The Dig (On Pudding and Bedrock)

I’m really proud to be a part of the team working in my field. Everyone works really hard, even in the soaring temperatures and humidity levels. And our skills are complementary.

Southern Young Man does most of the heavy manual labour: stripping the ground of plants, hoeing up the soil, removing the heavy rocks. Sunshine Girl will cheerfully carry out any task without a moment’s hesitation: moving buckets of soil, sifting for pottery, climbing into and out of the small spaces into which only she can fit. Southern Belle (who is also the director’s wife) has been digging for almost twenty seasons and trained me to be square supervisor before her responsibilities required her to stay in from the field. And yours truly keeps everyone and everything organized, so that all of our work is properly recorded.

But even better than our complementary skills are our complementary personalities. And I think that this is evident in our level of productivity.

A normal square for digging is five metres by five metres (the depth varies as digging continues until bedrock is uncovered). The teams in the other fields have dug three or four squares. But today, the team in my square opened our seventh and eighth squares.

In any other context, one might say that the proof is in the pudding.

But since I’m in the field, I’d have to say that the proof is in the bedrock.