Archaeologist job postings, take one

The NFI is looking for an experienced forensic archaeologist. The main duties are:
- The search for, and excavation of, clandestinely buried human remains or objects; the recovery of fragmented (burned) human remains, and the exhumation of human remains routinely buried in regular cemeteries.
- Participation in scientific research, in particular the development of (new) forensically-applicable field methods concerning the taphonomy associated with partially and/or completely skeletonized human remains.

This also requires fun things like “willingness to learn the Dutch language” and “Bayesian statistics” but really, forensic archaeologists, I salute you about a million and four times. Wanted: a braver soul than me.

New year, same as the old year

If by next May Day I am still looking at corn driers and pondering whether germinated spelt seeds are a crucial economic signifier for surplus production in the rural Romano-British world, I want you to exercise your Second Amendment rights judiciously.

Just saying.

Whack-A-Hoard

“Many people using metal detectors do not know the law. In England every piece of land belongs to someone and you need to get permission from the landowner.”

Stop stealing, folks. Yes, hoards (and hordes) are nifty. But oddly, laws don’t recognize the But It’s Awesome principle, which is why Louboutin makes shoes for a capitalist, greedy world, and why Greece is suing the pants off every country who got a postcard with a temple on it in the 19th century. (I kid, because I care.) But fields? Not a toy. The seeds in a pouch, the charcoal from a pit, the condition of the soil in which the gold is in- it is priceless.

…also, illegal. So basically bullying farmers. They have plagues and pesticides and sunshine to worry about. Nighthawkers? Just gratuitous.

See? Do it legally, and the archaeologists are mostly happy, you get to be stupidly wealthy and minorly famous, and everyone gets to see ridiculously nifty…things!

I AM….SPART- ZAHI HAWASS!

No, seriously.

“  Many people make the mistake of thinking that dreams cannot come true,
 but they can. You have to believe, and know that they are more than
just imagination. “

Thanks, Dr. Hawass! Tell me more, Dr. Hawass!

“  People often ask me, ‘well, it’s not really as exciting as Indiana Jones, now is it?’
I reply, ‘to an archaeologist, yes, it certainly is!’  “

Okay, I really can’t fault you there. Personally I too am a fan of not battling zombies, poorly designed aliens or Harrison Ford’s grin. And you’ve done great things for the promotion of Egyptian excavations, the protection of sites, and the training of homebased archaeologists. But I’m kind of not joining your fan club. Seriously?

…a glamour shot?

Drhawass.com. For the one man with enough chutzpah to announce that he did not fear the pharaohs, because “I am one of them, why should they hurt me?” I know, you’ve discovered everything in Egypt. You stumbled on more pharaohs. You unwrapped a few more, called a press conference for a pyramid, called another press conference just because, wrote a few articles on your press conferences…Maybe archaeology needs this kind of zeal for the camera. Or maybe, just maybe, this is proof that all archaeologists are bonkers. Just a little.

Facebook makes you immortal, right?

” Just imagine how much an archaeologist could unearth about our lives from excavating a typical suburban garden. All the changing fashions of the Ground Force era, from water features to decking, would show how that little plot of land became a hive of DIY creativity and social expectation. Timber remains would reveal that, across the country over the past half-century, back garden fences doubled in height from three to six feet. The dendrochronologists would discover that the neat shrubs and conifers at the garden’s borders satisfied a similar need for privacy. A quick dig in the front garden would lay bare a lawn replaced with block paving for a car – the simplest and easiest way to increase the price of a house, with the unintended side effect of making the whole area more prone to flooding. Just like archaeologists at ancient sites, the garden excavators could use the scrappiest evidence to extrapolate a wealth of social detail about our privatised, mobile, weekend-oriented lives. “

- The New Statesman

Trash pileup in Napoli, Italy

It’s true. The archaeologists of the future shall need the fires of inner vision to sort it all out- on one hand, we have these bizarre documentation strategies that involve already obsolete technology. Facebook may desire rights to your drunken escapades in perpetuum, but how long will that last? What’s the half-life of a blog archive? In three hundred years, what will photography resemble? On the other, we have a world documented in minutiae of the greatest extent-

Aww. A trash bag of adorable. Thanks, Japan! See? That kind of transmission of really basic goods didn’t necessarily happen in ye olden days. And for the love of all things styrofoam, dear lord, we’re leaving catastrophes of midden heaps. Crazy talk: can we be archaeologists of the future? Should we even try to consider what historians and bespectacled librarians [caution archaic imagery caution] would want to have around?

Ps: If anyone has a back garden or a room that they would be interested in professionally excavating, email me. Seriously.
Pps: No, my old bedroom doesn’t count, um, due to, er, prejudice of the archaeologist. Yup. Sorry, parents.

Edifying news, con’t.

In a surprise move, a newspaper article about a nifty local dig was published recently that manages to hit all the key points of archaeology: getting dirty, trash, hard currency, and meticulous curation of bits of organic flotsam.

The archaeologist have dug a trench through the ring from one side of the village to the other in order to examine the remains of the culture. Along with nine others, archaeologist Branden Scott, 26, of Cresco knelt on the ground, scraping away 10 centimeter layers of dirt at a time in a well-documented grid pattern on the ground. Each layer or significant area is marked with flags.

“I have never seen such density of remains. The amount of trash in the pits at this site is unique compared to other sites I’ve seen,” Scott said. He added that usually the land has been tilled through farming practices over time so that the under layers are disturbed, but that Oak Village has been preserved.

Items collected from the site will be preserved. The site will be buried and the levee will be rebuilt. The Corps is expecting to begin work on the levee in the spring.

Field work is ahead of schedule and expected to be complete by the end of this month.

“The Corps have really moved quickly to get this contracted and funded,” Benn said.

If the weather stays warm and ice continues to melt north of the site, Benn said the trench is sure to flood and work will be put off for a few weeks.

The work contract for the Oak Village project was $538,000 and the total cost for the Two Rivers PL84-99 repairs are estimated at $12 million. A temporary levee constructed of rock is protecting Oakville and construction of the new levee should begin this spring.

At A Glance

Archaeologists from Bear Creek Archaeology Inc. typically spend about seven hours a day at the Oak Village site. Bear Creek will devote nearly 9,000 man-hours to this project, not including the time of consultants such as a geomorphologist, a paleobotantist, and a paleozoologist.

archaeologist anticipate recovery of more than 150,000 artifacts that will need to be cleaned, cataloged, and analyzed in detail as well as curated, said Dave Stanley, director of Bear Creek Archeology Inc.

Hundreds of soil samples will be water screened and run through a flotation device to recover botanical remains. Researches will spend nearly 4,300 hours in the field on this recovery project.

I’m thrilled. No, seriously. There’s a budget! There’s transparency! This is what people should know- it’s a taxpayer funded dig, it seems, run by the Army Corps of Engineers, it involves highly skilled work and lots of primitive spa conditions (well, dirt and sweat is a kind of mud bath, if Pollyanna is involved). What kind of work? Well, a stratigraphic excavation based on layers and significant areas, not mad ravaging of my precciioousss. There’s an estimated time frame that isn’t on a geologic scale, although certainly substantial enough to make an impression, and a nice detail of the kinds of processing the site itself gets treated to. (See? Another mud bath! Archaeology, what a cushy life.)

Probably they still have people asking about the damn dinosaurs.

Rawr.

Thıs ıs not your trench, Mr. Jones

4:30 a.m. breakfast of tomatoes wıth salt, olıves ın brıne, bread wıth hazelnut sugar spread. massive, concentrated amounts of turkish tea. (editor’s note: I actually missed a step! real turkish tea has the leaves bathing in the upper kettle’s steam until that water boils, THEN boiling water gets added to the leaves and more to the pot and the whole thing simmers for another ten minutes.)

5:00 a.m. welcome to Gozlukule mound! please avoid the scrub brush, the guard dogs, bask in the only shadow you’ll get for the next twelve hours or so and oh yes. did I mention it is AWESOME?

7:30 a.m. Begin to realize that the sun is going nowhere, and neither are you.

9:00 a.m. tea party! Yes, that’s right, with washed hands, a sheet, proper silverware and get this: real glass turkish tea cups. In their own box. It is entirely possible Hetty Goldman brought back the tea love to Bryn Mawr…

12:00 p.m. notice that parts of arms are purple in certain lights. also, that a white baseball cap was a poor, poor idea.

1:30 p.m. dear gads there is rest there is shade there is lunch there is NO MORE HILL THERE IS NO MORE SUN INSIDE OF THE BUILDINGS.

3:00 p.m. village people view pre-shower archaeologist as curiosity and also, repulsion. archaeologist agrees. situation remedied. (with hot water. the luxury! the excess!)

4:20 p.m. fall asleep on pile of paper boxes in supply cabinet. am sent home to bed. oops.

Chicks dig it. Archaeology, baby. Mr. Jones, you may check the damn whip at the door.

Realistically, this is it. You have a site. It’s subdivided into minute parcels of absolutely perfectly measured squares- on the computer at least. In this case, the crack team of graduate geologist dudes who hang around with a TOTAL station that, I kid you not, works with LASER BEAMS. It has a little radiation warning and everything. So you have a site. There’s some stuff in it. What to do? Don’t pick it up. Don’t step on it. Fetch a broom. Review most of the more boring moments in your life while sweeping the dirt clean off the dirt. When everything’s been primped to perfection, it’s the photo shoot du jour….but only if the light’s good, i.e. between 5 and 7 a.m. Whew! Time for some tea. At this point the workmen began realizing that yes, we do in fact play in the dirt in millimeter increments. They are puzzled and also concerned not about death by sunburn but death by dust. Once you’ve got it good and primptastic, it’s time to have some real fun: bring on the pickaxes! Well, okay, these are all of six inches long, but still. Nothing up here in the top soil really counts, but everything is labeled and washed and noted in the bucket and the bone bag (paper, just like CSI so that ze dead things can breathe) gets a tag too just in case and then in the end everything is typed up and added to a highly technical program that every day spits out a daily list of loci and installations and the chemical composition and position with attached photographs of each and every important rock….or funny colored soil, or things sticking outta the wall.

In the past of course they chucked out what they didn’t want and went straight for the gold and treasures. But when I hold flakes of patina, the peacock color of really awesome museum finds, from Islamic glass shards that have fallen from my profile- it is worth it, the patience.

Plus, we may have bones with the disgusting habit of shedding on me from the profile, at least we get to skip the living dead!