My most recent actual dig was in a small town in the Czech Republic. It was one of the ones I didn't have to pay to work in, but somehow only get myself over there. I borrowed the funds (which I've recently paid back) and flew over to live in a forest for 2 months. The log cabin in the woods had no provisions or plumbing and was deemed unsafe: it was only just me there. It's an old outpost from the Soviet era and is now acting as a lab to sort and analyse bone fragments. The others hadn't arrived yet. So I stayed at the Masaryk University, small little room with a tiny fridge and bed bugs and all.
The dig site was absolutely magnificent and beautiful. It was in a large European forest, Moravian Karst near the deepest abyss in Europe (138 meters). It was May and all about was green. We had to lug our equipment up a steep rise that led to a cave on the side of a hill deep into the forest. If you weren't fit, you got fit after a week because of that steep climb. When it rained it took all your effort to cling on and not slip back down, and even if you protested and wanted to be a little lazier, you just ended up getting more of a work out and wished you stuck to the same route. Sitting on top of this giant hill was a medieval castle, which I climbed up to during breaks and explored with great enthusiasm and awe.
The dig site itself was a deep limestone cave first discovered by archaeologists in the 1950s. It was known to the locals earlier when, during the Nazi occupation, the Czech resistance movement hid a crate of world-war II bullets there. Earlier in history a medieval skeleton was found in the cave. With a sack of bronze articles. I had never heard of such an amazing dig site, with so much history and depth, and was told many little caves within the forest had contained little sacks of treasure found accidentally by locals. It was now even cooler, if that was possible, and was seen as a Neanderthal cave and the time period we wanted to get to was the middle-upper Palaeolithic transition approximately 50-30,000 years ago.
The archaeologists from the 1950s left their own artefacts behind, namely spades and various bits of tools and had found Neanderthal traces and tools. We were on the second exhibition and wanted to explore deeper. The dig director and field friends quickly went to work and set up a mini camp inside the cave and strung up some squares to dig. The constant temperature in the cave was 6 degrees. Never changing. Always six degrees, and my hands or knees or feet would freeze up from time to time and I'd have to get out of the cave to warm up again. As we dug deeper, we started to dig up bones immediately, bones of animals extinct. Large claws and teeth and ribs of ancient bears, deer and wolves. It was truly fascinating. We ended up finding a layer of loess and strange inclusions that were puzzling. A friend of the directors, a geoarchaeologist came into help and give us a geological context to the site. At about exactly that point I was hooked to geology. It seemed every academic in the Czech Republic had a degree in geology. I had very little geological knowledge and felt very privileged to learn from them.
