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July 21st

Trip to Gdansk!

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July 19th & 20th 

Back in Poznan.  Waking up at 5am after a long night of BBQ and talking was tough, but I was happy to be heading back to the city.  Once there my friends Maciej and Taria and I went out for breakfast where I had eggs for the first time since beginning the fieldschool.  THEY WERE DELICIOUS.  On a serious note:  that catering food in Drawsko turned me vegetarian.  Trust me.  Once you’ve had pickled pork meat you’ll never want to see another sausage again.

Maciej and I also walked around that afternoon (Maciej lives in Poznan), so I got to see a bit more of the local’s side of the city.  This graffiti is under one of the main bridges that crosses Cathedral Island in Poznan, the dog is Lili (the softest pupper on the planet!), and the mural of buildings is a... well, a mural.  But it took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t real!

I love how much art there is everywhere, I’ve been finding several artists around the city who I recognize now, and it will be sad to leave their familiar characters behind.

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July 18th BBQ

These ladies and I shared a small classroom for living quarters for 3.5 weeks on air mattresses in (essentially) the middle of a small but noisy town.  I am so happy to have met every single one of them and am lucky to have had such great roommates!  From left to right is Ariana, from CA, Stephanie, from Sydney Australia, Kora from CO, Fiona from Oakland CA, Me, and Krisit from BC!

The last day of fieldschool we were still required to be in the field (or lab) working from 8-3.  Some BAMFs worked right until 1st dinner at 4pm, and at 5pm we had our Osteo final!  It went well, and the best part was that afterward we were free!!!  We had drinks and a BBQ with the instructors, and had a wonderful time relaxing, saying our goodbyes to those who were leaving early, and sharing stories about how much we couldn’t wait to eat something other than pickles, deli meats, and potatoes again!

Special shoutout to Sarah S. and Maciej for a fun post-bbq conversation about Polish history, the boundaries and prescriptions of language, politics, and more!  I’m going to miss every single person and I can’t wait to see everyone for our 5 year reunion in Vegas! ;)

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July 15th

A kayaking trip!  This is Taria, my new friend from NYC!  We did a 21km kayak trip down a river with some pretty intense obstacles (I’ve kayaked many times before, but you don’t have to worry about fallen trees in an ocean).  I was hoping to do some bird-watching but we were having too much fun talking and singing to really get any nature-watching done.   At the end of it all was a BBQ with delicious and well-deserved foods, and I got to try a new dessert called “piepsisz bananan”, which is a bbq’d banana with pepper sprinkled on top, a recipe learned from Morocco.

I had such a great time on this kayaking trip and am so happy to have had such an amazing group to share that experience with!

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July 13th-14th, 17th & 18th

Cleaned and labelled pottery and cremated bone.

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July 12th 2017

After finishing excavating and cleaning the bones of the 7-12 month old, AJ and I returned to the field with new partners.  Taria and I were given another grave (another sub-adult), and as we dug found that the preservation was unfortunately horrible.  The cranium was intact, but the rest of the body had disintegrated due to being so close to the surface of the land, and not much else was left, and none of it in good condition.  We were careful and able to save both the left and right ilia, the right femur, and a disassociated tibia. This was also unfortunately my last time out in the field. 

The above pictures were taken 5 minutes apart.  The storms come fast in Drawsko, so we have to hustle big-time to cover and protect the site and it’s inhabitants from water damage by covering them carefully with several tarps.  And we also hustle because it’s a 30 minute walk back to our school, and we don’t want to get caught in a lightning storm. (We did).

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We uncovered our first skeleton!  A tiny little baby, My bet is around 7 months old, though we haven’t had the ‘Aging’ lecture yet, so I’ll know it for sure by the end of the week.  It’s sad to be excavating such a tiny human, but at least they will be held once again.  And once we’ve cleaned the bones this baby will get reburied in a cemetery where it will be safe. <3

The preservation on this skeleton is incredible.  down near the pelvis we have carpals and metacarpals, though the left lower arm bones, and the right lower leg bones are missing, or somewhere underneath.  We have teeth, ribs, vertebrae, and a sphenoid.

AJ is my partner for the dig and it’s been so wonderful working with him!  He was actually the first person I met of the field school, and after 30 minutes we were talking like we’d known each other for years.  I’m glad to be partnered with him because we’re both here for the experience, and since we have the  only feature with 6 graves, it’s nice to work with someone who isn’t overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do.  Plus, he has great taste in music and always chooses the perfect station to work to while we’re in the field!

Drawsko is beautiful, over the weekend I went on a walk early Sunday morning and visited the German cemetery to the south (~1850-1920).  Many of the graves had been smashed, and later on I found out from an instructor that after WWII it was common for Poles to destroy anything left behind by German occupants, both soldier and civilian.

My instructor also told me that there was an interesting site further on from the cemetery, so we planned a hike for later that night.  It was beautiful once we got into the trees, even though the mosquitoes ate some of the women alive (I don’t really mind it, but I don’t think I’m bit as much).  The forests here are gorgeous, though we didn’t find the site we were looking for. (It’s hard to navigate through unmarked trails).  

Other things this weekend:  I went to mass!  I studied!  I doodled! And I tried to make a stone tool (Achulean knife), but my knapping skills are horrendous. I have many things to work on.

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About the site:

Drawsko is a small farming town 2 hours north of the city of Poznań, in the Wielkopolski region an hour away from the German border.  The excavation site that the Slavia Foundation is working on is in privately owned land used for farming, so the 22 of us participating in the field school walk through fields of wheat and grains each day to reach our destination. It’s a decent 30 minute walk away from the schoolhouse we’re staying in, and the wildflowers are in full swing here so it’s a beautiful view the entire way.

The landscape where we’re excavating was once near a riverbed, so the land sloped up to 2 meters (uphill going northeast).  During the Early Bronze Age in the Drawsko area (~1,000 BCE) the typical burial practice was cremation, with the ashes and cremated bones buried in ceramic vessels.  The site was used frequently during that time for burials, and many urns and cremains have been excavated in the area.  When Christianity was introduced to Poland ~1,000 CE the culture around burials changed completely.  Cremation was seen as a pagan practice, and full-body burials in wooden coffins became the norm.  At the Drawsko site there are no burials of any sort between the Bronze Age and the 16/1700′s, suggesting that the site was not used for ~2,500 years.  A typical burial from this area is oriented in an east-west position (head toward the west). After the 1700′s the area was again abandoned as a cemetery, and farmers later in the century leveled the land for farming, back filling dirt and removing the original slope of the river-bed.  The quadrants we are excavating are across this slope, so on the eastern end the graves are only 20cm below the surface, while on the western/southern end we had to dig over 100cm before finding the original surface of the land and its burial features.  SO MUCH DIGGING.

The photos above show one day of digging out the feature my partner and I were assigned to.  Of course, we got the craziest feature where there were burials on top of burials and we had to keep extending and extending and extending our site.  We finally found the most recent burial, a small sub-adult (not sure how to age it yet, but it looks like a baby to me), you can see the darker dirt where it is buried in the lower right hand corner of our pit (it looks like a rectangle).  I do have to apologize for the quality of the top photo, I took it before we had troweled and cleaned up the area, so it’s hard to see the other graves present in the feature.  But believe me, there are 6 graves there (at least).  The photo below is a close-up of the sub-adult burial, you can see the exposed cranial bones, a long bone (probably femur) and some ceramic pottery from when the grave was filled in with surrounding dirt.  My partner AJ and I have to excavate this skeleton before being able to excavate the adult grave we’d originally been assigned.

Apparently this session is seeing some really unusual things.  Normally by week 2, groups would have finished excavating their skeletons and begun paleo-pathological analysis on the bones in order to prepare for the final paper.  No one has dug up a skeleton yet and Monday is the start of week 3.  There have never been so many overlapping burials in one area, and so far down!  I think it’s really exciting, and I’m sad that I can’t stay and see the whole project through.  C’est la vie.

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Mushrooms are a really big thing in Drawsko! *badunst*  Apparently the day before the field school began they held the annual mushroom festival (and I’m sad that I missed it!).

Today in the field we began troweling centimeters at a time in order to gently and evenly expose areas of disturbed dirt.  Which to me looks just like regular dirt. But I’m beginning to know when to look for patterns of mottled or marbled earth as opposed to one solid color (indicating that different types of soils have been mixed together and put back).  So in one quadrant we have some very promising rectangular patches, while we still need to continue troweling in the other 3 quadrants to remove more topsoil.  When troweling it’s really important that the surface remains even and smooth, and since we’re working in sand it’s easy to do if you angle the trowel (aka ‘gardening spade’) correctly.  I’d love to practice troweling in different types of soils just to get a sense of what types of obstacles to expect.  Yes, mom, that means we will have a pit in our backyard. :)

Just kidding.

We continued to find lots of Bronze-Age ceramics from the site, along with disarticulated bone (fragments from 17th and 18th century skeletons that are no longer in their original context because of disturbances - in this instance it’s field plows), and cremated bone (from the Early Bronze Age ~1,000 B.C.E).  We even found a bunch of teeth!

Tomorrow I’ll try to do a write-up of the history of the site since I haven’t really shared what I’ve been learning about it yet.  So expect some history to come your way!

Some of my favorite things to do in the evening:  Walk around Drawsko.  Drink tea.  Drink tea while walking around Drawsko.  Practice my Polish.  Play ukulele.  Identify birds.  Sketch birds.  Read.  Practice Juggling.  Study.

Let’s just say I’m keeping myself busy with all my favorite things. :)

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Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

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Spent the weekend in Drawsko and ran through wheat fields, walked all around town, collected wildflowers, and visited the marina at dusk while being eaten by bugs.  It was magical!

The ~10 of us that stayed in town spent some quality time together playing cards, making flower bouquets, studying skeletal remains, and celebrating Canada Day with volleyball, jello shots, playing ukulele, and telling ghost stories.  I couldn’t have asked for a more relaxing and cheerful time!

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2 days worth of topsoil removed!  (20m x 5m x 25cm x 22 exhausted bodies.  The top photos are from the excavation site, the cows watch us on our walk to and from the dig (it’s a 30 minute walk, partly through a field of wheat).  

So.  The surprise I bought was a ukulele (uku-la-la in Polish)!

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 Day #3 in Drawsko

Today was our 2nd day in the field, and 5 hours of intense manual labor removing topsoil from our quadrants.  The goal is carefully and evenly remove dirt in order to expose the underlying soil, and at our site we continued until we started to see consistent discoloration in the soil that would indicate organic matter or a feature.

I can say that I’ve got the bucket-o’-dirt-passing down.  My shoveling skills need some work.  We cleared out 10′x5′ meters of dirt, about 25cm down, and uncovered some promising features.  Hopefully we’ll find both skeletons from the 16th & 17th centuries, and maybe even some ceramic pots and cremated remains from the Bronze Age (~1000BCE).  We’re going back to the field tomorrow to finish removing topsoil from the other two quadrants that we’ll be excavating in, and once we’ve got everything leveled we will begin to map the quadrants, get levels for each feature (still not sure what the technical term for that is, I’ve only heard it in Polish so far), and only then will we begin gently using trowels to remove layers of soil to see if the features can reveal any artifacts or remains.

I am so tired!

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Day #2 in Drawsko!

Today we took it a bit easy and had breakfast at 8am (cereal, lunch meat, and yoghurt) then split into 2 to do a bit of training with site leveling and lab work. We were so fast at site leveling that we had some extra free time, so I got to practice my Polish, read and play before lunch.  After lunch we walked out to the field and did a pedestrian survey of the site (walk slowly in a line through 15m quads and gathering surface artifacts).  There was a lot of Bronze Age pottery and burned bone scattered on the surface area.  I found some teensy lithic fragments (so proud!) and a human canine (along with many other bits).  After an hour of survey we then walked back for 1st dinner (chicken patties with thick mushroom gravy - apparently mushrooms are a big deal in Drawsko) and then had a bit more free time as our lecturer wasn’t at the site yet.  

For 2nd dinner we had canned fruit salad, and a garbanzo corn green salad (it’s usually very light), and for desert there was ice cream.  Now, I know you’re wondering about 3rd dinner, but that doesn’t exist unless you count midnight snacks.

Our lecturer Marta is a PhD student who’s been working at this site for 6 years.  She told us a bit about what has been found and what to expect as far as the work and process of excavation goes, and it was nice to have so many questions answered.  I’ll post tomorrow with what I learned, because apparently the articles that I read from the internet to prepare, were very wrong (and very old).

Tomorrow is our first real day of work in the field!  We’ll be using shovels to carefully remove the sandy topsoil from the site, which will probably take all day.

The long building in the top photo is of the front of the elementary school where we’re camped for the course, and the bottom photo is of the classroom I’m stationed in.  Can you guess which bunk is mine?

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Dzień dobry!  Today was the last day in Poznań, so some of my colleagues and I enjoyed breakfast at the small coffee shop “Sweet Surrender” (they make everything to order, so while it takes a while, it is always fresh and delicious!).  At 2pm the bus to Drawsko picked us up, and our group of 8 met the other 14 students that we would be working alongside for the next few weeks.

2 hrs and a beautiful countryside later, we landed!  Our lodgings are on the campus of the small school in Drawsko.  Us students sleep 6-8 to a classroom (except for the guys, who share a whole room between the 2 of them), with a small kitchen (no oven :C) and long dining room.  The showers are in the gym area across the courtyard, and so we get to use the gym as well.

The orientation was simple and brief; do the work, do your chores, be considerate, no fraternizing with the stray cats or dogs, and have fun!  

With the laws laid, it was time for dinner!  We had a stuffed pork sausage thing (I asked what was in it, and the whole table laughed), with a corn salad, cheese, and deli ham.  For desert we had the best, freshest, strawberries I’ve had since I was young and harvesting them from my neighbour’s garden.

After dinner we took a look at the lab, talked a little bit more about some logistics of the school, and then it was free time. Taria, who I met yesterday in Poznań, and I decided to stroll around the town for a while and get a sense of the place.  Taria speaks Polish, and helped me ask a nearby grocer for scissors (to cut flowers).  No luck - but that didn’t stop me from making a bouquet of wildflowers anyway.  We passed by lots of unclaimed doggoes, which seemed to be part of the status-quo of Drawsko.  The people were either very nice, or very uninterested.

Before bed I played P-I-E-S (Polish for ‘dog’) with Taria and Sarah (another friend I met in Poznan), and lost shamefully.  But I’ll get lots of practice I’m sure!

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Day #5 in Poznań

Loving this weather like crazy!  The sun peeps out, but not too much, and then it rains so gently for a second and then back to warmth and coziness under a foggy sky.  I wish I could send my SB garden a postcard.

In this photo we’re crossing a bridge over the Warta river to get to Cathedral Island, the birthplace of the city of Poznań (the town center moved in 1300 to where it is now).  The cathedral itself was closed because it is a practicing church, but one of the nearby buildings (not pictured) is the Architecture Museum, built right over one of the first ramparts of the initial city (ca. 1000ce).  It was a fascinating museum with high-tech and interactive displays (many of the museums in town are like this), and I learned so much about the origins of Poland itself under the duke (?) Miesko I (who is buried in the Cathedral).  The staff was wonderful and after walking through the exhibits we had a great conversation about schooling in the US vs. Poland.  10/10 would recommend.

After the Architecture Museum the group headed back toward the Stary Rynek (Old town), and I broke off to visit the Dalineum - a museum housing a collection of Dali’s work from his “Divine Comedy” period.  It was amazing to see his pieces and learn more about the wide variety of work he did in all sorts of sectors.  <3 Dali!

I also visited the Archaeology museum today for several hours (yes), and got maybe too excited to see the various lithic (stone tool) fragments that have been collected in the area from the neolithic period (pre-pre-pre-Poland).  The hostess kicked me out at closing time in the kindest way imaginable, and even entertained my questions thoroughly while ushering me toward the door.  Again, 10/10 would recommend.

PS: I bought a thing today… but I’m gonna keep it a secret for now ;)

Pa pa!

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A courtyard in old town. It used to be part of a Jesuit cathedral (the church still operates in the building to the right of the pic), but the rest is used for Town Hall and public event space.  Baroque period. Apparently the exterior is considered ‘modest’ compared to the interior chapel.