Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [77]
A few meters away, the idea that the site was once a bustling marketplace—deserving of the designation "Omanum Emporium"—was given further credence as Airwork volunteers Richie Arnold, Nick Deufel, Neal Barnes (Guru), and Pete Eades (Black Adder) enthusiastically attacked a slope overlooking the sinkhole. Waste rock flew through the air, and barrow after barrow of sand was hauled away to the sifting screens. Within a few hours they were rewarded with the outlines of shops, more and more of them, backing onto the site's encircling wall.
When Ran Fiennes, normally busy with logistics and government liaison, had a go at actually digging, he excavated with his hands rather than a trowel. "Now, we don't dig like that," Juri advised. But there was no stopping Ran as he hit a section of the wall and proclaimed, "I'm an archaeologist, an overnight archaeologist!"
"Stop digging like a fox," Juri pleaded, to absolutely no avail.
It was an enormously rewarding week. Juri identified a total of five towers and suspected that two or three more were hidden in the site's rubble and sand. Our fortress's encircling wall finally led us back to where we had started: the old fort, which we now called the Citadel. It was a sizable, complex structure, and dangerous too, for it was severely undercut by Shisur's sinkhole. A week before, without warning, several tons of rock had sheared off the sinkhole's south edge. If anybody had been underneath, they would have been killed. It was now quite possible that, triggered by the vibrations of people at work (or malicious djinns), the entire Citadel could come crashing down. To excavate this structure, we recruited volunteers who had had mountaineering or spelunking experience. They donned safety harnesses and ran ropes to bumpers of Discoverys parked out of harm's way. If the citadel collapsed, they might suffer a nasty jolt but would be left dangling in the air rather than buried under the rubble.
Reconstructed lamp
A few days' excavations revealed halves of rooms, meaning that the Citadel had not been built at the edge of the sinkhole, but had been larger and had collapsed into it. Excavating one of the rooms, Pete Eades discovered the Citadel's first artifact (shown above). Gingerly, Juri made his way over and turned it this way and that. At first he thought it was part of an incense burner, then realized he was holding the handle of a lamp.
A lamp that had shone as this remote settlement thrived. A lamp that fell to the floor and flickered out when it was suddenly, violently destroyed.
Week four at Shisur ... The weather took a turn for the worse. A raw, cold wind raked the site, blowing sand in our eyes and down the backs of our necks. It was a week for spending time in Juris workroom and Amy Hirschfeld's lab. Our initial excavations had circled the site, and it was time to clean, sort, and inventory what had been found.
Amy's lab was now piled with thousands of artifacts: bag after bag of broken pottery, beads, bracelets, glassware, and fragments of three incense burners. Each artifact was given an ID number and logged on an IBM 386 computer. Dbase 4 software three-dimensionally pinpointed the exact level and location where every bit and piece had been found. Some of the artifacts were puzzling (and some still are). In what once was an ancient shop or storeroom, volunteer Ian Brown unearthed a sandstone object, which was unusual because sandstone is not found anywhere near Shisur. Juri first guessed that the rock was a cultic object, perhaps a small betyl.
Sandstone artifact
Then, across the ruin, in rubble in the base of Tower #6, five more similar-sized pieces of sandstone were discovered. Juri lined the pieces up. As he often did, he rubbed his nose and fiddled with whatever was handy, a pencil or a dental pick or in this case an artifact. He ventured an awful pun or two (singing "These stones in the foundation, what do they mean to me?").
"They seem to go together," he pondered, "as