Posted by Fiona on May 25, 2006 at 22:24:57 from 213.78.91.189 user Fiona.
In Reply to: Sitting on the Roman Wall posted by Pam Adams on May 24, 2006 at 23:41:59:
Can I assure you that archaeologists don't sit quietly.......passing the bottle, eating, getting increasingly rowdy as the time progresses, breaking open the scotch.....often while sitting either in the nearest hostelry or even in the middle of the site at midnight under the stars (if you happen to be digging in the N East as I do for 2 months each summer) but quiet??? Surely not! And even at conferences, there are regular intervals for refreshment of both liquid and non-liquid nature. Papers might be passed around but this is usually to keep the flies/mosquitoes off.
And having dug in Egypt like Prof Callum did, I'd have thought sedate eating of sandwiches was extremely unlikely. Mrs Callum would be needed to mop his brow the following morning and to make sure he got home in one piece. Conferences tend to end up with some sort of shindig on the final evening - and I've been at some *interesting* conferences - Aswan, Washington, Jamaica, Cape Town.....I'll say no more!
Off to Jordan in 2 weeks, then followed by Antakya, Turkey - back on July 31. It's a hard life for some of us.