Field Reports from the end of the 2000 Field Season Student Diaries Week 5 August , 2000:   PRAJNA DESAI Week 5: THE WINKLER CHALICE Prajna Desai working in the locus of Trench PC 20 in which she and Krista Farber found a bucchero chalice in several large pieces. We found it. We claimed it. We named it. It’s ours. It’s the Winkler Chalice. How appropropriate last week was: a week of excavating revelry in Trench PC 20 that ended with what is now referred to as The Winkler Chalice. Think patient hands and soil. Think wooden tools and watchful eyes. Think ceramic and curve. Think a soft-bristled brush and determination. Think…I think something touched and shaped. A lovely bucchero chalice reborn through archaeology. Prajna Desai watches Justin Winkler excavate the chalice in Trench PC 20. Friday, July 29, 2000 was precious. Memorable. Precious in how the final hours of that excavating afternoon uncovered this bucchero chalice. An almost complete chalice. And memorable in how the experience unfogged my imagination of all the facile romanticism that frequently colours my idea of archaeology. Five people watched the supervisor of Trench PC 20 excavate a broken bucchero chalice embedded in the south walls of Locus 4. And it was not romantic. It was exhilirating. Even painful at times. The fascination I hold for that afternoon lies beyond the intelligence and creativity involved in its excavation. It lies in the knowledge that those qualities might very well have been part of the process that led to the making of the chalice in antiquity. Bucchero chalice partially excavated. Yes, we now have an unharmed (by human hands) bucchero chalice. Thankfully, that comes as no surprise. What is surprising to me though is how the whole process of the discovery and removal of archaeological material from its original context, to perhaps a museum setting, is in many ways more than a process of undoing its history and remapping its identity. What one sees in a museum display case will invariably lack the intimacy that excavators might share with the objects/architecture they uncover and the life and identity of these objects I imagine they contemplate. For additional photos of the excavation of the bucchero chalice, see Trench PC 20 Week 5. CATHERINE NORMAN Week 5: Catherine Norman in Trench PC 21. This past week has been pretty intense. As we’re careening into the last week of actual excavation, we’re unearthing all of the major finds, which are just above bedrock. With excavation, pottery washing and documenting, and lectures, the students, at least, have been pushing to thirteen hour work days. My locus in Trench PC 20, which has by now become quite familiar, is continuously challenging me both physically and mentally. It’s somewhat of an acrobatic and endurance test of getting into my now waist deep locus and digging all day. Besides that, I’m finding it both difficult and intriguing to visualize the chronology and structure of the habitation which my foundation walls supported. We now have defined a substantial amount of features and finds to start putting together a story about the Etruscans of our Poggio Colla site. It’s like trying to work on a puzzle, with clues from the soil stratigraphy and ceramic fragments and every other element of our trench. Hopefully, the picture will be a bit clearer once we excavate the last of the pre-bedrock soil in these next couple of days. All in all, I can say that after five weeks of working and analyzing and practically wearing and breathing our Etruscan dirt, I really do feel like an archaeologist and not just a lost college student. Left:Catherine Norman working in her locus in Trench PC 20. Right: the same locus from above. Attempting to make up for the dehydrating work in the field, I took on Kate Topper and Katy Blanchard the other night in a water drinking contest. I lost miserably, but not without every creative attempt to cheat. I think laughing while drinking my water was my downfall. By the end, I felt so sick I just wanted to…well…explode. Vigna, the student residence and excavation headquarters in Vicchio. After last week’s work, I took a quick day trip to Ravenna and then settled back in Vicchio for the weekend. It felt so good to come back and be able to cook in our own kitchen and be able to sleep in my own bed and not have to worry about hotels or trains for weekend travel. It’s definitely very laid back here on the weekends when most everyone else is gone traveling. JURRIAAN VENNEMAN Week 5: Left to right: Jurriaan Venneman, Greg Cress, Robert Belanger, Katy Blanchard, and Melissa Tschebaum with the flag sent to them by Jerry Nelson. Deze week hebben we de tussenwanden van de loci verwijderd waardoor we beter kunnen zien hoe de muren lopen. De wanden blijken met elkaar te zijn verbonden en op andere plaatsen in de greppel komen muren tevoorschijn. De meeste vondsten worden nog steeds in locus één gedaan en deze bestaan vooral uit stukken dakpan, scherven van potten, botsplinters, bolletjes brons en een soort spijker van ijzer. Tea cup from Trench PF 5. We vermoeden nu dat het hier zou kunnen gaan om een soort villa en dus niet om een werkplaats. De objecten zijn schoongemaakt door de conservators en zij denken dat de kleine bekers geen smeltkroesen zijn omdat er geen metaalresten zijn gevonden. View of Trench PF 5 from the north. Vorige week vrijdag vonden we op verschillende plaatsen in de westhoek van locus één zwarte verkleuringen die houtskool bevatten. Op maandag hebben we er nog een paar gevonden en het lijkt hier te gaan om paalgaten. Uit de dwarsdoorsnede’s is gebleken dat de gaten niet erg diep zijn en daarom hebben we ze ingetekend op de detailkaart van de "Fod". Week 6 August , 2000:   PRAJNA DESAI Week 6: GRAPES AND ARCHAEOLOGY Prajna Desai during final trench tours. "Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as strawberries knows nothing about grapes." -- Parcelsus As a student of art history, I arrived at the Poggio Colla Field School with a certain confidence in my sensitivity towards a visual world, in my creative grasp of artistic and cultural material. I did in fact generalise that strawberries and grapes both being fruit, or should I say art history and archaeology both being studies of cultural material, were quite similar. The realisation that I do in fact know little about archaeology is opportune in that I am now beginning to acquire a tentative grasp of its methods and goals. That sense however is adequately strong, strong enough to be indulged and nurtured as it shall be. My most valuable lesson during the past seven weeks is concerned with vision. Watching for colour changes in soil strata; looking at the contour of stones and observing their configuration within walls; visualising beyond the limits of excavated material such as visible walls and constructing a working vision of an architectural structure--in this case our temple and its walls--that extended the limits of the trench I had been working in; lifting the real space of walls into a living visual experience. The north end of Trench PC 20, with Prajna's locus in the background. The challenge of this kind of three-dimensionality is quite unlike the thrill of looking at a painting where space and depth are constantly re-effected under an intelligent seeing eye. Here, the vision itself, the walls, the objects, their location, within or around these walls are irrevocable, even implicity coherent as built and still-standing structures. The "looking" here has more to do with making cogent this vision within one’s imagination. Upside-down podium block in the locus of Trench PC 20 in which Prajna worked. For me, one incident in particular sounded the wake-up call on the importance of careful looking. This was the discovery of an upside-down podium block in the northwest corner of Locus 4, Trench PC 20 by Jess Galloway, a block of stone I had been excavating for a long time but whose regularity and sculpted aspect I had never really been mindful of. If you can see, look. If you can look, observe. --The Book of Exhortations CATHERINE NORMAN Week 6: Catherine Norman in the Podere Funghi during final trench tours. It’s hard not to think of these next couple of days in the ultimate sense—our last weekend, or last day of excavation, our LAST opportunity to stumble on the mountainside lugging the 45 pound water containers. I keep trying to value our time here for its present sense, on its own merit and without lamenting it as something already past. Catherine Norman's locus of Trench PC 20 is in the lower left. So, it’s with reluctance and relief that we’re wrapping up this season at Poggio Colla. By the end of my pass on Friday, I was digging barefoot because my shoes just didn’t fit in my narrow locus any more. It rained all weekend, which transformed our beloved trench into a squishy mud pit for our final plotting and drawing. We spent today on the hill translating these massive ancient Etruscan walls and thousands of years worth of stratigraphy into the modern terms of data points and plotable spatial relations. It’s ironic that we can use these clear-cut, technical means to try to analyze and interpret something as ambiguous as the Etruscan culture of the Mugello Valley. Jess Galloway and April Kramer survey points in the walls in Trench PC 20 for the site map. Just as we’re studying the Etruscan culture, we’re also creating our own sort of traditions at Vigna (our undergraduate excavation house). Amy and Ruth have made fiendish tea addicts out of a good portion of us. We’ve been congregating around the kitchen table after dinner to drink tea. It sounds quite civilized, I admit, but we’re really just completely silly. I think we really lost it when Katy brought down her world traveling Jungle Boogie Monkey finger puppet. We saw pictures of him everywhere, including the picture of Jungle Boogie Monkey at the Colloseum with foreign techies in the background. To make things even better, Amy got some sort of bizarre toy from a Happy Meal which makes monkey-like noises whenever you hit it or shake it. We had to put it to good use. We hid it in the not-so-graceful Texas van, which Jess Galloway drives, for his listening enjoyment. View of Vespignano through the windshield of the "Texas Van." All in all, this season has been really challenging, but at the same time, very intriguing. I feel like I’ve learned a good deal from Justin’s patient and thorough teaching in Trench PC 20. Missing trains and trying to communicate in a foreign country has been a lesson of sorts for me also and I think it all just makes you stronger. JURRIAAN VENNEMAN Week 6: Katy Blanchard and Jurriaan Venneman watch Rob Belanger excavate the interior of a vessel found in Trench PF 5 during the last week of the season. Dit is alweer de laatste week van dit seizoen dat we opgraven. De resterende drie dagen zullen namelijk gebruikt worden om tekeningen van de greppels te maken en tevens alles weer dicht te gooien met aarde. Aangezien de "Fod" op landbouwgrond ligt en men waarschijnlijk binnenkort zal gaan ploegen, moeten we een hek om de greppel plaatsen. Op maandag hadden we in alle loci stratum twee bereikt en het was dus tijd om foto’s en metingen te doen. In locus twee hebben we aan het einde van de dag de rand van een grote pot gevonden. Op dinsdag zijn we in locus één verder gegaan met het traceren van een vreemde rode plek in de grond wat uiteindelijk een ronde vorm bleek te hebben. Gelukkig kwamen Dr. Greg Warden en mijn docente Patricia Lulof op dat moment langs en zij vertelden ons dat we de bodem van een grote oven hadden gevonden. Professor Patricia Lulof of the University of Amsterdam (left) visits Trench PF 5. Als we dus deze grote vondst naast de andere leggen kunnen we concluderen dat het hier dus toch gaat om een werkplaats. De volgende vraag is dan wat de binnenkant en buitenkant van het huis is. Volgens de leiding moet de oven heel groot zijn geweest en persoonlijk denk ik dat het niet erg logisch is om zo’n gevaarte in je huiskamer te hebben. Locus één zal dus waarschijnlijk de buitenkant zijn en locus drie en vier de binnenkant. Samenvatting: Het is een succesvol seizoen geweest voor de opgraving in Podere Funghi. De leiding wist vanaf het begin dat men in dit gebied ging opgraven dat er ergens sporen van een nederzetting moesten zijn. De afgelopen jaren leverden echter steeds veel aardewerk op maar geen muren. Aan het begin van het seizoen dacht iedereen dat we geen architectonische resten zouden vinden maar na anderhalve week stuitten we toch op een aantal muurresten. In eerste instantie gingen we er vanuit dat we twee verschillende gebouwen hadden maar dat bleek later niet het geval te zijn. Het huis bleek nogal ingewikkeld in elkaar te zitten en we twijfelden steeds of het hier nou zou gaan om een werkplaats of een woonhuis. Met de vondst van de oven kunnen we nu met zekerheid zeggen dat we hier de resten van een werkplaats hebben. De leiding heeft besloten de greppel volgend jaar weer te openen om te zien hoe de rest van het gebouw eruit ziet. FOD Trench PF 5 and crew, left to right: Greg Cress, Jurriaan Venneman, Rob "Base" Belanger, Melissa Tschebaum, and Katy Blanchard. Director's Diary Field Director's Diary Trench PF 5 Trench PC 18 Trench PC 19 Trench PC 20 Trench PC 21 Conservator's Reports Student Diaries