I t's hard to believe that things are already winding down here at the excavations. I went out to the site this morning (we left at 6:30 as usual) and everyone was tidying up their excavation units in preparation for a big site tour tomorrow. The American Ambassador is coming to visit Jenné-jeno and all the important men in the town of Jenné will be there too. So we cleaned up the house foundations and hearths that have been uncovered and got everything drawn and photographed. I started a video that I am calling "A Day in the Life of an Archaeologist", so I stayed at one unit to get all the cleaning and drawing action on film. Many people don't realize it, but this is a large part of what archaeologists do. It's not very exciting, but getting the data recorded is as important as making big discoveries.

One of the things I've done in Jenné is to go visit a potter as she worked, to see how she made the pottery that people use here. Almost everyone uses a ceramic ji daga (water pot), small bowls for hand-washing, pot lids for cooking pots (even though many people have metal round-bottomed cooking pots because they don't break). So the potters stay busy.

We walked to the potter's house in the morning and an old woman greeted us at the door of a one-story mud house. She was the grandmother of the potter we would visit and she, too, was a potter. Potting runs in the family - only certain groups make pottery, and the craft is passed from mother to daughter. Potters marry blacksmiths, and blacksmith fathers teach their sons and male relatives. The blacksmith's apprentice I interviewed a while back turns out to be a cousin of the potter I am going to see. As we left for the workshop, we saw many broken pots piled against the wall across from the front door of the house. The old women explained that these pots had been collected to be ground up in a mortar, then sieved, and the finest pieces added to clay as temper. This makes the clay easier to handle, and helps to keep it from breaking when the pot is fired.

At the workshop (really, it was the front room of her house) the potter was seated on the floor with a large, shallow bowl between her legs. It was dark in the room, with only a small window and the door letting in light. Children crowded in the door to get a look at us. On this bowl, she placed a partially completed pot, to which she added a rope of clay to make a base on the pot to help it stand upright. She worked, smoothing the clay with one hand as she turned the big shallow bowl with the other. Oil placed on the ground under the big bowl helped it turn smoothly. If we visited a professional potter in the U.S., he or she would probably be using a potter's wheel, which goes around much faster. But the Jenné potter got a similar effect with a simpler technology. During the hour that we watched, she put bases on a half dozen pots that she had partially finished earlier in the day. She spit expertly into a corner every minute or so, observing Ramadan (the Islamic month of fasting during the day) by not even swallowing her own saliva! After putting the bases on, she showed us how she would apply an iron oxide pigment (hematite) that she had collected in the bush and ground to a fine powder. By mixing the pigment with water, she had a yellow paint that she could apply like a paint with a fur brush. I estimate that it must take her about two hours to make each of the small bowls she was producing in her personal assembly line. She sells them for 100 francs each (about 20 cents). In the U.S., she could probably get about 20 dollars for the same hand-crafted pot!

The next day, while traveling out to the site, we saw an area near the river where potters had fired their pottery the night before. There were two blackened piles of burned straw and animal dung. As the potters pulled away the burned material, we saw the glistening red of the painted pottery. The heat had turned the yellow paint a deep red. There are deep holes dug into the flood plain where potters and masons get clay for pottery and bricks.

Another thing we've done is take a ride in one of the sewn plank canoes (pirogues) they use here for transport on the many waterways around Jenné. After a bit of bargaining we were able to fix the price of 1,500 francs ($3) for three people for over an hour. We got to see much of the riverside of Jenné. On the riverbanks of the city trash is dumped because their are no trash men to pick it up. In Jenné you deal with your own trash. Once you get past the city, though, the countryside is very beautiful. All green near the river, with trees on the horizon and herds of sheep and cattle grazing in the distance. I'd actually like to be able to spend more time in Jenné. I'm even getting used to rice and sauce every day for lunch!