Although it was much of the same work we found the edge of a wall and so were able to begin uncovering that with our trowels instead of attacking the ground with pickaxes like over eager dwarfs. I also found a iron nail which i was highly excited about but had to throw away. Because we are only clearing ground zero all items are without context as we are digging through the disturbed layers to get to the undisturbed ones. Its extremely hard to throw away all the pottery, glass and animal bones found simply because they have no stratigraphic context.
Although I can't post photos from the dig, a few have been published by the actual Gabii project which I feel safe in posting as they are already online, so here are some for an idea of the site!
My favorite part of the day however was the osteology (study of bones) lecture we were given in the field. The professor assembled the Roman skeleton right in front of us, explaining how she could tell the gender (male), age (about 38) and even height from the femur (5.8 ft). Seeing a real human skeleton and having it all explained was the highlight of the trip so far. I got an awesome photo of my friend Joe holding the skull in an 'alas poor Yorick' pose but unfortunately can't post it. You can see when we were shown how not to swing a pick-axe instead.
We also got to do some awesome pottery cleaning in small groups which I really enjoyed. There's something to be said for taking a black undefinable lump of dirt and washing and scrubbing it carefully, watching the mud fall away revealing the red slip beneath, often shining and incised, the work of some Roman potter many moons ago. Even cooler when the clay is indented where the potters fingers once worked it. I think this is my favorite job on site so far, and wish we got to do it more often. The other upside to pottery work was we got to sit down and converse with the people in the group. One of the guys was Belgium and I had lots of fun making french-fry jokes at him. We also all decided everyone needed nicknames from religion or mythology, so he became Brother Mark and another guy became Loki. The rest of the nicknames we are still working on but it was great fun. I also taught them how to say kumera which was hilarious.
Our day was finished early with the sudden down-pour of rain so we made our way home. After showers I was bored so one of my friends that I made on the bus and I went exploring. We had seen a garden from our window that was within the apartment complex so we decided to go looking for the entrance, but it turned out only some residents could access it, so after calling it the 'secret garden' and abandoning our quest, we turned to plan B. We thought we would wander over to the river -the map showed it as being in a straight line from where we were-and admire the view, however after an hour of wandering and wondering if the river had somehow disappeared we realized we had gone in completely the wrong direction and gave up. We went and had pizza for dinner instead which was very nice. I had a margarita pizza and Joe had an olivey-tomatoey one with an unpronounceable name.
Pizza and gelato! Most excellent. It looks like Trastevere is pretty central - Google Maps tells me you're about a 26 minute walk from the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona! And not much further to the Trevi Fountain. Unfortunately it looks like there aren't any metro stops in that neighborhood, have you asked anyone about the bus system? (Vatican nearby!)
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