ok, i'm going to try not to write such a novel this time...

Over the past week the excavation has yielded some interesting results...
What we thought was a tomb last week turns out to probably just be a late phase floor so we're a little disappointed about that. Alexandru, our Romanian director, really hopes to find a tomb though so when we uncovered some columns (!) on Thursday he decided that was probably a tomb...after we get the area cleaned up and documented a little we'll dig under and see what we find. Meanwhile, I spent most of the week working in the "pit of death." It is so far the deepest area of the site, and we've dug down almost 2 meters. Me and Val have been working and finding a number of large pottery pieces, most have rim pieces, rim and bottom, and even one that has part of a rim, an entire handel, AND part of the bottom. We also found the spout so it's a jug, we're hoping to find the rest soon. ALso lots of big bone pieces so we think it was a garbage deposit. After finding so many things we remaned it "Lauren and Val's Awesome Pit of Fabulous Finds."

We've also spent our evenings mostly hanging out on the west wall, which I can't remember if I mentioned it but is now my favorite part of the entire site. It's so peaceful and you can see all the hills in the distance. It's beautiful. We watched a big storm in the distance the other day and since there is so little light pollution we could see every bolt of lightening. It was soo cool to see, i'm going to try to bring my camera next time and get some pictures. We also like to go sit and watch the sunsets with a bottle of Uncle George's wine. I went to visit Uncle George the othe r night but he wasn't home. Instead Aunt Veronica, his wife, made us more gogoc and chated with us. It was lovely. Most of the families make their own wine, which is really neat. All the houses have grape canopies over the entranceway. We also were invited to one of the ROmanian workers houses for Crepes which was a lot of fun. We got to see her horse, water buffalo, and chickens, and then we learned to make crepes. It was really fun! It's so cool being able to interact with the locals here.

My last observation for this post: it's really neat seeing how they're all starting to develop the area. There is a lot of construction, especially near the city, and people are starting to build bigger and nicer homes. It's great to see the progress they're finally able to make!

Ok, off to lunch in the "big city" where everthing else is closed on Sundays...

Love and miss you all!

Lauren