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The first week at Pintia has been a fantastic experience. We arrived on a Monday, which is a free day, then on Tuesday we go on excursions. The first Tuesday we went to Segovia, which was really impressive with the enormous Roman aqueduct. On Wednesday the work really began! We leave the house at 6:45 in order to be ready on site at 7am. The first day we got into the swing of things, learning techniques for what we need to do. Carlos and Rita have been really great at explaining things and making it interesting. A lot of nice pieces of pottery have been coming out of the ground, as well as a few bits of metal and bone. The human bone fragments are white and cremated, whilst the animal bones have a yellow colour. One of my favourite finds are the ‘canicas’ - ceramic marbles decorated with poked-in holes and made for playful Vaccean children. Now we work as a pretty effective team. When somebody sees that a job needs doing (such as swapping full buckets for empty ones, or emptying the wheelbarrows), they just do it. The most exciting day so far was Saturday, when we started to reveal the tops of our first Vaccean burial urns! We had to be very careful after that. We cleaned around them before covering them up again with sifted earth, in order to protect them from the elements. In the heat of the sun the ceramic could dry out and break. Due to bad weather - thunder and lightning storms, as well as really heavy rain, we haven’t managed a whole lot of digging since then. Those urns are still waiting patiently in the ground. After over two-thousand years, another few days probably won’t hurt. At least yesterday (Wednesday), we managed to remove all of the stelae from our sector. A man with a big truck came to help us hoist them out of the digging area and onto the grassy area alongside. It was mine and Will’s job to rush in and measure each stela’s height, width and depth after it was laid down on the grass. Then we got out of the way as the next one descended. Today there is more rain but we’re hoping to be able to do some more digging once it clears a little. We’re running out of pottery to wash!

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