Rainless

Currently I am in Campania and the sky is the never-changing cloudless blue that I became familiar with in Greece. A few weeks ago, though, it came as a shock to find that excavations sometimes actually have to deal with rain. Sure, I knew rain fell on British excavations and on Jamestown and stuff; but having never experienced it myself, it didn't seem like an archaeological reality. I was spoiled in Greece, where it stops raining in early June and then, well, that's it - no more moisture for the rest of the summer. The Mugello Valley, on the other hand, turned out to be wetter than I anticipated.

At first I was a bit...perplexed...by the whole covering-the-trenches-with-tarps-at-night thingy. And then I found out why it was necessary.

Bailing out PC 40.

In the end, the tarps were not wholly effective and some trenches got a bit...damp. This was especially unfortunate for those students digging through a deep layer made up of dark, ashy soil. Which turned into a gruesome greyish-brown ooze. They ended up having to sift the mud by hand.

Robert of PC 41, covered in black slime.

A PC 41 bucket. Yuck.

Alas, my own PC 42 did not escape unscathed, either. Yet somehow my students were awesome enough to stay relatively clean despite it all.

PC 42's sparkling clean Jack and Cassie excavate a muddy rubble pit that turned out to be a robbing trench for yet another wall, removed and filled in during the Hellenistic period.

Sand Storms: The Revenge of Tatooine

I am still trying to figure out why I am not entirely healthy yet, ten days into my cold. Up to now, I've been blaming it on the lymph node infection I've had, assuming that a common cold will be much more devastating if infection is involved.

My friend Stavroula (OSU represent!) has indicated that it might be something else. Now, it's no secret that Athens is grossly polluted and breathing the air can be bad for you. But apparently, we've got more to worry about than just the Athenian air...the Evil Dust Cloud of Death coming in from the Sahara.

Dust cloud approaching Italy from Africa in 2005.



Dust cloud blankets Cyrpus in 2008.

Apparently the dust clouds rolling in off the Sahara reach Athens several times a year. It seems, in fact, that these dust clouds have quite an atmospheric impact, reducing rain and maybe even cutting down on the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic. Unfortunately, it seems that the dust clouds also carry pollution. For example, in 2000, a Saharan dust cloud brought radioative rain to Thessaloniki...radioactive as in straight-from-Chernobyl-style-radioactive.

I haven't heard anything in the news about a dust cloud in Athens, but according to another OSU representative, Dimitris, one of these very dust clouds is now in Crete, where the air is thick and opaque. I assume that this outbreak is a result of a dust cloud documented on March 1st down in Chad, which has since grown in size and moved our unfortunate direction.

Dust cloud in the Sahara, March 1st.

Huge dust cloud swirls over the Mediterranean yesterday, March 6th.

I was appalled to look out my window yesterday and see that Athens looked like this:

Athens in a Saharan dust cloud, April 2008.

So maybe this is the reason that I can't stop blowing my nose, and my head feels like a cotton plantation, and I can't hear anything out of one ear. I can blame the desert for all my woes.