Our site looks so much different than it did two days ago! After digging for a couple of hours yesterday, we realized that the pavement stones had disappeared completely. We slowed down a lot so that we could periodically dig down to see if there was pavement further underneath the dirt. All we found was bedrock, though, so we kept going. Every now and then a Roman wall would appear on either side of the street, so we knew that there must have been pavement there at one time. My supervisor said that the pavement in that area must have been made of much thinner stones, since the bedrock is so close to the surface, although he did not know who destroyed the road there. We actually found pieces of the pavement in that area today, and they were only about an inch thick, which is extremely thin when compared with the other stones of the street that are at least a foot thick.

The tractor did most of the work today. We smoothed out the dirt where the street should have been with shovels and brooms. We also brushed off any Roman wall segment we found. It was so neat as we were approaching the gate today, because as soon as the tractor pushed away the huge wall of dirt, we could see the whole valley, which is beautiful, as well as the gate entrance! The street is on a slope in this area, so the closer to the gate we got, the less dirt had to be cleared. The gate is already visible above the ground, so we did not need to dig to find it. It was so exciting to finally reach our goal though! We were all so excited when we could walk to the gate on the uncovered road for the very first time. I had the job of telling everyone to "please continue down the street" as they walked down the path to the bus, instead of taking the path we have taken thus far, which leads around an unfinished Decumanus. :)

We had a couple of interesting finds close to the gate. Yesterday we found a large piece of a roof tile, which was neat. Today we found another Ionic column capital. It still has the plaster on it that was used to decorate it. My supervisor told me that columns were plastered if the people could not afford to make them out of marble. Sometimes the plaster would be made to resemble marble, and sometimes the plaster would be colored. There is no color remaining on the plastered capital we found. The plaster is very fragile, as it chips off easily, so we did not clean the capital ourselves. It is much bigger than the other two we found three weeks ago. It was a great discovery!

I am not sure where I will work for the last two days, since the enitre Decumanus Maximus is uncovered, but we will see! It felt so good to reach the gate today!