In which I discover A Reader, and also, socialized health care

to an American blogette who is far from her native shores, these are both peculiar things. I am hoping all is well, not only because I would like to be all well, but also because apparently all one needs is a cheap laminate card, DOB included, twenty-four hours notice and a Google Map of the weirder reaches of Oxford. Seriously! That’s it! You call, and someone pleasant answers, and they mumble some sort of name (presumably, though not assuredly) a GP, and you have an appointment!

Though if I get lost, there might be tigers, and all would be moot.

So that this is not entirely monochromatic, here, have something of educational merit:

Oh and this:

Out of the sands they rose; out of the ashes, out of the dunes, such columns, such capitals. In the foreground- sherds? clods of sand? bones? Imagine stumbling across that, as people must have, century after millennia after century. The tops of the capitals scoured so deeply the stone itself warped.

And, less than a century and a half later, the New York Public Library would have a “flickr” and “digital acumen” and preserve this, the old crinkles in the paper, the strangely tepid sky, on the “internet”. What a world, eh? What a world.

(by this point, I may have lost A Reader.)

(Oops.)

(The world is still amazing.)

Ave atque vale

Most visitors to Pompeii will have met the old kids on the block, those packs of dogs that sniffle for scraps and who scrape up and down the crumbling walls. In a surprising move, the forces that be have marshaled the piteous fate of the dogs (and of the ruins) into a service for good: (C)ave canem!

Yes. It is a Latin pun. I love it so.

So basically they spruce up the dog, you sign a waiver, presumably give them denarii of some kind, and trundle on home with Jove or Europa or whichever mythological beast takes your fancy. (Why this is lacking a Cerberus is beyond me). Definitely better than another pair of David boxers or rancid olive oil, but, seriously, some of us live out of boxes, and those faces are heartbreaking, and so perhaps there could be a ‘pane et circus’ option for those of us who are sappy grad students, and who lack emotional restraint when it comes to fur.

Alternatively they could have Adopt This Priceless Treasure of Antiquity, which could pretty much cover anything in Pompeii and the surrounding five hundred miles of countryside, in which you get a trading card of your Fresco With Graffiti or Collectible Brickwork, but, you know, the dogs are pretty awesome.

Scientific names

Okay, palaeontologists, what have you got?

The largest is the ‘BoarCroc’, which measured 20ft in length and used its snout and three sets of dagger-shaped fangs, like boar tusks, to slice its prey.

Equally as large were the remains of a creature with spiked teeth inside a long, flat head which alone measured three feet in length, dubbed PancakeCroc.

Also noted:

The new species are still dwarfed by the SuperCroc, which measured 40 ft in length and weighed 8 tons, making it more than twice the size of the largest modern crocodiles.

Article

Okay, awesome. Imagine how fun this trick would be if we could just name sites: the villa of SUPERCROC or House Shaped Like Pie. HousePie phase 1!

Inspector Jones?

Back in the day, life looked like this.

A STUPENDOUS view of the COLOSSEUM

(Courtesy Library of Congress)

It’s a little known fact, but archaeologists have actually proven that the world simply hadn’t gotten around to inventing color yet, and anyway, cheekbones and marble revetments looked better in the sepia light of the Golden Ages.

This is entirely truthful. Rich with bits of truth, like toffee-studded cookies.

Okay, it is entirely false. But it is true that archaeology and the tricks of the antiquities fields have had to grow up a bit in the last, oh, century and a half or so. And while some of us exhibit only enough technological literacy to babble online, some other people are doing things like “writing PhD theses on Second Life” and “figuring out where they are through not the sun’s rays but a gadget”. Shocking, I know.

“Excavating Second Life Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities.”  What a sweet, sweet gig. No visa.  No peculiar food poisoning, no artichoke-banana yogurt. No bloody dust colonies of sinus doom from Hades.

On the downside, none of this:

Seen in his natural habitat, the archaeologist of yore glows with shining clothes...

What’s that, you say? You can burn things on Second Life? For academic, instructional and educational purposes involving Neolithic tube tops?

Seriously awesome.

And if for some reason you require stone age level graphics (but with mead!), there’s a game of indeed the Stone Age (alias: Neolithic) running at http://www.greenlandgame.com/ where you can attempt to survive barbarians and that whole realistic bread => people => buckets of people => starvation deal. I may have just invaded barbarians armed with stale bread.

For those not fearing Big Brother, geotagging is what all the cool cats with jetlags need to do (the formal review is even more enthusiastic, but it doesn’t sound field tested).  For those with a Big Brother complex, don’t worry, it doesn’t appear to work that well.  Also, there is a distinct lack of wifi in most of the interesting corners of the world, namely, most of the mountains out West and the greater sum of Romania. On the other hand, this clearly warrents a personal appraisal…

There’s also a whole host of fun and games (mosaic tetris!) that presumably work to lure small children into the loving arms of stratigraphy, and Lego Indiana Jones on youtube, and…

…couldn’t resist. Oh, Indy. You slay me. So the times are changing- we can no longer swoop in, poke around, and take all the good stuff. Excellent thing. (The loss of the brilliant white seersucker suits and helmets is a sartorial shame, but so it goes).  Not that archaeologists (legit archaeologists, not just dudes with metal detectors) have really done that for a while, but it bears repeating. The evolution of the scientific equipment in the corresponding decades have been countless- DNA tests, NAA, TOTAL stations, GIS, mini bottles of shampoo etc.- but honestly, the ability to translate a dig from lantern slides and loci charts into Second Life, and turn that further into an open, public exploration of experimental archaeology- that’s a good thing. A great one.

The next trick might have to be the whole marquee attraction, though- youtube’s related videos give an interesting twist to keyword searches, but the chances of stumbling across the archaeological section of the Library of Congress archives is, I’m going to guess, relatively slim. As much as I joshed the drhawassathon, hey, he’s a charismatic, polarizing figure. People will read, and maybe even do that educational thing I hear is all the rage these days. But is there a better way to thread the research together than hapzard searches and chaotic tags?

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.

And what a big bad world it is, too

Breaking news: Archaeology a poor choice for fame and fortune!

No, seriously. Apparently the whole title and trust fund thing are de rigeur these days for those foolish enough to fall for ye olde thingys.

No? You’re not convinced? Suggestion: Sleep with the department chair. Or worse, read a physics book or five.

Apparently Archaeology isn’t the only battleground of civilization, the NY Times is hosting a rousing discussion about navel-gazing academia, the future of the ivory towers and whether or not the humanities are fit to be the hobbyhorse of those classy dudes figuring out that kissing is fun.

Simplistic? Of course. I’m still a proud archaeology major, student loans and all. And I still believe in the future of literature and art and words that have been savored by mouths in a hundred different languages, or even words saved from the sands. On the other hand, I hear that foraging is no longer the fun and mammoth hunt extravaganza it used to be.  And archaeology deserves better than dumpster diving funds. I know it’s crazy to actually postulate some future potentials, but archaeology needs more than bull whips and glittery gold. Or the Naked Archaeologist, because that’s just embarrassing for the species.
That’s right. We need firepower. We need zombies. We need motherfuckin’ Greeks on a trireme.

We need sleep, because our thesis is doing weird things to our occipital lobe.

three more sunrises

That’s right, only three more mornıngs of wakıng up the roosters and wanderıng down streets lıned wıth stray cats and the snores of the guy up the road who sleeps on a balcony and could wake the dead on gozlukule hıll. Four weeks almost done and over wıth but it’s not enough tıme!! Someone found a well. Someone found dead people. We had a modern pıpe slash! crash! found rampagıng through our pıts and ınstallatıon locı and walls and levels. How dare they! Well potentıally ıt was the french army ın 1921 but stıll. Tantalızıng shards from the Iron Age and obsıdıan flınts keep slıppıng ınto buckets but we’re defınıtely stıll stuck ın the medıeval envırons. There’s lusterware and a plaster floor to prove ıt…

Anyway. One day! The Goldman expedıtıons pulled back 40 meters, yes, that ıs rıght, 40 yards plus 120 ınches extra just for kıcks to get to the Neolıthıc. We’re stıll just dabblıng, really…

back to the sea agaın on the weekend where I rambled around a castle, maybe a couple blocks square, totally empty except for fallen towers and sunken basılıcae and pıles of brambles and even a moat on one sıde and all of ıt, all of ıt sun soaked and bleached lımestone pıled hıgh to the sky agaınst the blue of the sea. then down the coast whıch ıs just mıles and mıles of sea, well, duh, and these massıve slabs of rocks dotted wıth sea salt pools that look lıke geodes. I stuck to the rocks after fındıng the snake skın curled up around a bush so ıt was a hıke on forgotten walls and ruıns untıl the barbed wıre fence cut ın.

we have been told that gıven the holıday on frıday we are to have an Amerıcan Barbeque so Cat and I have made plans ınvolvıng condıments, mıxed drınks and Bruce Sprıngsteen. Probably no one wıll survıve especıally sınce someone poınted out the exıstence of SILLY STRING.

well ıt could be worse, ıt could be a turkısh natıonal holıday and there could be gunshots agaın.