Saturday, July 4, 2009

The challenges of week two

The second week at Gabii in the 2009 season was full of challenges. First, the celebration of a major holiday in Rome (the saints' day of Peter and Paul) kept us from working on Monday, and then torrential rains on several successive afternoons did their best to hamper us the rest of the week. One particularly rough storm on Wednesday 1 July was unbelievable - wind, hail, torrential downpours - and made such a mess of the site that we could not work the following day. We did learn that there is tremendous downslope erosion at Gabii, explaining a good deal about deposition at the site. We used Thursday to work on documentation and talk with the team about topography and GIS (thanks to the Topo team for a great presentation) and to work on practicing the Harris matrix. Friday saw us back at the site, cleaning up after the rains.

There were some positive developments this week, including good progress in environmental sampling, work on the U.S. zero finds, and the exsposure of some stratified layers, including more mysterious bedrock cuttings. So we move on to week three hoping for calmer weather and steady progress ... hopefully Iuno will allow it.

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