A large assortment of gear is necessary for a modern scientific dig, even a modest one: for surveying and levelling, clinometer (which measures slopes), plane-table (which measures angles), alidade (which shows degree of arc), prismatic compass with front and back sights (for taking accurate bearings; the prism brings the object being sighted, the hair-line of the front sight, and the reading on the compass card all in a vertical line together), leveling staves marked in centimeters (for measuring elevations); templates for recording the curves of moldings; brooms, brushes, and mason’s tools for cleaning the architectural finds; zinc plates and sodium hydroxide pencils for electrolysis of coins; measuring tapes of all sizes, mechanical drawing instruments, trowels, marking-pegs, cord, squared paper, large sheets of filter paper for taking “squeezes” of inscriptions, catalogue cards, India ink, shellac, cardboard boxes, small cloth bags, labels, journal books, field notebooks, and a small library of technical manuals. The gear was divided between the villa where the staff lived and an abandoned Italian anti-aircraft observation post on the site itself, whose concrete gunmounts made excellent drying floors for freshly washed potsherds. Ambitious excavations use a light railway for carting earth to the dump, but at Cosa, which ran on a shoestring budget ($5000 for eight weeks), the vehicle was the wheelbarrow, the track a set of boards bound at the ends with iron to keep them from splitting. Twenty of the local unemployed formed the corps of workmen. The foreman, in better times a master carpenter, used a pick with all the delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel. The first step in excavating a site is to lay down a grid--fifty-meter squares are convenient--marked with wooden stakes set in cement and levelled. During the ten months of the year when there was no digging and Cosa was abandoned to the shepherds, they operated on the conviction that the stakes marked the spot where the treasure lay buried. They would overturn them and dig like badgers, and each new season would have to begin with a partial re-survey.