2004 STUDENT DIARIES Week 4 - Jeff Edwards: Hello everyone. We are now beginning our fourth week of excavation here at Poggio Colla. Tomorrow will be July 13th, and everyone has returned from our long four day weekend. A group of seven of us went to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum. We stayed in the seaside town of Sorrento, just south of Naples. It was a picturesque location. Also, we visited the island of Capri where the emperor Tiberius had his villa, and the Museo Archaeologico in Naples which houses a large collection of artifacts from Pompeii. I cannot quite convey the feeling I had while standing in the forum or some of the villas in Pompeii. Most of the time I felt numb, stupefied, or simply amazed. Luckily I was accompanied by six girls, two of whom had just taken Professor Michael Thomas's class on Pompeii. They were great tour guides, having studied and visited the site before. Everyone is in high spirits and looking forward to returning to work tomorrow. View of Trench PC 20. Jeff Edwards is excavating in the locus in the foreground. I will be continuing my work in Trench PC 20, which is located in the northeast corner of our site plan. It is a very rich area for artifacts, yielding approximately twenty finds each day: mostly bucchero and fineware vessels. Today we continued working in PC 20 by removing a line of baked mud brick that was first thought to be part of the Phase I building (the earliest construction on top of the hill), It is now considered to be debris deposited after the destruction of the building. Like much of the work that goes on here, plausible hypotheses are formulated then tested by the data we recover. This is one aspect of archaeology that is both challenging and exciting. It is always interesting for me to observe the evolution of thought during the process of our work. One day last week I was excavating and encountered a very strange shape of terra cotta and I could not picture what it might be. When Dr. Thomas looked into our trench, he said that we might have an antefix (a terra cotta sculpture used in Etruscan architecture.). This was a very exciting prospect and it would be truly remarkable to find one, however the object turned out to be part of a coarseware vessel. This example speaks to the nature of excavation. Often you don't know what you may have until it is lifted. Jeff Edwards and Sarah Titus in the southern end of PC 20. Throughout the last few weeks I have become quite adept at using dental instruments to define artifacts before they are removed. For instance, I spent approximately three hours defining and block lifting a large bone fragment. Artifacts like bone are by far the most difficult to work with because they cannot be touched. One must leave a thin layer of soil attached so the fragment will not disintegrate. The slightest touch will cause the bone to crumble into dust. I consider myself very lucky to be working in our trench because the amount of artifacts we encounter each day is astounding. Etruscans were fine craftsmen who were influenced by the Greeks and Phoenicians. The Orientalizing phase of their culture is remarkable and one can see the Near Eastern influence in their works of art. Today I found a fragment of bucchero which had a design that may be a griffin, and drew this artifact in my trench notebook. These notebooks are modeled after our field supervisors' although not nearly as detailed. Publication is a very important part of archaeology that many people do not recognize. We are learning the rudiments of how it is done and are encouraged to write everyday. Jeff Edwards completing find tags for bucchero from his trench. I now have the utmost for our supervisor and the directors, Dr. Warden and Dr. Thomas; their dedication to their project and our education is evident every day. Theirs is a multifaceted job that is both challenging and exciting. I am lucky to be part of the Poggio Colla teams and am grateful for their unique experience. Things have been quite interesting the past two weeks working in PC 20. The many artifacts that were made finds have been sent down to our laboratory so conservation can look at them. These finds are cleaned up and some are catalogued. For an object to go into our catalogue it must be "diagnostic." By this I mean it must tell us something about our site, such as how the object's context can tell us something about how Poggio Colla related to other sites in the region, or perhaps the object could tell us something about trade relationships. After excavation and pottery washing we went to the lab for a lecture on the material culture of Poggio Colla. It was very interesting to see the bucchero (a fine black pottery produced by the Etruscans) after the conservators had finished their work. Some of the pieces that I had found the day before had been cleaned. One in particular was a winged cup handle of a skyphos that had an incised design on it. We also so the famous objects that were found last year. But of course, "it's not what you find, it's what you find out," that really matters. The real importance is what we learn from all these wonderful objects, however, excavation is exciting and fun. Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7   Director, Gregory Warden gwarden@mail.smu.edu Director, Michael Thomas michael.thomas@tufts.edu While the team is in Italy during the summer field season, send e-mail to: mvap3@dada.it To email an individual on the team, enter the person's last name in the subject heading. Excavation house phone: 055-844-9834, or, when calling from the US: 011-39-55-844-9834. 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