Our morning routine.
I arrived in Erbil two weeks ago and the workday has now settled into a comfortable routine for the most part. We start work at sunrise to take advantage of the relative cool and leave the field when the heat gets too intense to work efficiently. We seem to have settled on 108 degrees F as our upper threshold, which took us back towards the dig house at 10:30 or 11:00am when we first started work. The temperatures have cooled a bit the last few days and as we slip into September, we will be able to work later into the early afternoon. Of course, sunrise will also be later, so we will have to start later as well.
Most of us are up around 3am to get ready for the day – tea and coffee, packing up supplies and equipment for the day, a nice cool shower. Our driver, Ahmet, arrives with the team bus at 4am and we all pile in for the long commute to the site.
The dig bus. Comfortably fits eight of us, our driver, and the equipment we need for the day.
After stopping at the Directorate to pick up our four Kurdish archaeologists, the bus makes two essential stops for our workday. First, we buy ice and water from a pleasant older man who sets up outside a hardware store with a palette loaded with large slabs of ice which he breaks up with a crowbar to fill our ice chests and bottles of water.
Next, we stop at a roadside bakery where fresh bread shaped kind of like pita is made in a simple brick oven, at an industrial rate. It is a popular spot for laborers and the bread disappears as soon as it is pulled from the fire. Our bus smells like hot bread for the remainder of the journey. Sometimes there is vendor selling hot chickpeas and beans, which we pick up as a supplement for our site breakfast. With cold water and food acquired, we head through the village to Mastawa and on to our dig site.
Roadside bakery on the outskirts of Erbil. They open at 3am! There is no menu, just bread.
By the time we get to Kharaba Tawus, the workmen have already arrived from the local village in their pickup truck and usually the tents are up and the picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows are waiting to start work. As the sun rises, we are awake and focused and work starts in earnest. We seem to always be racing the sun and the heat, but I find the quiet mornings are perfect for digging.
Sunrise on the western Erbil plains. In summer there is a permanent haze in the sky from the oil wells that support the economy of Iraqi Kurdistan. The flames from gas flaring, as well as the dust raised from the baked earth, both contribute to the haze, and make for spectacular sunrises.