Well, if you thought 105 degrees was hot enough to simply be outside in, try digging in 105 degree weather and you will quickly learn that is far worse. Even though Nemea is cooler than Mycenae, apparently it still will hit the triple digits. Once again, however, I was in the much cooler museum, where it stayed in the lower 90's all day.

Well, truth be told, I was outside in the morning when it was nice and cool. Before the sun rises over Tsoungiza hill the Nemean valley is blissfully refreshing, sitting at around 70 degrees, usually with a nice light breeze blowing. Once the sun passes over the summit, however, water can start to boil fairly rapidly and if there wasn't so much dirt flying around we could make quite a bit of sun tea.
My morning projects have been going rather well so far. Before the museum opens I've been working on mapping scarps. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it actually is. What that means is that we are mapping vertically the layers that we can see in a trench.

This is from the Poggio Colla Field School

This is a scarp from an excavation trench in the Poggio Colla Field School. If you're lucky you have four sides perfectly oriented to the cardinal directions. In Nemea, we can definitely do that since where we're working is nice and open and flat. If not, then you just have to draw your maps a bit differently, but it isn't too hard to figure out.

What's nice about this scarp is that it is pretty easy to read. There is an upper layer that is kind of red, followed by a gray sandy color, and then followed by a charcoal gray. Below that is a thick layer of pale yellow-brown, and the bottom is reddish-brown with large stones. In the middle you can see a rust-colored vertical strip. This could be a soil inclusion, or it could be a stain of some sort. Not having excavated there, I couldn't tell you.

So, why bother with drawing this out and mapping it? Who cares? You've already dug through it, you know where the levels were while you were excavating and you're off to do paperwork and museum studies at the end of the season. Why give yourself more paperwork?

The answer's pretty easy. What if you want to dig a trench on the other side of this one? Wouldn't it be nice to have a quick and easy way of looking at what happened in a previous year? Why, yes, it would. And mapping it at the end of the season is nice because you won't have a year's (or multiple years') worth of runoff mucking up your layers. It's like you're getting a preview of what may happen. The second reason is that this is a great way to double check that you wrote the elevations down correctly while you were excavating.

Mapping the scarp is not a quickly done rough drawing. It is drawn to scale. So if you had written down that your first level ended say a foot below the surface, when in actuality it ended a yard below, well, the rest of your levels very well could be messed up. You should catch it, but hey when it gets hot, it gets harder to think clearly and there is far more room for error. Mapping the layers afterward means you'll have the elevations for every layer and you can go back and check to see that everything makes sense.

So that's how I've spent my mornings for the past two weeks. It's been fun, and I'm glad I get to do it. I've been showing some of the other students how to go about it as well, to see the layers and accurately get them onto paper. The ones we've been drawing have not been nearly as pretty and easy to read as this one, go figure. N, in Nemea, we'd just much rather give people the things that are much harder to do first, so when they get to map something that's easy, they appreciate it for how easy it is. We had roads cutting through, clay falling in, an uneven surface to stand on... it was tough work! But we finished the two most important drawings today and I think I'll be starting in another section tomorrow with a new crew. I can't wait!