or whether there is further structure below them.

To the right of the stones in the picture you see a stack of buckets. All the dirt removed from the square gets taken to the dump pile bucket by bucket.

We have found a lot of pottery sherds which will help us identify the time period that we are digging in. It is interesting to see the different sherds and to visualize what the pottery looked like that they came from.

Now for some sleep so that we are ready for another day of digging.

How much deeper will our square be tomorrow?

Steven