Have you worked on digs?

Has anybody here worked on any digs before?
I've worked on a dig in the Tombigbee National Forest in Mississippi. The site was called Noxubee (which means "Stinking Water").

I've also worked Tel Halif near Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel (just north west of Masada). I had a great time at this one, staying in tents, burning up in the desert conditions. It really was fun, strangely enough.

This thread seems lonely, so I'll give it a bump by saying that I only took a few of anthro courses, but I worked for a couple of hours on a dig underneath my college library when they found some 19th century ceramics, etc. during the course of excavation for renovation. :)

I've done paleo digs, but no archaeo digs. I imagine a similar process, and thrill of discovery. In the case of paleontology, it's something that no one has ever seen before when you uncover it. In archaeology, it's something that once belonged to someone else, a slightly different vibe.

I worked at the Institute for Nautical Archaeology in Bodrum, Turkey, but not specifically on a dig. I cataloged glass from the Serçe Limani wreck.

Hmmm, I can almost copy Tims post. ;)

I worked at the Institute of Maritime Archaeology at the Danish National Museum, but not specifically on a dig. Documenting the Roskilde 6 wreck in photos and 1:1 drawings.

I'm an archaeologist, but I've only worked on two digs, one on Santa Cruz Island off the California coast, the other a site in Germany. My specialty is prehistoric art so my projects are conducted with artists, cameras, cartographers, etc. I've worked on Easter Island, the American Southwest, and California sites.

Nothing as exciting as some of you but I belonged to Young Rescue in England as a teenager and worked on a couple of local digs (Roman)in my home town. I recently took and passed my A level in Archaeology using an Internet study course which was great - sitting my exam at a local grammar school. It was hard to fit my studies in with my day job etc but well worth it. Such a sense of achievement. I'd love to do a degree given the time/money.

I haven't worked on any. I was going to major in Archaeology before I decided to back into acting. I didn't get very far in the academic aspect, unfortunately. I still would like to get involved as a lay person, though.

I volunteered a few years back at a local site. A developer I worked for was developing a tract of land where several kilns were found (western settlement site) and I volunteered to help out the local archaeologists for a couple of weekends sifting thru pottery sherds. I really enjoyed it.

I worked for a while at Historic St. Mary's City (17th Century) in Maryland for a while, as well as at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Lab for about a year. I also spent a year working for a CRM firm doing archaeological surveys around the US.

I have no credentials; just an lifelong interest. I did some volunteer spade work, supervised by the County Archaeologist, with a local archaeology club. Words that come to mind are: dirty, sweaty, exhausting, & frustrating. I loved every minute.

Other people working on the (Native American) site on other days uncovered burials and boring stuff like that. Over the course of many days I found: 1 post hole (the first of the set!), a shard of pottery made by another tribe that lived hundreds of miles away (only shard found AFAIK), and a rounded, polished stone, not of a type found in the area, that the CA said probably was carried as a lucky charm. Carter probably wasn't much more excited or proud when he broke through into the tomb.

Those of you who have worked on exotic sites, or get to do it for a living, have my undying envy! :-)

We lived overseas when I was a kid, so while I have never worked on a dig, I have climbed all over ruins in the Middle East. We lived in Turkey for 3 years and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting several sites there. We also were in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Old city of Jerusalem.

I have been to a few new world sites in Mexico as an adult, and of course Stonehenge.

I worked on James Madison's family home in Virginia.

Visited Chichen Itza, but as a visitor.

I am an archaeology graduate student at New Mexico State University. My experiences include a survey in the Saddle Mountains of eastern Washington, volunteered with the Mud Bay Field School near Olympia, and have worked on the excavation of the Wenas Mammoth near Selah (2 summers). The Wenas dig was under desert conditions--lots of fine sandy loess that destroyed two pairs of glasses, my camera, and helped to bury my favorite pair of boots! But I managed to locate and excavate two mammoth rib bone fragments (they are very fragmented due to the tentative age of 16,000 years), a possible prehistoric bison vertabrae, and parts of a kangaroo rat and 2 pocket gophers found at the bottom of a burrow. This dig also became archaeological in 2006 with the discovery of the heat-treated medial portion of a human modified stone flake found in the same excavation unit as mammoth and bison elements. Pretty cool stuff! This dig continues July-August of 2007--they are open to volunteers, and the site is open to visitors, as well.
-aggie

I worked at Poggio Civitate in Tuscany when I was an undergrad. It's an Etruscan site, with a huge terra cotta workshop. That was a fantastic summer. Now I work for the AIA, so I get to meet all the important people in the field.

I worked at a Virgin Anasazi site in Overton, Nevada last fall for field school credit (undergrad). I loved it. (I'm currently analyzing the sherds we dug up.)

I did a volunteer stint on a postclassic Maya site in Belize. It was very hard work, but fascinating, and prompted me to do a degree in history and archaeology. Fieldwork included digs in London and Cyprus. We found a burial my very first day in Cyprus - much excitment ensued. It's certainly a great privilege to hold even the humblest artefacts from the past, which haven't been touched in centuries. It should be added though that archaeology can be hard on the knees!

I did my field school in archaeology at Petra, Jordan at the Temple of the Winged Lions in 2001. It was great! I have been working in cultural resource management for 5 years as a field archaeologist, and have worked on probably 60+ excavations, from survey to data recovery. I am now a grad student at ole' miss working on my MA. We are out here! Theres just not many of us....

I volunteer reasonably regularly for a community run dig called the Poulton Research Project, based just south of Chester in the UK.

It originally started twelve years ago with the intention of locating the "lost" Cistercian Abbey of Poulton. This has yet to be located.

What has been uncovered to date includes a medieval chapel (with hundreds of skeletons) and a bronze age timber circle. Numerous finds ranging from flints, Roman pottery to post-medieval finds suggest continuous occupation on the site for several thousand years.

The site was recently featured on the archaeology programme Time Team (Channel 4 in the UK). More details of the site can be found at Poulton Research Project.

OK, I'm an ecologist not an archaeologist, so I haven't worked on any digs anywhere. Nor do I really know much about the subject. But the two coolest digs archaeology-type places I've visited as a tourist would have to be Chichen Itza and Petra. Both were just amazing places with surprisingly breathtaking views. The first particularly from the top of the pyramid, and the latter the first view after you come out of the winding canyon/road leading to the city is just shocking.

I have worked seasonally off and on at a dig in Houston, TX and spent one summer in Sweden digging in Gotland. I have both excavated and worked in a lab cataloging artifacts.

Once, high school, salvage, illinois.

Spectator at workman's village (Giza, Mark Lehner) and Red Pyramid (Dashur, Dieter Arnold)

Worked on Chalcolithic and La Tene excavations in Romania, on a Neolithic Excavation in Turkey, and a PreContact site in Iowa. I'll be back in Turkey and Romania this summer.

In the summer of either 1973 or 74 The University of Cincinnati was excavation a campground at the mouth of Bullskin Creek in Clermont county Ohio. I was a 16-year-old high school geek that watched everything he could.

Now I am a ‘non-traditional’ collage student (I think they mean old) and a Professor I had last summer does excavations in the Bahamas, he says humans first colonized them a few hundred years before Columbus ruined the entire neighborhood. My wife tells me that I should go on one of his workshops next year and I am tempted to take her up on the offer.

Worked for a couple weeks on a Native American site in northern Minnesota, and spent my weekends one summer working on a mammoth (or mastodon--don't recall which) dig north of Detroit. Found what I thought was an arrowhead, but the professor decided it was simply environmental action that had inadvertently shaped it. I was really disappointed! But I still really enjoyed it.

I worked on a couple of spanish colonial and anasazi digs in the southwest US, and also a bit of salvage archeology on a construction site in downtown Santa Fe. That was interesting, all the stuff I'd normally stop and document, like post holes and such, were just brushed away. "Don't bother with that, we don't have time." It was pretty much a big feature/major artifact hunt since we only had 8 days to be in and out.

Did some paleo digs in western Colorado and Utah as well.

I did a dig in southern Minnesota for one of my classes at the University Minnesota. It was in a farmer's field . I remember we dug carefully for hours and found we had a rock .

So two years on how is it going in Poulton?
still teaching the local uni students how to geo phys?

very new to this, in fact joined 4mns ago, are there any archaeologists from the uk on here...

As a student (long, long time ago) I've assisted in some digs here in Holland (mostly Roman period stuff), and once in Saqqara (Egypt).

I am a UK-based archaeologist although I have not dug for about five years. I started in Hampshire in the mid-1970s and have worked on sites throughout the UK and Norway. I was a tutor for the Nautical Archaeology Society (of which I am still a member; I also belong to the IfA and the AAI&S) and an Assistant Producer on Time Team. More recently I have organised archaeology workshops for schoolchildren.

I dug in Italy a while back at Trebula Mutuesca in the Sabine Hills, and in Greece at Mt. Lykaion in Arkadia for the past three years.

I'm a professional archaeologist & have been for (too) many years. Office based these days focussing on consultancy & management...