Dig Conditions
One of Chiera’s first acts in the 1927–28 expedition season was to rent and repair a large mudbrick house, in which staff would live, in the village of Tarkhalan, 3 kilometers from the ancient mound. The local owner of the house agreed to let the expedition use the house rent-free for two years and then pay $3 per month for the next two years. The house was originally designed with four bedrooms, a large living room, lab, bathroom with a tub (a luxury) but no running water, kitchen, servants’ room, and guardroom for three armed night watchmen. In the following years, later directors altered the design of the house with repairs and improvements.
 Chiera had walkways and an oven constructed near the dig-house using original bricks from the excavated 3,000-year-old houses. The oven was used to bake the inscribed clay tablets recovered at the site. These included administrative documents, written in the Babylonian language, such as ration lists, court decisions, contracts, and letters (see History Through Tablets). In the ancient world, such tablets were usually dried in the sun, leaving them vulnerable to degradation, and baking them in Chiera’s oven hardened and stabilized them for subsequent handling and study. The expedition could fire between 150 and 200 tablets at one time in the oven.
The season typically began in October and ran through March. The expedition planned to excavate six days a week, with Friday, the Muslim day of rest, free, but bad weather occasionally slowed or halted work completely so that the six-day workweeks were sometimes shortened.  In 1928, a torrential rainstorm flooded the excavation areas, as well as the village of Tarkhalan, and shut down work for more than a week. In his letters, Starr frequently commented on the bitter winters such that a fire was required every night and that mornings were hard to bear. The cold even robbed him of the joy of discovery. He noted, “[The tablets] are rather dull and uninteresting after the sixth hundredth and your hands and feet are almost frozen. You begin to forget what a treasure you have.”
The excavation teams typically arrived in the field by 7 a.m. and worked until 4:30 p.m., with only a half-hour for lunch and two 15-minute breaks. After dinner, the staff had a few hours of leisure; however, miscellaneous duties, including writing letters to family and sponsors at home, often kept the directors up well past midnight.
Although the joy and excitement of discovery often carries archaeologists from the opening days through publication, life on an archaeological expedition can be tedious and frustrating, and time away from home and loved ones can be wearing. By December 4, 1928, after a particularly trying day, frustration was apparent in Starr’s letter home, “After all, what is the sense of all this work? ... Throughout the whole world there are not more than 300 men who give a hoot for what we are doing here.” To alleviate some of the stress, staff often used their free time to travel the country, visiting local villages and sightseeing.
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