The routine of excavation
The weather changed significantly on Sunday (10 July), as warmer temperatures and higher humidity settled in for the rest of the week. The humidity is like a damp blanket that lies heavy over the area, casting all in a gray haze that smothers one’s senses and enthusiasm. It blurs the horizon and blends a gray sea with gray sky, rendering the two indistinguishable except for their darker and lighter shadings. The temperature cools little at night and leaves us sleeping on damp sheets moistened both by the muggy air and our own perspiration. Such conditions make sleep difficult and tend to leave us feeling drowsy and poorly rested after we awake in the early mornings.
Isla Grosa, el Farallón, and the horizon are obscured by a gray pall of humidity (photo by M. Polzer).
Regardless of the conditions, the team has settled into its normal excavation routine. We wake up at 6:00 AM and have a light breakfast, typically consisting of yoghurt and granola with honey, and of course some strong espresso coffee. Afterwards, the team loads artifact boxes, collection bags and vials, tags, dive slates, extra pencils and brushes, underwater cameras and housings, and our water and lunch coolers into the van and by 6:50 AM we are on our way to the marina—a short drive of less than 10 minutes. There, team members retrieve their diving equipment from our storage container and set up their dive tanks and kit.
The team's dive kits laid out at the marina, ready for loading into the dive boat (photo by S.H. Snowden).
We dive in three groups of 4–5 divers each. The first two groups head out to the site in the boats, leaving group 3 at the port. At around 7:20 AM, dive group 2 boards Soneya and heads off with Pedro to the site, where they tie up to our mooring buoy and line. Meanwhile, group 1 loads all of the kitted tanks (groups 1 & 2) into the dive boat. At about 7:40 AM, Emilio and group 2 speed out to the site and arrive just before 8:00 AM, at the same time as Pedro. The dive boat hitches up to Soneya’s stern and dive group 1 enters the water. At 8:00 AM, they dump the air from their BCDs and descend down along the anchor and shot lines to the site. Each diver makes his or her way to their assigned grid square, removes and stows their fins, positions their airlift, turns on the air, and begins excavating.
José Lajara Martinez, with grappling pole in hand at Soneya's bow,prepares to snag the mooring line once the boat reaches the site (photo by M. Polzer).
Our dive bottom times are 45 minutes, after which divers surface back up the mooring line, make a 3-minute safety stop at 5-meters depth, and then surface by the dive boat. Meanwhile, divers of the following group have donned their tanks, fins, and mask and are waiting in the water on the surface. As soon as the previous dive team reaches the safety stop, they submerges and head down to the site to begin their own work.
Neil Puckett makes his safety stop on the mooring line after an afternoon dive (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Once out of the water and back into the dive boat, Emilio takes group 1 back to the marina, where they disembark with all of their gear and are replaced by group 3. Then, it’s back out to the site to await the surfacing of group 2. In this way, our three dive groups shuttle to and from the site to make their dives, with no idle time between.
Once back at the marina, divers change out their used tanks for fresh ones and are ready to go for the second set of dives in the afternoon. These begin just before noon, after a 3-hour surface interval to off-gas nitrogen. Between dives, one or two persons from group 1 walk over to the bakery and grocery store to buy fresh bread (pan rustica), ham or other sandwich meat, cheese, and tomatoes for the bocadillo (Spanish breakfast). Team members busy themselves with writing up notes from their dives, copying slate sketches into their notebooks, filling out dive log books, reading, or catching up on sleep with a short siesta. Both sets of dives are typically completed by 2:30 PM, and it is usually an hour later by the time we’ve washed and stowed our gear, loaded cameras, empty lunch coolers, and boxes of raised artifacts into the van, locked the container, and driven back to the expedition house. Then, it’s time for dinner!
Following the Spanish custom, the team eats its large meal of the day around 4:00 PM. Annun is our cook this year, and has made sure that the team keeps up its strength for the diving and other work with a variety of tasty, multi-course meals. These typically end with water or other melon, Spanish flan or custard puddings, or—when they can be cajoled—with mouth-watering cookie, pies, or brownies from Laura and Staci. Finally, all is topped off with espresso coffee.
The team gathers for dinner at the expedition house (photo by S.H. Snowden).
The caffeine hit is certainly appreciated, since immediately afterwards it’s time to get back to work. This is when all of the non-diving, but equally essential, work gets done: artifacts raised during the day are inventoried and recorded; mapping measurements are checked and object positions triangulated; underwater photographs are processed; and specific objects are analyzed, drawn, or otherwise examined.
Juan leads the inventorying effort, assigning lot numbers and initial identifications to all the objects before “bagging and tagging” them and sorting them in labeled boxes.
- Jose Mata Mora and Juan Pinedo sort and register pottery sherds raised earlier during the day’s dives (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Arianna Villani prepares artifact tags during registration (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Neil oversees the object photography, providing an immediate digital visual record of each inventoried object. These photographs are used as well to verify the contents of each artifact box before it is handed over to the Arqua staff.
- Josh Jones and Neil Puckett arrange artifacts to be photographed (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Staci is responsible for collecting and entering all of the mapping data into the Web program and verifying that the measurements are ‘good’. Once she signs off on a mapped object, the diver responsible for it is free to raise that object at the earliest convenient time (typically, on the subsequent dive). If the mapping program is unable to position the object points within the level of accuracy we have set, then the diver must retake the measurements before the object can be move.
Staci Willis enters the day's mapping data into the WEB program, which triangulates the relative positions of the measured artifacts and provides the spatial data I need to create the site plan (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Josh Jones catalogues and draws an ivory artifact (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Mark Polzer starts up the Bruker Tracer III-V Light Element Analyzer, which he will use to determine the elemental composition of a number of unidentified metallic objects (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Besides the archaeological work, other logistical tasks are tended to, including taking our empty SCUBA tanks to the dive shop for filling, shopping for food, water, or any needed supplies, repairing equipment and dive gear, and—of course—making sure that there is always sufficient money on hand to keep the project going. Kiko and I tend to take care of these tasks, especially since driving team members are few this year. I learned long ago that, when in the field, my job as director is less about doing archaeology myself than it is about facilitating team members in doing such work and making sure that they have whatever they need to document, record, and otherwise capture all of the archaeological field data that we generate. Later, back in my office,library, laboratories, or wherever, is when most of my research will take place and where I will do the necessary detailed analyses and interpretation of the site and finds that all of this field data allows.
Work continues until 8:00 PM, after which time team members tidy up the work spaces and then are free to shower and freshen up, relax, or take care of any personal business—emailing, Skyping with friends and family, or simply surfing the web being the most common of such activities. Fourteen hours of work, including two dives, make for long and exhausting days, but the team does it all, day in and day out, without complaint. They are true troopers!
Crowded house…
Another team member, Basilio Infantes Ormad, arrived Thursday evening. Basi, as we know him, is studying archaeology at the University of Seville and took part in the 2010 campaign. The expedition house is beginning to look like a refugee camp, with beds occupying every available floor space, including in all four bedrooms, out on the upstairs terrace, under the stairs, in the living room (which also serves as our computer work area), and outside on the patio. Accommodations are expensive in La Manga and hard to come by, especially during the summer tourist season, and so lodging has always been a constraining factor of our work here. So many residents in the house puts a major strain on our kitchen, bathroom, living, and storage facilities. Despite the tight quarters, the team soldiers on in good spirits and with a true team mentality of helping out and looking after one another to make sure all the work gets done.
The boy who lived under the stairs…Simon Claeys (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Dolphins, fair weather, and excavation!
This first week of excavation couldn’t have been better. The weather was our best yet, and Tuesday (July 5th) was especially fantastic: the sea was mirror flat and the sun warm, but a mollifying, cool sea breeze kept the temperatures pleasantly comfortable. Best of all, the visibility at the site was amazing. The only complaint we had was the frigid water temperatures, especially down in the lower quadrants of the site, where a nasty thermocline has settled in. On Thursday, a pod of dolphins, in pursuit of a large school of sardines, made an appearance at the Bajo. We are hoping that it is a good omen!
The week also proved promising with regards to the finds. A fair amount of Phoenician material was raised, in addition to a large quantity of Roman and Punic pottery. Some of the more interesting objects include a large whetstone, two pan-balance weights, and a small and intact dipper jug, the first of its kind from the site. The weights are roughly cubic in shape and have a small crown device on their top face. They are made of a lead core that is sheathed in a thin skin of bronze.
Some of the early finds – the tip end of an elephant tusk, two pan-balance weights, and a whetstone (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Juan shows the dipper jug to Ernesto and Kiko, pointing out some of its features (photo by S.H. Snowden).
Finally, moving sediment rather than boulders…
Shortly after 8:00 in the morning, Pedro fires up the air compressor in Soneya’s stern; it coughs and sputters momentarily and then roars to life. Igniting diesel and rotating steel pump air through the large, black supply hose down to the manifold on the seabed below. There it feeds through smaller hoses to five airlifts positioned around the site. Divers open valves at the end of the hoses where they connect to the lower ends of airlift pipes, fan sediment up into the water column with their hands, and watch intently for any archaeological material that becomes exposed. As air pumps into the lift pipes, it rises up the 10-meter-long tubes and exits from the other end in a flurry of bubbles, jetting water, sand, and small rocks and shells like billowing plumes of smoke or steam from so many factory stacks. As the air rises, it expands and loses pressure, generating suction at the mouth of the pipe that pulls the surrounding water and suspended fanned sediments into the pipe and emits them into the upper depths, where sea currents carry the sediments away and deposit them off site.
In short, the team is excavating!
Pedro puts on his hearing protection before firing up the air compressor (photo by S. H. Snowden).
Airlifts spew bubbles and sediment as the team excavates the site (photo by S. H. Snowden).
Another team member joined our ranks this evening: Simon Claeys, an archaeology student at Ghent University in Belgium. Simon is a student of Prof. Roald Docter, a well-known Phoenician/Punic archaeologist who excavates at Carthage and who wrote his doctoral thesis on Phoenician transport amphoras.
With so many team members with little or no underwater excavation experience, I held a briefing in the evening to go over our excavation methodology, to instruct the team on proper airlifting technique and mapping protocols, and to show them what sorts of items they will likely encounter. Laura also reiterated the dive plan and our diving safety procedures. We talked late into the evening, as there were many questions, and it is obvious that everyone is excited and anxious to start excavating and doing some actual archaeology at last.
The evening excavation and dive plan meeting (photos by S. H. Snowden).
The “day off”
Sundays are typically the team’s ‘day off’, but the term is really a misnomer…for some, at least. This is the one day each week that we don’t dive, so that our bodies can rest and expel the excess nitrogen that has accumulated over the preceding days of diving (from breathing air under pressure). It is also our house-cleaning day, which usually consumes the morning hours. After that is done, the rest of the day is each person’s to do with as they please. Some catch up on sleep, others read or email or watch videos, while some go to the beach and enjoy a swim or some lazy sunbathing. Neil and I spend most of these days in Cartagena, at the Arqua library, researching the books, catalogues, and site reports of the museum’s excellent Phoenician holdings. In the evenings, I work on the expedition journal and blog, the week’s photos, the site plan, artifact documentation, the next week’s diving roster and site work, or any number of other things that need doing.
The library of the Arqua Museum in Cartagena (photo courtesy of Museo Arqua, http://museoarqua.mcu.es/)
On this particular Sunday (July 3rd), Neil and I stopped at the Cartagena train station on the way back to La Manga and picked up Joshua Jones, a masters student from Flinders University in Australia. Josh is writing his thesis on public interpretation of archaeological sites, and is using the Bajo de la Campana shipwreck and Arqua Museum as his central case study.
All prepped and ready to excavate…
On Friday, we manage to get back into the water and make our dives, but the sea was still rather choppy, and the large, lingering swells made the boat ride to the site rather uncomfortable for several on the team who are susceptible to sea sickness. Conditions improved immensely on Saturday. The morning sun was a pastel orange ball seemingly nestled into the top of a blue-gray bank of clouds that sat on the horizon. The wind was reduced to a slight breeze blowing from the northeast and the sea was calm, with only remnant rolling swells from the preceding days now lazily making their way to shore. At mid-day, the current and wind shifted to the south and our vessels floated directly over the Bajo, just off the site, which allowed us to make our safety stop in the shallow, sun-drenched waters on top of the Bajo and enjoy the plethora of sea life that thrives there. It was such a pleasant day of diving, in contrast to the previous week, and the team’s mood was much improved.
Between Friday and Saturday, the team completed the final site prep work. The grid was secured and measured in, the last of the datum points and towers were set, anchored down, and mapped, and our five airlifts were tied down and hooked up. On Monday, finally, after what has seemed like an eternity, we will start airlifting and excavating!
VIDEO: Installing airlifts and excavating (Bajo de la Campana July 2011) – Kiko and Arianna position the airlift pipes where they will be needed and attach their air supply hoses (once they succeed in untangle them!). Finally, Arianna and the rest of the team are able to enjoy the fruits of their labor and start excavating.
Follow the sun: heading to the site–and the rising sun–on a placid sea in the early morn (photo by S. Snowden).
A visitor from ‘down under’
I was most pleased to welcome to the expedition Prof. Alistair Paterson, Head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Western Australia and my doctoral advisor. Al had originally planned to visit the excavation last week and make a few dives to the site. Unfortunately, the ash cloud from an erupting volcano in Chili grounded him in Perth for the better part of a week and forced him to reschedule his entire trip to England and Spain, leaving him but a single day to spend here with us. He arrived Wednesday night on the train from Madrid and spent Thursday with me at Arqua. There, we were graciously hosted by Rocío Castillo and Milagros Buendía, who showed us all of the Bajo material and took us through the museum. Al was genuinely impressed with both, and thoroughly enjoyed his all-too-brief visit.
Prof. Alistair Paterson examines an enigmatic stone disc found on the shipwreck site (photo by M. Polzer).
Alistair Paterson and Mark Polzer look over some of the Phoenician pottery from the shipwreck site in the Arqua Museum’s conservation laboratory (photo by R. Castillo).
On Thursday morning we also bid a sad farewell to Faith, who flew back to Turkey to spend a few days in Bodrum before heading home to Connecticut. It was a real pleasure diving and working with her again, and I especially appreciate all of her help getting the site set up. “Adiós, Faith, and hasta luego!”
Faith Hentschel at the Murcia-San Javier airport (photo by M. Polzer).
Meanwhile, back at the site…
A stiff easterly wind had come up overnight and never let up, so, despite an attempt, the team was not able to dive. Instead, Juan and company registered all of the ceramics raised from the crevasse and then Juan gave Laura, Staci, and Neil a tutorial on Phoenician, Punic, and Roman pottery. Tiko and Pedro grilled some sardines and lamb for lunch, which the team enjoyed along with tortilla (Spanish omelet) and sangria, topped off with a delicious bread pudding for dessert, courtesy of Laura.
Laura and Staci have delighted the team with many a delicious dessert, including brownies, cookies, bread pudding, and pies (photo by S. Snowden).
Back to work
Back in Spain, having rejoined the team, we continued moving rocks and clearing the site. On Tuesday, dive group 1 finally moved the last huge boulder from the crevasse, while Susannah and I captured the action with photographs and video, respectively. After three years of work, the crevasse is now finally emptied of all surface boulders and can be fully excavated. There is already an impressive amount of material visible. In the barrier wall formed where the boulder once sat, this includes well-stratified pottery from all three ancient shipwrecks—Roman, on top; Punic, beneath; and Phoenician at the bottom. The latter material includes the mouth of a western Phoenician amphora, a small tripod bowl, and the tip end of an elephant tusk.
VIDEO: La Madre de todas las Piedras (Bajo de la Campana 2011) – The team removes a massive boulder from the crevasse to allow for excavation in this important area.
Members of dive groups 2 and 3 put down airlift pipes and continued installing the site grid, while Neil and Laura recorded the crevasse pottery with sketches and photographs.
We were also happy to finally and officially welcome Ernesto (‘Tiko’) to the excavation. Ernesto was contracted by Arqua to help fill tanks in the morning, which he then brings to the marina during our surface interval, and to help Emilio pilot our dive boat in the afternoon.
Josue Mata Mora loads airlift pipes onto the top of the van for transport to the marina and then to the site (photo by M. Polzer).
(L) Neil Puckett carries a large rock off site with his hands; (R) Kiko Bañuelos and Juan Pinedo employ one of our Subsalve lift bags to move a large crate of rocks (photos by M. Polzer).
Ceramic material in the crevasse (photo by M. Polzer).
Spain, Germany, and Phoenician Seafaring
I left the excavation on Wednesday to fly to Germany to attend the symposium “On Sea and Ocean: New Research on Phoenician Seafaring” at Philipps-Universität in Marburg, which, founded in 1527, is the oldest Protestant university in the world. My trip once again turned out to be quite the adventure, as powerful storms around Frankfurt caused the cancelation of many flights, including my own from Madrid. Although Iberia Airlines certainly cannot be blamed for the cancelation, they didn’t handle the situation well and left us sitting and waiting without providing us with any news or information on our flight status, other than that it was delayed, nor any reason for the ultimate cancelation. Even after the cancelation, the departure board only said that the flight was delayed indefinitely, and that passengers should go to the customer service desk for further instruction. The plane’s full load of passengers mobbed Iberia’s customer service counter, trying to reschedule connecting flights or make other contingency arrangements, and the scene quickly degenerated into a mass of frustrated and angry people jostling one another and shouting at the airline representatives. The latter responded by shouting back and lowering the shutters of their windows, which only irritated and inflamed the situation further. Finally, airport security was called in to restore order and keep things from escalating. In the end, after more than 6 hours of standing in line, everyone was put up in a dingy old hotel not far from the terminal and rebooked on another flight in the early morning.
Cryptic message on the flight status board for flights to Frankfurt (photo by M. Polzer).
The crowd grows at the Iberia desk as more passengers realize that the flight is canceled (photo by M. Polzer).
At the crack of dawn the next day, we were all bussed back to the airport and put on a special flight to Frankfurt. From there, I traveled by train to Marburg and then by taxi to our hotel, which was located outside of town. I was to give the plenary address at the opening night of the symposium, and just did have enough time after arriving to check in, shower and change, and then catch a taxi back into town to the University for my talk and the following welcome reception.
Marburg, on the River Lahn in Hessen, Germany (photo from www.brodyaga.com).
The symposium was organized by Texas A&M University Nautical Archaeology Program alumnus Dr. Ralph Pedersen, visiting professor of nautical archaeology at Philipps-Universität Marburg. It was a thoroughly enjoyable few days of meeting new and old colleagues, making new friends, and listening to interesting presentations on various aspects of Phoenician seafaring, including Phoenician harbors and lighthouses, shipwrecks, trade and commerce, colonization, and culture contact with the indigenous peoples of the lands where the Phoenicians settled. Ralph and all of the supporting faculty and students at Philipps-Universität, as well as the Mayor of Marburg, are to be credited for the warm hospitality we received and the well-run conference we all enjoyed; hopefully, the first of many more.
I received word that, back in Spain, the team was unable to dive on Friday and Saturday (June 24–25) due to high Levante winds; valuable time we can ill afford to lose.
Faith and Fotos
On Monday, the team welcomed two new additions: INA’s own Prof. Faith Hentschel, who arrived from Bodrum and will work with the team for the next 10 days; and Susannah Snowden, our photographer for this season. Susannah served as photographer at both the INA Kizilburun and Cape Gelidonya projects.
Susannah Snowden (L) and Faith Hentschel (R) on their way out to the site for their first dive (photo by M. Polzer).