Magpies and Stones
Funny story. We have magpies EVERYWHERE here, they have stalked the people preparing food at times. Yesterday we were having fun shifting sand, etc. and we had some pretty darn nice finds (by our standards, anyone else would be bored...). We left for our siesta and when we came back and started to retrieve our buckets and shovels from the ground to resume work our prof came over and asked us if we were missing anything, because the magpies had been poking around. We all looked at each other in panic (thinking about the beautiful shards of glass that we had found) and dove for the finds box. After rifling through it and checking that the gorgeous glass handle that I had found was still there, along with our other bits of glass, bone, and ceramic, we couldn't think of what was missing (and our prof was smiling this whole time). Finally, we announced that we didn't see anything missing. Then our prof, grinning, was like "and I was that magpie" and he held up what he had been hiding. We had forgotten to check the bags, he had taken the awesomely amazing carved bone end of a stylus that we had found earlier, it was the only one found so far at this site so he wanted to record it, then he decided to give us a heart attack.
Another funny moment came today when we were cleaning out backfill from a room next door. The whole room was just loose sand and stones so we quickly cleared to near the floor. They decided that it was my turn to hack at the packed sand with the hoe but when I did I hit a rock, so I moved over and promptly hit more rock, so I went to the other side and hit MORE rock. The only spots that I could clear were at the very edges of our spot. The other people with me were like "go AROUND the rock" and I was like "but it's EVERYWHERE" but they insisted that I was just an incompetent hoe wielder, there couldn't be rock everywhere, and one of the guys took over. And he hit rock. Everywhere. So we busted out the brushes and trowels and unearthed a HUGE stone block, big enough for 2-3 people to sit on side by side. They were like "oh, what do you know, you were right!" I was like "thank you, nice to know that I'm not going insane."
Another funny moment came today when we were cleaning out backfill from a room next door. The whole room was just loose sand and stones so we quickly cleared to near the floor. They decided that it was my turn to hack at the packed sand with the hoe but when I did I hit a rock, so I moved over and promptly hit more rock, so I went to the other side and hit MORE rock. The only spots that I could clear were at the very edges of our spot. The other people with me were like "go AROUND the rock" and I was like "but it's EVERYWHERE" but they insisted that I was just an incompetent hoe wielder, there couldn't be rock everywhere, and one of the guys took over. And he hit rock. Everywhere. So we busted out the brushes and trowels and unearthed a HUGE stone block, big enough for 2-3 people to sit on side by side. They were like "oh, what do you know, you were right!" I was like "thank you, nice to know that I'm not going insane."