Today was not a good day. Despite starting with a hearty breakfast - pita bread, jam, eggs, coffee (you can see I'm wrapped with the pita bread and jam), come lunchtime after the days digging, Cheryl was asking if I was okay, so I must have looked really despondent.
After my little mishap on Friday, I was obviously not in any condition to be getting fully into it as far as the digging was concerned, and Dr Bob was keen to have me a little less hands on and operating more in a supervisory capacity. No big deal, but I've already expressed my minor frustrations with the hired help.
In any case, obviously some progress was made in my absence on Friday (despite the fact that Friday's are "half-days", where the locals finish around 9.30 - 10 O'Clock and head up to get paid). I'd be supervising Square 95, Jennifer and Hanna would be assisting Dr Bob with some top-plan work, and Aaron was to do some photo work around the site (he with the big sexy camera), and Luke would later be helping me out.
We were off to a slow start to begin with, so it was one of those mornings where it took us ages before actually "getting to work". Within about an hour though, I had my first crisis. Mahmood was moving some limestone blocks (yes those bastards!!) onto a wheelbarrow, caught his finger between a rock and the far east marble column, and crushed his finger. Same finger as mine, similar injury. He comes to me, quite calmly, showing me his finger, which looked pretty mangled. What was so creepy was how calm he appeared, and didn't appear to be in much pain - in fact he was almost laughing at it, and only flinched when I poured some water over it to clean the wound. So once again, grab Dr Bob, grab a phone, call David, and another worker is off to the clinic.
But that was enough to set me off, and for the rest of the day my mood was foul, Dear Reader. Every five minutes I'd be mouthing off to myself - why aren't these guys more careful? Why didn't he get someone to help him? Why aren't these guys bringing their own gloves for protection? I never asked anyone else, but I suspected that I wasn't a nice person to have around.
So after all that, I'd naturally be thrilled with the prospect of having to dig around the West Column , hauling those rocks, getting rid of the dirt holding it up, and allowing the column to be lowered safely. From what we could ascertain, in the earthquake the column had shifted significantly from its base, digging around the back of it and shifting it back onto the base (without any heavy lifting equipment) was not going to be possible.
In addition to this, from what little we could see of the column's base under the rubble and dirt, it was hardly level, and would require a bit of work getting it back into a position of stability. The thought of an unstable column erect on an equally unstable base whilst people are on their hands and knees sifting around it - the OH&S issues were too much to even think about, and after two injuries on site we weren't going to risk a third - a column horizontal was less hazardous than one "erect".
Basically our strategy would be to carefully dig around the column and let it "fall forward", gracefully onto a bed of dirt that we'd have built up. With the use of some rope and some able bodies, we managed to get this done, and would worry about getting it standing once we'd taken care of the base.
Dr Bob had also measure up a square next to hours (to the south of us), and today Square 96 would begin excavation, with Fazel the machine getting to work on that.
After the column work, Luke and I got to work sifting through the mound behind where the column had "stood". We cleared around the column base - missing edges aside it was still in relatively good nick.
Behind it, Luke began to uncover a circular object about 20cm diameter.
Also uncovered was what was left of another chancellery screen (what little was left of it). This would have extended to the edge of the east wall, as can be seen by the grooves cut into the wall here.
Other than that, a pretty lackluster day all up, and as I'd previously stated, my mood was pretty dark. Hopefully tomorrow would prove to be a bit more fruitful.
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