UCLA recently opened Egypt’s first official archaeology field school for U.S. undergraduate students.
The field program is five weeks long and students receive 12 units for their work, as well as field experience in the world’s most popular place to do archaeology, UCLA archaeology Professor Ran Boytner said.
While in the program, which lasts from October through November, students live 50 miles southwest of Cairo in the Fayum Oasis in Egypt, where they examine a Greco-Roman agricultural settlement once known as Karanis, according to the UCLA Today Web site.
The students at the school now are in their fourth week of field work and have completed their digging and writing reports and have begun preparing for exams.
Before the students leave, they will be taken to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, an exhibit of more than 120,000 artifacts.
Some of the students, such as fourth-year ancient Near Eastern civilizations student Mallory Ditchey, have chosen to stay longer to help with a team that plans on staying in Egypt for three months to continue excavating sites, she said in a statement via e-mail.
The students in the archaeology school work day and night excavating and studying in Karanis.
Ditchey said students’ days begin at 5 a.m., when they must catch a bus to their site.
“If you catch it just as it leaves, our bus driver makes you chase after the bus, but mostly just because he thinks it’s funny,” she said.
The day continues when they reach the sites shortly before 6.
Each student is paired up with an Egyptian student and assigned a specific trench to excavate in the area.
While communication can be difficult between the English- and Arabic-speaking students, they share a common passion for archaeology, Ditchey said.
Students continue to dig until 2 p.m. when they head to lunch. After lunch, the students attend several lectures that last anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours and include topics on how to do research in Egypt and how to analyze what they find.
At 6 p.m., students have a meeting in which they discuss their findings that day.
They are excused for dinner at 7 and are free the rest of the day, Ditchey said.
The students have found several interesting artifacts while excavating, including carved wooden tools, basketry and painted pottery.
Students also found the skeleton of a puppy with its skin, nose and claws still intact because the climate in Egypt and the sand often naturally mummifies dead things, Ditchey said.
But the most interesting thing the group has found was a trap door to a basement, she said.
She added they did not have the time to excavate it properly, but that next year’s group would be revisiting the basement.
Boytner said he helped arrange the university’s new study abroad field school program and its first Egypt program for students.
But this opportunity would not have been possible without UCLA Professor Willeke Wendrich, he said.
Wendrich is a leading Egyptologist and has close ties with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the group allowing the students to excavate, Boytner said.
Wendrich made a deal that the council could not refuse: for every UCLA student allowed to excavate, she said she would help train one of the council’s inspectors-in-training.
The program is going to be available in fall of next year, and the application will be available next week on the UCLA Archaeology Field Programs Web site.
“There are no prerequisites; any student who wants to do it is welcome,” Boytner said.
The program next year will run from Oct. 11 to Nov. 15.
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