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July 24, 2007

After leaving the dig in Razlog, I followed Svetana to Blagoevgrad, where she works at the Blagoevgrad History Museum as the resident Medievalist. I learned about the complex process by which an artifact transitions from the dig to the museum floor. During this time, I helped Svetana by organizing the pieces, filling out forms, and slowly creating a catalogue of the items that will eventually become part of Svetana's massive archive.

Svetana's means of record-keeping are painstaking and paper-based. At the site, she takes notes everyday on the progress of the dig and the items uncovered. These notes are always accompanied by detailed drawings of the artifacts. Once back in Blagoevrad, she transcribes everything to a second book, in which items are assigned the numbers that will follow them for decades. About a month is required to make item "passports," with a picture and detailed information about where and when it was found, how deep in the ground it was, the materials used, the condition, and any pertinent historical information. At this stage, Svetana will send some pieces off to be restored, cleaned, or reassembled. Once each item has a physical passport, Svetana sets to work on a bound overview of the site. This will cover the history of the location, the daily progress of the excavation, an inventory of the items found, blueprints, drawings, and a photographic history of the dig. Only when all of this has been completed will Svetana present her findings to archaeological societies and prepare a display for the museum.

I am continuously impressed by Svetana's dedication to her field. She lives alone in a humid one-room apartment. There is graffiti on the walls of her museum. She can't escape Blagoevgrad's stifling heat--she has no air conditioning or working refrigerator. Yet she hums away with quiet excitement as we sit in her office and slowly make a coherent story out of broken tools and shards of pottery.

I am now back in Sofia while I wait for Svetana to prep a second excavation in her home town of Melnik. I've spent a great deal of time at the ethnographic museum here; unfortunately, work has come to something of a stand-still. The hot weather has driven many of the locals to the Black Sea, making what was once "loosely structured" almost totally random and disordered. With more time on my hands than I would like (the neurotic student in me is starting to get antsy), I've begun doing some research on grants and other sources of funding for Svetana's projects. As she speaks no English (we communicate in French, of all things), I hope to put her in touch with resources she might not otherwise find. In August I return to digging!