More re UCLA field school in Egypt

Field school student Susie Joyner takes another video, this time meandering around the dig site in the ancient city of Karanis to capture footage of her fellow students digging. We get a look at their brightly colored digging tools, some of which bear a surreal resemblance to the the sand toys you may remember using at the beach as a child or the dustpan in your kitchen. The video closes with a little good-natured teasing and goofing around. . . .

After weeks of digging among century-old ruins, the Fayum field school students visit some living Egyptians for a change. They’ve found bits of broken pottery in Karanis, and now, with this field trip to the village of El-Nazla, they get to see how the original bowls, vases and other pieces are made. At the beginning of the video, the students gaze at the dozens of unshattered vases, including some so large that any one of the students would easily fit inside.

Next, an Egyptian man demonstrates traditional pottery-making methods by making two large containers, starting from hunks of clay. He thumps the clay lumps into shape using simple tools and a rounded hole in the floor. Over the thump-thump-thump of his work, you can hear field school Director Willeke Wendrich pointing out the distinctive hole in the floor of this pottery room, noting that similar holes in Egyptian ruins can help archaeologists identify where pottery was made hundreds of years ago.

It's a long day for students excavating the ancient town of Karanis in Egypt's Fayum oasis.

They're up at 5 a.m., so early that UCLA's field archaeology program includes a first and second breakfast to keep them fueled until lunch. But you won't hear them complaining – much. Instead, they and their Egyptian cohorts in the field school are sending text and video blog postings back to UCLA, raving about seeing the pyramids and excavating the Greco-Roman town.

"Last year, I learned about Karanis at UCLA, but I never imagined this!" wrote Mallory Ditchey, a UCLA undergrad who joined the fall dig. "Karanis is HUGE, a wasteland of ruins scattered throughout the desert. When you look at it all, you can just imagine the thriving town it used to be. ... The excitement of discovering what's underneath makes the 5 a.m. wakeup call for eight hours of hard manual labor worth it. Maybe."

It's all part of the adventure of being in Egypt's first officially sanctioned field school for American undergraduates.

Egypt's agency in charge of protecting the country's cultural heritage, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), tends to be picky about who gets to dig, said UCLA archaeology Professor Ran Boytner, who helped arrange the university's new study-abroad field school program and its first Egypt program for students.