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Laing's students dug six days a week, starting at 9:30 in the morning and continuing in shifts until 8 in the evening. They lived in a nearby campsite and prepared their own food. While they unearthed interesting artifacts, the archaeologists were unsuccessful in locating the palace, which Laing believes to be a wooden structure like King Arthur's of roughly the same period, found recently at South Cadbury (Camelot).
ITALY: South of Siena in the tiny village of Murlo, Professor Kyle M. Phillips Jr. of Bryn Mawr and his students have dug, cleaned, studied and catalogued during the past eight summers more than 3,000 pieces of Etruscan pottery, terra cotta, bronze and other materials brought up from the ruins of a huge (4,500 sq. yds.) temple-like building that the archaeologist calls "the sanctuary."
A site like Murlo, Phillips says, is both a professional excavation that can yield important finds and a school for producing new archaeologists. At Murlo he has had students from Bryn Mawr, Haverford, the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Princeton and Harvard—and even a Groton senior who used the summer to find out that he did not want to be an archaeologist.
Like most of the excavations in Italy, Murlo was strictly an eight-week summer affair. At the site, each student-archaeologist, known by the impressive title of "trench master," supervised a number of local workmen who were hired to dig for the season. "The worst thing is the heat," says Trench Mistress Jenifer Neils, a 22-year-old Princeton graduate student in classical archaeology. "But when you find something it doesn't matter how hot it is."