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Program Tour, continued............the Excavations at Marillac, July 2006

	Village of Marillac, Charente, southwest France. The Roman Church dates from the 12th Century and our living quarters are in the stone house just to the right of the church.
Each year we celebrate those who will have a birthday during the program. This past year, only Bruno had a natal day in July and of course we had a cake, champagne and much merriment

	Liz and a local French resident of the village. Marillac-le-Franc is a very small rural village in the Charente Department. Residents have been very friendly and cordial, even when some of our activities at night might have been a tad loud. Of course, this resident, being noctural, was relatively uneffected.

Lyra and Jeff, having finished washing the excavated sediments and carefully looking for tools, bones and other evidence that might have been missed by the excavator, partake of an interesting Princeton ritual of long tradition: the mud toss. Its origins are lost in antiquity but tradition has it that it began while the school was still the College of New Jersey as a rite of purification that every student had to undergo just before receiving their diploma.
	Early in the course, while we are still in Bordeaux, we take a walking tour of the old city and afterwards, we retire to a local Moroccan restaurant for cous-cous.
One of the joys of spending time in Bordeaux is to enjoy things like the Sunday market in front of the church of St. Michel. Here, you can find just about anything in the way of books, antiques, old tools, paintings, CDs and much else besides. It is a favorite place for many of the students to visit.
	During our field trip to the prehistoric sties in the Department of the Dordogne, we visit the rock shelter site of Cro-Magnon. Here, Dylan holds replicas of the original finds from this site, which provided some of the earliest evidence of humans using stone tools and living at the same time as extinct large mammals.

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