Konya, Hamam, and the end of the season

Not too much has transpired between this Friday and last besides work. I did want to post some more pictures from the site and from last Friday's carpet shopping. A exciting thing for me (but maybe not as much for most of my audience on here) was that I got the opportunity to learn to excavate an infant burial out of one section of our trench this past week. It was fun but difficult since it was so small and would fall apart as you would lift parts out. This is my first time working on burials, and though it may have been easier to get an adult individual to start out with - I was still glad that I got something to work on this season. Next season we are expecting to expand the trench borders and will have to excavate a number of Late graves - good for me and not so good time wise for my supervisor who is concentrating more on the Chalcolithic (a much earlier time period). The neonate/infant that I took out most likely died shortly after birth (as it was less than 5 months of age), as was typical for early agriculturalists to have a high infant mortality rate. It was also from the Chalcolithic, so it was buried here somewhere around 7,500 years ago.

There was no theme party this Thursday, as we instead had a soccer game between the two mounds (west versus east). I played with the other west mounders and we won! It was very fun, though the sun made it seem a lot hotter even playing at 5:30pm.

This Friday I got to go to the Hamam, which is the Turkish Bath. It was not exactly what I expected it to be... going off of what others had told me about it. The Hamam is divided into a men's and women's section, and you choose what services you want done. For example, you could get just a wash, or massage, or both. Another woman we went with got a wax, which was actually different from what I've seen done in the states, where they use actual beeswax to take the hair out not strips with wax on it. Myself and a few of the other women I work with got the massage and wash option, which is the standard to get. Usually women wear bikini bottoms and are topless or have a towel on when they go into the baths, which I also did not know until I got there. The woman who washes you is also topless. This of course is not a big deal here, as that is just what they do. The first room you enter is a heated room with a octagon shaped marble slab in the middle of the room where you lie down on. After you have been in here for 5-10 minutes to start to sweat, you get called into the wash room where you lie down on another marble slab and get scrubbed with a course hand brush to remove the outer layer of skin. Then you get a light massage and soap, wash and rinse. Then you get sent to sweat it out at the sauna. I only lasted about 10 minutes in there it was so hot! I definitely did feel like I was cleaner afterwards though.

We had kind of a hectic end to the season, where both of our professors in charge were out for one reason and other. Despite this, it was very enjoyable and a good learning experience to work at this site. The people I worked with were fairly easy to work with - which when things get crazy sometimes is a good thing. We did lose a member about half way through due to illness, and most of us had some kind of injury at one point or another. We did accomplish a lot though. The space I was working in most of the time, pulled out about 10 metric tons of soil - that was a lot of buckets to carry. We finally figured out why nothing was coming out of that space when we realized we had dug through a section of a buttress. Not entirely a bad thing - because now we know where they are haha. The big problem with our site was that everything structurely kind of looks the same as soil... unlike the East mound where structures and features are as clear as day. This is because the people who occupied this area recycled their material of mudbrick and other junk (pottery, bone, mortar, plaster) into their walls and structures for buildings. It makes it difficult to see because these are the same things you find in room fill where it is all rubbish and not structure. Anyway, I tried to pick out good pictures from the season without posting too much. I will have to travel for 36 hours to get back home tonight (overnight bus, layover, flight 1, layover, flight 2, home).

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Part of trip: Turkey

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