Nature News has run a nice interview with Russell Ciochon about the new excavations at Ngandong, Java.
We've been excavating for 24 days without a break. The days blur together and we often lose track of time. There is a routine to systematic palaeoanthropological excavation: opening an excavation pit, digging down to the bone bed, carefully mapping the strata as we proceed, exposing the fossils, assigning the fossil a number, charting its xyz coordinates, removing the fossil, and then sampling the strata for geological analysis and dating.