Things were back to normal again, the weather was sunny with temperatures between 25 and 30. The grass has slowly changed colour from light green to a light brown, most of the beautiful flowers have died, the birds have become more quiet and their song has been replaced by the quirking of cicadas. The thistles are also dying slowly, when we arrived at Monte Polizzo the mountain was almost completely covered with them and the first thing that we actually did was to cut a path from were we park our cars to our excavation area.
Ten more workmen arrived on Monday, together with our professor. We have now divided them up in three teams, our workmen from the first week are still occupied down the slope where we now have a new structure that we proudly have named House 3. The second group is digging a 20 meter long trench westwards from House 2, thus trying to reach the next house quarter. The third group has started to uncover walls on the western stretch of the fire-gate. Compared to the situation in house 3 were we now have walls that almost has reached 2 meters in height, the houses along the fire-gate only consist of three or four layers of stone, averaging around 30 cm in height. This is probably due to the constant scraping of the ground surface by bulldozers. Monte Polizzo was forested during the fifties and most of the mountain is now covered with trees.
The unusually rich find layers on our excavation yield continuous surprises. Last week we uncovered several artefacts that will be of great importance when we make our interpretation of the site. We found three fibulae and one glass bead lying only a few centimetres from each other. They were probably collected in a wooden box that was destroyed when the house burned down, as we have destruction layers in every room that we have excavated this far.
No excavation is complete if it is not surrounded with question marks and mysteries. Our goal, of course, is to solve them and that is perhaps the biggest challenge that we have to face. When we excavated a small remaining section on the western side of House 2, expecting to find a wall that hopefully could delimit it to the east we suddenly found a small enclosure with a stone paved floor. Part of the enclosure has been created in a second phase, effectively blocking the small stretch of stones. And even though we only have four more days of excavation, everyone is excited to find out what we are facing. The solution is of course, more digging.

Midsummer games, imported from Sweden and enjoyed by everyone!

Last Saturday we threw our yearly Midsummer’s party. We invited all of our Italian friends, we ate , drank, sang traditional songs and danced around the midsummer pole. The tradition is typically Swedish but the setting is Sicilian and together we have been able to create something that is actually a mix of the best party ingredients from both cultures.