Pre-excavation work and post-dive report

Tuesday 23.8.2016

We will have two trench excavations, one in mid-ship and the other in the bow. The bow area has been excavated before, but it will be redone now better. Today we started to record the current state of both areas before actual excavation begins with airlift. Our task was today to find and locate as many amphora tags as possible in the bow area, record them and photograph/video the tags and the amphorae they are attached to. We located over 20 tags, but some of them only from watching the video afterwards. My GoPro (with Goodman handle) turned out to be quite useful in recording the whole dive, and then writing down all the tags we found from the video. However, this type of post-dive work can be tedious.

We will probably continue pre-excavation recording tomorrow, and then start practicing using the airlift in the bow area. It has lots of new sand on top of the earlier excavation. The sand was placed there to protect the excavated trench from elements. The idea is to excavate, raise amphorae and other finds, and then refill the trench to protect remaining artefacts there. What you can not study now, preserve for the future. Of course that means that now there is just sandbags and loose sand where amphorae used to be. It is not as pretty any more. That new sand seems to be a good place to practice airlift use as there is no big danger of hitting any valuable artefacts immediately...

Trench A divers are collating their pre-excavation work into one comprehensive report. All pictures/videos and other files must be named according to a fixed standard. Tutors are helping and guiding us to keep the report useful for real archaeologists to use tomorrow, or 50 years from now. 

In the evening we collated the results of each team that worked on the same areas. The mid-ship excavation will be the main one, and it is divided into two parts, Trench A and Trench B. We create full daily report in the evening, before we forget anything. It is placed in project files, and then processed by the archaeologists in our project. It was kind of surprising to realize that we 12 technical divers are pretty much the only divers doing the field work. The "old hats" are really there just to help in logistics and guide us to do the work properly. For example, putting together an airlift is done much faster by people who have done it before many times. Anyway, we are the only ones collecting research data. At least until we start raising amphorae and the real archaeologists on board get to do their work on the surface.

We were also shortly introduced to certain software that archaeologists like to use. We should now download them into our laptops, and then hopefully use them soon. Some software is used help in finds documentation, some to stitch together many pictures, and some are used to create photogrammetry point cloud images. We will learn details and practice with them later on.

The days are kind of long. You wake up at 5:30, get back on-shore maybe at 15:30, start lessons and post-dive work at 17:00, eat dinner at 19:30, and go to bed at 22. And yes, this is (so far) a fun way to have vacation.