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Published: July 30th 2009
Skeletons
We have excavated three human burials at our site this week. 2 adults and 1 child. One of the adults was buried with a tile cover, suggesting that he/she was of importance. The other two graves were probably buried in wooden coffins, we found only the nails from the coffin. In the section I have been personally working in, we have come upon a similar layer to that of the section with the graves, so I am hopeful that we will uncover another grave in the next two days. Until we found the grave of the child, we thought that if we located graves that they would have been the graves of the monks (since this site is of a 6th century Orthodox Christian church and monastery), but since we found a child's grave, that theory is not strong anymore. There is a chance that after the Ottomans invaded this area, the monastery was deserted and then because it had a reputation of being a holy place, locals buried their dead there. Or perhaps those buried here were important donors to the church and had a right to be buried fairly close to the altar (where the relic of a saint was kept). We can tell that these were Christian burials because their feet face the East and their heads face the West/Sun/Jesus. Also, there are no grave goods and the bodies have their arms in a position common in Christian burials. Besides there exciting finds, we also excavated an arrow head, an arm of a large cross and a ton of pottery (some are good quality Roman pieces). I have been having a great time at the site. DIgging hard, drawing and documenting and hanging out with lots of cool Bulgarian archaeologists! woo!!
Stray Cats
So, there are stray cats all over the place here in Varna. Some are cute little kittens too! I love this one particular cat who sits in the park near the place where we catch the bus. She (i think it is a she) is white and has beautiful and oddly shaped eyes. I named her Antonia.
Bowling
My team loves bowling. I hate bowling. We went bowling twice so far. The bowling alley plays loud dance music and has a bar. I almost threw myself down the lane last night. I have no idea what kind of bowling ball I should be using. When I used the light one I sent it flying with too much power and it just went sliding into the gutter. When I used the heavy ball, it just rolled slowly to its death in the gutter. It wasn't all bad though, I did knock some pins down before calling it a night.
I have two more days left of excavating. I am sad that my work here is almost done and that we will be closing up the site. But, I am happy that I made such good connections here and I plan to return to do more work with the archaeolgists here.
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mom
non-member comment
It must have been sad to see the child. Does it have a musty smell in there? It's good that you made connections with alot of people, you'll never know when they will come in handy. It sounds as if you have alot of fun during your down time.