Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Hello!

Hey everyone! Hello from Turkey!! We’ve been here for one week and five days, and it’s been amazing so far.

My name is Nicole Tan, and I’m (going to be) a junior at Penn State University, studying Archaeological Sciences and Sociology. I heard about the study abroad to Turkey program way back in the first semester of my freshman year, when I took my freshman seminar with Dr. Killebrew. I couldn’t go that summer, but when I heard about it again last fall, I jumped on board!

For the past week or so, we’ve been surveying at Dutlu Tarla and Dagilbaz Höyük, two related sites near Iskenderun. We’ve been doing random samples of 10 meter squares and working on taking points with a total station in order to create a topographic map of both sites. One of the most exciting finds so far has been pottery slag at Dutlu Tarla, meaning they were making pottery at that site, and an Iron Age potsherd from the top of Dagilbaz.

I’m not going to talk about the total station. Suffice it to say that we made an offering to the god of technology two nights ago, and we’ll go from there.

So, I was working on washing pottery out on the balcony earlier. All the pottery we collect from the survey squares has to be soaked, washed, sorted, read, and either discarded or properly documented. Anyway, someone decided to collect a shoe along with the pottery from one square. When I find out who that was…

Right now a few of us are sitting in the classroom and talking about nicknames. I’m Thorns. :P

Well, nice chatting! If you’re my mom, dad, brother, sister, friend, or boyfriend, just wanted to let you know I miss you, but I’m going to bring back great pictures!

1 comment:

sebastopoledward said...

Amanda, I just noticed that you worked at the Archeological Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. I lived int Alexandria in the mid 70's and was a volunteer in a dig of the colonial site across from the city hall (now a hotel). I am curious about what the museum is like and if some of the artifacts that we pulled from those brick lined latrines are there. I now work at a small college in Northern California. I have always loved archeology.