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Week 1 In Italy:

For those who do not know I am currently participating in an archaeological field school through the University of Pisa in Altopascio, Italy for the next three weeks.

I have been in Italy for a week and to be honest this is probably the most emotionally and physically draining experience of my life (and I went to a military boot camp in 10th grade); but just to be clear I am very appreciative of the opportunity to explore this side of my anthropology degree through a very hands-on type of learning. This field school is very unique because we are actually finding and excavating human remains. We are excavating from a church called Badia Pozzeveri that has records beginning around the 11th century and we are digging in sections where the old cemetery used to lay. This church, barely standing, now rests in the small town of Altopascio in the province of Lucca, Italy. It has endured centuries of change from a church to a rectory to finally an abbey and back to a church before it was abandoned by the Bishop. However, what makes this such a awesome archaeological opportunity is during the middle ages there was a cholera break out and bodies upon bodies were piled into this cemetery so we are excavating human remains from this outbreak along with any other relevant artifacts.

So my day begins at 6:30 am with breakfast then we walk a mile to the dig site and dig from 8am to 6pm Monday-Friday. I have bruises on all my limbs and I am sore where I didn’t even realize it was possible to be sore (like my thumbs??). The bug bites are real and I have a sinus infection that I feel is turning into some sort of respiratory infection from breathing in dust and dirt for 10 hours a day in 95 degree weather with absolutely no shade past 10 am. You could say this is a struggle. I was well aware of what was required to be part of a dig, but between strenuous pick axing for hours on end to crawling on my hands and knees with a trowel and a paint brush dusting off rocks I am definitely outside of my comfort zone. Nevertheless, I am being taught new and innovative skills in this field by some of the most intelligent and charismatic Italian researchers and professors from the University of Pisa. I learned how to use the geographic information system total device to gather the wave lengths and coordinates of our field area and have computed the elevation levels of skeletons with data points and mapped out this data using photoshop and GIS software. I get to work with actual human remains and better understand the skeletal system and the impacts of stratigraphy on this site. These absolutely outweigh the fact that I get relatively no sleep, can’t breathe through my nose and literally just killed two cockroaches underneath my bed. However, this is something no anthropology textbook or lecture could teach me about my field and is something I can look back on as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Ciao!