Cleaning Clumps of Dirt

I felt pretty rough when I woke up this morning, but there was no way I was going to miss two days of excavaton in a row. I went to the site but wasn't doing very well... when I got there I wondered if maybe I was more in the way than useful, but I think I ended up doing alright. I worked in the house on site, with one of the girls from my group who has come for three years now. She is doing specialized work on pottery from structure 12. She let me help her clean bits of pottery that had been drying for days, and then she described them with all sorts of fancy codes and entered them in a database on her computer. Really all I learned how to do today was clean pottery, but it was fun and it didn't make me any more sick. (Apparently several people at another excavation were sick with migraines Sunday and Monday, so we must be experiencing the weather changes. I wish we could just get joint aches or something.)
So, with a small but stiff brush, I brushed dirt off of all of the pottery bits. The pottery sizes were anywhere from 5mm to 8 or 9cm today. I learned how firm I needed to be to get the dirt off, but how careful I needed to be so I didn't break more than was necessary. Some of the stuff we worked on today was completely abraided and it was awful to try to clean. When you would pic up a piece, it would fall into several bits before the brush even touched it. Sometimes the "pottery" that someone had tagged as a small find, was actually just a big clod of dirt. It's surprisingly difficult to tell the difference sometimes, even when dry.
The dust flies everywhere when doing this job. It's so fine that you see whisps while brushing the pottery, and you inhale a lot. The room has to be cleaned every day after this task because a thin film of dust coveres everyting.
It was fun to clear away caked dirt from a piece and reveal the pretty designs around the rim, or identify rims of vessels, or sometimes the base, or base of the wall of a vessel. Sometimes there were no pretty designs and the darn pottery would crumble in bits, but sometimes we were rewarded with cool stuff.
There were three finds trays full of crumbs of varying sizes, that were all part of the same pot, or at least part of the same small find, (theoretically the same pot.) It looked horrible to try to work with, but towards the end of the day, we had to omve on to it because we had finished all of the other dry pieces. After a few minutes of working on some of the larger bits of that pottery, we found white paint on the surface of some of the pieces! It was very exciting. (They call it white slip, although they really don't know what it was made of yet. I was under the impression that "slip" refered specifically to pottery mixed with water to change the color, but I guess that's not how slip is defined at this site.) Anyway, even while feeling pretty crappy and not digging in the dirt, I got to help find someting exciting. We found several pieces with substantial white slip.
I'm feeling much better tonight, although  have what my mother calls my "migraine hang-over." It doesn't hurt so badly, but I'm disoriented and can't remember what I'm doing. That's why it has taken me so long to get ready for bed and type this, so I'm going to sleep. Sorry that the pictures still aren't working. I'm not sure if it is because the internet connection is so poor, or becuse blogspot doesn't cooperate well with my tablet.

Goodnight