New team at camp.
Our camp now includes
five guards from the Republican National
Guard: Alhassane, Omar, Omaru, Brahima,
and the chef (chief) Sidi Mohammed.
A testament to the work of integration
after the Rebellion, two of our guards are
Touaregs and the other three are Djerma.
Camp guards
Oumar, Sidi Muhamad, Alhassan, Oumarou,
Ibrahima from Niger's elite Republican Guard
regiment.
As was the case
in 1993 and 1997, armed guards have been
assigned to the expedition by the Prefect
of Agadez, primarily to ward off would-be
robbers. While having guards is not a new
experience for our team, the enthusiasm
of this particular group of five men is
remarkable.
Each morning they come
out into the field with us and jump right
into the work - cutting burlap, chiseling
at rock with mallets and chisels, shoveling
out the excavation pits.
Yesterday the guards
asked to play with our small basketball
and we foresee a game in the near future.
Our prediction for the Expedition Olympics:
we'll cream them in basketball and they'll
cream us in soccer. Stay tuned for up to
date results.
Camp Life.
It is good to be back
in camp. These days are physically hard,
but also peaceful. We are up by 6:00 and
out in the field by 7:00. Most of the sites
are still close enough to camp that we come
back for lunch. From 12:30 - 2:00 we eat
and rest in the shade of the trucks. Then
we head back out and work until sunset.
Daytime is hot but the evenings are cool
and still. When the temperature drops from
120 to 60F, it makes 60 feel downright chilly.
Rudd catches
30 minutes of sleep during lunch in
the coolest place in camp - under the truck.
Chris looks
back at dinner preparations after he arrives
in camp
at the end of a long day.
While we wait for dinner,
some people play chess, write in journals
or look over specimens in the library tent.
We also try (usually unsuccessfully) to
tune in news of the States on our shortwave
radio
Excavation continues.
Last night the team
hovered around a tiny turtle, smaller than
my palm, which had been prepared clean of
matrix by the wind. It was amazing and delicate
- the top and bottom shells are almost perfectly
hollowed out and are held together by a
single column of rock.
Most of the sites, however
are proving more difficult to collect. People
return at night exhausted from pounding
on chisels, pick-axing and shoveling. In
order to get a plaster jacket around a fossil,
you need to move enough rock away from the
fossil so that you can get around and UNDERNEATH.
Large jackets require tunnels, wooden frames
and sometimes wire. When they are finished,
small jackets are brought back to camp and
added to the steadily growing pile next
to the library tent.
The fossil jackets
pile up from a very successful
start of a field season in Gadafawa
Larger jackets are being
left in the field - many of them are simply
too big to fit into the back of the LandRovers.
On the 8th of October a big desert-going
flat bed truck will make the drive to Gadafawa,
travel to each of the sites, pick up the
jackets and bring them back to Agadez. The
same truck will transport water - already
in a balloon - up North for use during Camp
2.
Still Prospecting.
We have not stopped
looking for sites: in fact, we have spent
the better part of two days looking for
a Nigersaurus site we discovered
in 1997. It preserves a good part of the
spine and most of the pelvis. We began
to excavate the site in '97, but ran out
of both time and plaster. In anticipation
of our return to the area, we buried the
site and concealed it with rocks. At the
time we decided not to build a cairn of
rocks because we didn't want to call attention
to it.
In search of
a Nigersaurus site Jack, Greg and Paul compare
a
photograph from the 1997 Expedition with
the terrain.
What a joke! Now we
can't find it. Despite GPS coordinates,
photos sent to us from Chicago, late night
phone calls to Michigan to talk with Jeff
Wilson, one of the '97 team members, and
repeated attempts in a truck and on foot,
the site continues to elude us. Yesterday
morning was particularly frustrating as
we tried to line up a hazy background of
dunes and trees with rock outcrop.
It is much easier to
prospect and find nothing, than to look
for something you know is there and not
find it.
Gabrielle
Lyon
Team Member, 2000 Expedition to Niger.
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