ArchaeoBlog

Well, Unemployed Day 2: Partly spent at the Calvary Cemetery. Yesterday (Day 1) I biked down to the university and worked out, hauled a bunch of junk to the dump, put some of it on Craig’s List gone in a day!), and cleaned up the back patio area. Today I worked out again (daily routine, donchaknow), and then spent the rest of the morning — I still get up at 5 like usual — at the cemetery trying out my database app. I finally settled on HandBase; I preferred Pendragon forms but it was way too expensive. I think this will work. It’s not as slick as Pendragon, but it ends up working about the same.

As usual, once you get to the field you figure out where all the bugs are, what was left out, and what else needs to be done. I had a couple of fields wrong, one left off the form, and a couple of things that will make things easier. I do not, thankfully, have to worry about spatial data; they have a decent database with the Section/Lot/Grave# and I should be able to match up most of them to that. All I will need to worry about is going over it systematically so I don’t miss any.

I talked with the grounds keeper and learned a lot from him. A few of the test monuments I’d recorded as flat-lying lawn types were actually upright ones that had been set in the ground sometime in the past. That’s vitally important to know, of course. They are tending to be more covered up than I had thought, necessitating some more clearing than I had anticipated. I think I need something like a plastic putty knife or trowel to clear them (no metal, obviously).

So I’m keeping busy. I think by next Monday I ought to be able to start really recording for keeps.

Buried Secrets: Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland by Sally M. Walker

We believe we know our own history: the story of the Jamestown settlers anchors our study of American history, and third graders can recite the stories of John Smith and William Bradford, Ben Franklin and George Washington, Betsy Ross and Molly Pitcher. But most of the stories of our earliest countrymen remain untold, the personal histories of many which have long gone unrecorded and therefore untold.

Also a link to its own web site.

Raiders of the Lost Outhouse

There is treasure under our feet, and the Byron Museum of History is excavating it. If you have ever been to the museum you have probably seen their large outhouse exhibit which consists of artifacts recovered from other peoples long forgotten privies. Now the museum has found one in their own backyard.

“To have our own privy dig on our own property is just amazing for us. We have the Lucius Reed House, one of the oldest houses in Byron, it was on the Underground Railroad, but we don’t have any of their stuff. And so we indeed have some of their stuff now.” says Jessica McCanse, Executive Director of the Museum.

A prof of mine once told the story of finding a patch of ground that had much richer greenery in it than the surrounding area. Thinking they had a phosphor-rich habitation, they started digging only to discover what it really was.

Good places to dig though, as long as enough time has passed.

Current laws are inadequate to protect antiquities

Artifacts give us a priceless window into the past, but the laws protecting our past are no more than a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging patient. Somehow, our personal property rights have come to include prehistoric structures that none of us built, and artifacts that can be willfully destroyed if we happen to hold title to the land. We are about the only civilized nation in the world that allows this unrestricted, unrepentant erasure of history.

. . .

Some may not feel archeological preservation laws are important, but like all laws it is not our personal liberty to pick and choose which we obey or ignore. To me, the real question is, are the laws just or adequate? Because if archeological protection laws were designed to fail, then they have succeeded big time.

Well, there’s that whole 5th amendment thing. It’s not a complete free for all; skeletal remains are exempt and I believe some state laws may extend that to grave goods in obvious association with burials. But yeah, that is a feature of this country.

Archaeologists uncover secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza

The Egyptians who built the giant pyramids on the Giza Plateau 4,500 years ago ate dense bread, choice cuts of meat and preserved fish.

They slept in military-style barracks and belonged to work gangs with names such as the “Drunkards of Menkaure.”

Archaeologist Mark Lehner knows these details because he spent the past two decades digging them up from their lost city.

Kind of an interview of Lehner. His stuff doesn’t get as much press and the usual tombs, temples, and texts — although he gets a LOT, comparatively speaking — but it really is an excellent project. It is already providing a wealth of data for comparing with other sites. Now, we just need some more out in the farfreluches not directly connected with a temple or other state project. . . .

De Luna shipwreck rising from the deep

A stone cannon ball, a bright green ceramic dish piece, a chicken bone.

These are just a few of the items that have been recovered from a 450-year-old shipwreck sitting under 12 feet of water in Pensacola Bay.

The wreck, designated Emanuel Point II, is part of the fleet commanded by Pensacola’s founder, Don Tristan de Luna, University of West Florida archaeologists said.

Pretty neat although they don’t go into much detail.

This announcement shouldn’t really have a lot of effect on blogging, though in the future it might, and besides, it’s a rather significant event in the life history of your humble correspondent. So here it is: As of today, I am unemployed.

This isn’t entirely unexpected. That is, I wasn’t laid off or anything. I have been in a temporary contractor position since last April and it hath run out as of July 1 and I’ve been unable to line up anything suitable to start right up afterwards. And, in fact, for a while I suspected that I might go through a period like this, although since the economy tanked so badly I have become a bit less optimistic about the extent of it. But that is to be expected (?) when one does a career course correction. Allow me to explain.

For the last, oh, 19 years or so I’ve been doing public health research. I started out at Employer A (a local government institution) in 1990. I was just past comps (well, by a couple of years) and had finished my masters project and starting on the dissertation road. I did about 2-3 months of contract archaeology all over the west coast, and then decided I wasn’t going to be able to do any research doing that. Then someone at the univ. computer center offered me a half-time position doing stats consulting. I did that and added another half-time position elsewhere and did that through the summer. Then a friend started a job at Employer A and two weeks later asked if I’d like to do it because she got a better offer. Well. It was three times what I was making then, so I said OH YEAH! Said I knew how to program in SAS which was more or less an exaggeration, though I picked it up quickly (I’m a nerd). I did that as just a regular programming job until 1999 when I moved to a different group that was doing EMS/cardiac research, all the while working on my dissertation. I was still technically a “temporary” even though I’d been there for ten years already, and it suited me; I could work a bit less than full time and take off every now and then for fieldwork in Egypt. Worked out well.

So I got my degree in 2001 and kept on working with the EMS group. I liked it, the money was good, and the research was fairly interesting. I continued to do archaeology, with one field season at the ARCE Memphis field school as co-director in 2003 and I still worked on side projects. I had started to get some pubs in the public health (PH) literature, but then I had to leave Employer A for a variety of reasons (mostly having to do with grants and a change in funding). I spent a year as a bona fide statistician at a private concern — Employer B — (blehh) and then left for Employer C, an internationally known public health group. I actually could have stayed there. Exciting place, interesting and significant work. But none of it was anything I had a particular interest in, though I continued to get some pubs and ended up with one as primary author (in press as I type this).

But. I had been starting to get frustrated for a while that I wasn’t doing archaeology. I did okay at public health and medical research, but really only when I had specific tasks to do. I’ve just never been that interested in it and I was sort of waiting for the bug to bite me, but it never did. This struck me particularly hard one day when I was sitting in my office doing some data-intensive task and not enjoying it very much, when I looked across the hallway and saw my neighbor deep in a phone conversation with some international colleagues. He had a wireless headset on and was pacing back and forth while talking. You could tell he loved it (and I knew he loved his work previously as well). Even though it was work, you could tell he just thoroughly enjoyed doing it. And I thought “I want to feel like that”.

So, I left and went back to Employer A on another temporary basis doing something that had more to do with earth sciences than strictly public health. I had intended to stay within Employer A and migrate over to something closer to archaeology, but soon after I joined back, the budget went whacko and hiring for really the last year has been nearly non-existent (there were other internal reasons, too). Then the overall economy tanked and, well, continued employment was looking pretty grim. For a looooong time I was in a near panic. I’ve never been unemployed before, at least not unless I planned to be. It’s a bad feeling, as many out there no doubt know.

But, you know, it was my intention to make a career in archaeology; it’s what I trained in and what I love doing and I think that in the end I would be profoundly regretful if I never even tried to make a go of it. Like I said, I’d been feeling frustrated with public health for some time. Some of it has to do with increasing age; I’m 47 now and even though I’m mentally and physically ten years younger than that. . .well, the End is now closer (probably) than the Beginning. Plus my dad passing away really made me sit up and notice my own mortality. Did I want to end my days doing public health grunt work? Never being a PI because I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it? Not really. So I started on the path to archy.

Trouble is, not having done CRM work in many years I can’t just plug myself in to a regular position. And CRM has been hit as hard as anything else, so I haven’t been able to line up fieldwork as yet. Still, I have to say, I haven’t been this enthusiastic in years. Feels like I’m starting grad school all over again. Not like I haven’t anything to do. . . .I just reviewed a paper for the Journal of Field Archaeology, I’m working on some old excavation materials at the local museum, I have a cemetery assessment going, and a couple of papers to fix up and submit. Oh, and the usual 101 home improvement projects.

And, um, looking for work. Thankfully the ArchaeoWife is still safely (knock wood) employed and I have a pretty decent war chest of savings not affected by the stock market, so we’re okay financially for a while (knock more wood). But I am going to set up a donation widget and bug you all to contribute, if only to offset my server costs (which aren’t that much, but every little bit helps).

So anyway. It’s scary but also rather exciting as well. It sounds cheesy, but I’m treating this as an opportunity and, truth be told, I may not have jumped ship for archaeology if I just kept being employed, being employed, and being employed in public health. Wish me luck.

From the EEF wires:

Ancient military town dating back to 26th Dynasty discovered in Ismailiya

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni said an archeological mission discovered the remnants of an ancient military town in the governorate of Ismailiya.

The discovered military town dates back to the 26th Dynasty (664-625 BC).

Wasn’t something like this found earlier?

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.

He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

This story has been making the blog rounds. Actually, the kid wrote a pretty good article there. As I mentioned here I never used them walking around very much, but they were great for taking to the library or something. And he makes a good point about being able to plug them into a AC socket, although you’d lose the portability of an iPod with the transformer.

As for me, I can’t wait until some kid gets into my old Mustang and can’t figure out where the button is to make the windows go down.

Big announcement coming tomorrow. Stay tuned.