#drawsko

Mushrooms are a really big thing in Drawsko! *badunst*  Apparently the day before the field school began they held the annual mushroom festival (and I’m sad that I missed it!).

Today in the field we began troweling centimeters at a time in order to gently and evenly expose areas of disturbed dirt.  Which to me looks just like regular dirt. But I’m beginning to know when to look for patterns of mottled or marbled earth as opposed to one solid color (indicating that different types of soils have been mixed together and put back).  So in one quadrant we have some very promising rectangular patches, while we still need to continue troweling in the other 3 quadrants to remove more topsoil.  When troweling it’s really important that the surface remains even and smooth, and since we’re working in sand it’s easy to do if you angle the trowel (aka ‘gardening spade’) correctly.  I’d love to practice troweling in different types of soils just to get a sense of what types of obstacles to expect.  Yes, mom, that means we will have a pit in our backyard. :)

Just kidding.

We continued to find lots of Bronze-Age ceramics from the site, along with disarticulated bone (fragments from 17th and 18th century skeletons that are no longer in their original context because of disturbances - in this instance it’s field plows), and cremated bone (from the Early Bronze Age ~1,000 B.C.E).  We even found a bunch of teeth!

Tomorrow I’ll try to do a write-up of the history of the site since I haven’t really shared what I’ve been learning about it yet.  So expect some history to come your way!

Some of my favorite things to do in the evening:  Walk around Drawsko.  Drink tea.  Drink tea while walking around Drawsko.  Practice my Polish.  Play ukulele.  Identify birds.  Sketch birds.  Read.  Practice Juggling.  Study.

July 19th & 20th 

Back in Poznan.  Waking up at 5am after a long night of BBQ and talking was tough, but I was happy to be heading back to the city.  Once there my friends Maciej and Taria and I went out for breakfast where I had eggs for the first time since beginning the fieldschool.  THEY WERE DELICIOUS.  On a serious note:  that catering food in Drawsko turned me vegetarian.  Trust me.  Once you’ve had pickled pork meat you’ll never want to see another sausage again.

Maciej and I also walked around that afternoon (Maciej lives in Poznan), so I got to see a bit more of the local’s side of the city.  This graffiti is under one of the main bridges that crosses Cathedral Island in Poznan, the dog is Lili (the softest pupper on the planet!), and the mural of buildings is a... well, a mural.  But it took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t real!

July 18th BBQ

These ladies and I shared a small classroom for living quarters for 3.5 weeks on air mattresses in (essentially) the middle of a small but noisy town.  I am so happy to have met every single one of them and am lucky to have had such great roommates!  From left to right is Ariana, from CA, Stephanie, from Sydney Australia, Kora from CO, Fiona from Oakland CA, Me, and Krisit from BC!

The last day of fieldschool we were still required to be in the field (or lab) working from 8-3.  Some BAMFs worked right until 1st dinner at 4pm, and at 5pm we had our Osteo final!  It went well, and the best part was that afterward we were free!!!  We had drinks and a BBQ with the instructors, and had a wonderful time relaxing, saying our goodbyes to those who were leaving early, and sharing stories about how much we couldn’t wait to eat something other than pickles, deli meats, and potatoes again!

July 15th

A kayaking trip!  This is Taria, my new friend from NYC!  We did a 21km kayak trip down a river with some pretty intense obstacles (I’ve kayaked many times before, but you don’t have to worry about fallen trees in an ocean).  I was hoping to do some bird-watching but we were having too much fun talking and singing to really get any nature-watching done.   At the end of it all was a BBQ with delicious and well-deserved foods, and I got to try a new dessert called “piepsisz bananan”, which is a bbq’d banana with pepper sprinkled on top, a recipe learned from Morocco.

July 13th-14th, 17th & 18th

July 12th 2017

After finishing excavating and cleaning the bones of the 7-12 month old, AJ and I returned to the field with new partners.  Taria and I were given another grave (another sub-adult), and as we dug found that the preservation was unfortunately horrible.  The cranium was intact, but the rest of the body had disintegrated due to being so close to the surface of the land, and not much else was left, and none of it in good condition.  We were careful and able to save both the left and right ilia, the right femur, and a disassociated tibia. This was also unfortunately my last time out in the field.