Oh Poop

Hi again guys!

Today is day 2 of 2 of my days off this week. I am spending it researching for my paper that's due at the end of the month, wherein I will present it to a bunch of processualist badasses who will probably hate my noob methodology. We will see.

What am I thinking about for my project? I'm glad you asked. Here are my brainstorm notes so far:

Research paper ideas:

1. Scat analysis

a. Investigate the differences of ingested bones between carnivorous animals (coyotes vs fox, etc)

b. Investigate different taphonomical issues with these ingested bones (differences and similarities in digestive etching, gnawing, etc)

c. Investigate the rates at which ingested bones survive in the digestive tract

d. Compare the findings to a pre-established prey-choice model?

e. Profit???

I am also doing all of this in my dorm room, blasting some of that Viking Polka Metal (thanks Mike!) which is really popular with my roommates (not). Once I hit the idea wall hard, I'm taking the canoe back out on the lake and if I feel brave, I will snap some pics with my phone.

Life O' Reilly

I just realized that I have not talked about my living arrangements. I'm staying in a comfy cement floored dorm with seven other folk. We have running water, electricity, and spiders galore. Also scorpions, but I keep my belongings off the floor for the most part.

I also have massive zits slash bugbites all over my face, and I'm wondering if it's stress or spiderbites. Who knows. Anyhow, the living is easy around these parts.

Pot's right

Howdy y'all!

Today marks day one of the weekend, which is pretty neat considering all of the asscracking studying we've been at for forty hours this week.

I was feeling super demoralized after todays exam, but then I went swimming and bought so much beer that the people at walmart were sarcastically inquiring after my liquor needs. It turned out alright, though, in the end. I may not be super at the memorization, but as far as big pictures go, I've got it. I feel like there's a disconnect between me and the other students intellectually, but that's another tangent. Plus, we get along great.

Tonight was the fish fry night, and gee was it good. After dinner, we went fishin', caught nothin', and came back for beer and poker. I cleaned up and swigged a bunch of tequila with my professor, who seems to like me even though I suck at taxonomical strata.

Yesterday I caught a big olM fish that might win me the pirhana tropy prize. Pics above

fishin'

I woke up before dawn this morning and beat the men to the dining hall and sucked down some cold coffee from last night. When the professors showed up, I was super ready to go, and we had our lines in the lake by 4:40 am. While everyone else was catchin' fish, I was tangled up in fishing line and slimy with my super powered (for noobs like me) powerbait. 3ventually, I felt a bite on my line, but ended up with nothing for about four hours.

Right before I was heading out, I got into a fish battle with a two lb rainbow trout (salmoninae, mykiss aquilarium? studying is hardish) and landed that mofo. People were jelly, I can tell. I took him back to camp and donated him to the fish fry!

one month later

Hi again!

This time I'm writing to you from the field in Eagle Lake Field Station, California (ELFS for short). The drive in was about twelve hours of roadtime, including a bout of moderate and super dusty offroading up into the mountains. The station is run by a hard mountain man and his super sweet wife, and seems to house 2 dogs, 1 cat, and plenty of bats, snakes, birds, and scorpions, in addition to some pretty nerdy zooarch students.

Compound pics are posted above. There's not much time for dilly dally around here, but I'm doing my best to update!

Today we focused on zooarch theory and history, and really cut our chops on learning the skeletal morphology of native fishes found in Eagle Lake, which can be seen from our lab windows. My homework tonight is also pictured above.

I've got about 5 hours to sleep up, because I'm getting up at 4:30 to fish with the men, so stay tunned for hopefully more organizational and informative posts.

This is pretty boring unless you're the commander

SO, I've just purchased my diving insurance, and boy is it a good deal! Get this: for 40 bucks, I get $125,000 worth of coverage, including emergency evac, decompression, loss of life or limb(s), AND they'll even pay to ship my soggy remains back to my mother. It's a bargain.

I've also found last year's blog of field school #2 that I'm attending this summer. It's pretty cool, but does not include helpful clues about living arrangements. As far as I know, I'll be shacking up at a dive shop 100 miles down a highway in the middle of the ocean. Here's the link: http://www.pastfoundation.org/category/slobodna-2010/

Though I know practically nothing about 19th century maritime stuff, I'm really REALLY excited to try my fins out in the open ocean AND swim shipwrecks. I might even trap a shark a la the little mermaid, but it might trap me instead (hooray insurance). Regardless, it sounds like a pretty cool adventure, even for a landlocked lubber like myself.

The hardest part, I think, will be getting there in time to hear the lessons and diving advice. A discussion of artifact identification, safety procedures, and dive schedules would be pretty nice. The problem is, I'm flying to the school a day later, due to overlap between Slobby (fieldschool #2) and a month-long Zooarchaeology field school (#1) in California. More about that later.

I've never been to Florida, and am toying around with staying in Miami for a few days. I might be too tuckered out to really get into the scene, so I'll see how travel pans out first.

How it starts

Hi all,

You don't know me, probably. I think for the most part, I'll keep it that way, because I'm paranoid, and there's something cool about reading a stranger's thoughts.

However, I will tell you some things. I'm a graduate student, for one, studying Ancient Middle Eastern History. Really though, my interests lie in archaeology, which is the meat of my degree. Which means basically that I study really old things that those Great White Adventurers studied in the 1930's onward, and sneer down my nose at them in the process.

I started this blog initially because I wanted it to indulge my escapism. I thought it would be great to write a blog about what my life COULD be like, rather than how my life actually is. That's more intriguing than the banal reality anyways. But THEN, it was suggested to me that I blog about my adventures in archaeology. Thus, I think the blog will mix one part truth to two parts delusion. That's cool, right?

Stay tuned for tall tales from the field and otherwise.