Others catalog artifacts by describing their composition, shape, decoration and dimensions. Still others will be busy drawing wood fragments or emptying jars to separate organic traces of the ship's original cargo from the sand and shells that overlay these clues to the past. But most of the crew ends up training with our conservator, Howard Wellman, or with master concretionologists Emad Khalil and Douglas Haldane, as they learn to remove the naturally occurring concretion that coats many of our objects. Everyone helps unload the supplies, hoping for letters from home or even the ice cream bars Adel sometimes stashes in the coolers as a special treat. The water truck, which brings our fresh water from a town at the end of a desert pipeline originating at the Nile, is supposed to come every two days unless the driver's cousin gets married or he has to go get a permit or license renewed, in which case we scrounge drinking water from a campground or gas station.
Evenings begin as the sun sets.
Everyone has showered the salt from their skin and changed into relatively clean clothes. Small groups congregate in and around the mess tent, some focused on an impromptu barbering or game, others simply sitting in silence as the sea and desert offer up their night colors. Once the generator is turned on, dinner is served and talk in Arabic, English, Swedish or German resumes. Later, cleared tables provide work surfaces for letter writing, journal keeping, and, always, archaeological drafting and documentation to keep up with the day's accomplishments. Howard Wellman spends his evenings in the conservation tent monitoring the progress of cleaning tasks and going through the day's finds with the archaeological director before keeping his own journals of artifact numbers and storage basins.