A quiet night, a stack of books, a tuna melt on rye

First off - Bias disclaimer: I prefer historic archaeology. 

    Okay, today when my crew was just about finished our transects, Amber found a piece of historic ceramic, or pottery.  Like this mug it had manganese glaze on one side and a cream  slip on the other, a design which is usually pretty old.  The crew chief hemmed and hawed about recording it, how it was probably just trash and historic ceramics are scattered everywhere.  In the end he decided to bring it back to the lab, but not to change our probability model, instead just putting in a judgmental or two. 

    Then Megan found  a point.  Suddenly everything was different.  We changed probability models.  We collected all the surface scatter (most of which  was historic   in nature.)  In short, we did a thorough recording of a site.  I'm a little annoyed. 

    I do realize that many of the historic ceramics are still produced in roughly the same way today, and that it is more difficult to conclusively date them.  While you know that a point is prehistoric  unless there is someone purposefully perpetuating a hoax. But, how will we  know until we look fully at the site.  Yes whiteware can fit in range of 200+ years, but how can you know which side of that range the piece you found is on, unless you look for other diagnostics.  After we were able to do the surface collection, we did find a piece with maker's mark, so the lab can have the final say. 

    Also, the "it's just trash" view annoys me.  As archaeologists, trash is what we look at.  People, for the most part, don't allow their well functioning possessions to be buried in the backyard.  When we find ceramics or whatever around a housing site (which according to the crew chief is an acceptable historic scatter) we are looking  at the trash the house's occupants threw out the back door before the land fill was invented.  Also, the pre-historian's beloved flakes are also trash.  They're the refuse left over when a stone tool was made.  That's trash.  Also, all the points abandoned halfway through because they split in some weird way? Trash. Yet,  they're deemed to be oh, so exciting. 
 
    The again maybe I'm bitter.  My view of pre-historics: "It's a rock, a nicely shaped rock, but still, a rock."  At least, the area will now have a proper chance at being recorded. 

    So, we're driving home from the field and get off at our usual exit.  There, halfway up the exit, a pick-up truck is stopped half on and half off the road.  Being a conscientious driver I slow down to figure out what is going on.  The driver of the truck steps in front of our vehicle.  He asks for a tow rope, which we don't have, and then asks us to help push his truck. 
    I park the car on the other side of the road, well out of the way of other cars, and we proceed to push the truck all the way of the ramp and to the nearest gas station.  Good thing we were all wearing our orange safety vests!  Also, it's a good practice to keep a gas can in your car so you don't have to ask a bunch of strangers to push it to the nearest gas station. 

Well now, I haven't updated in forever or, you know, a couple of days.  It's much more difficult to remember to write something on my four days, when I  actually get to do something, than on the ten days when I get to sit in a hotel room after work. 

( Things I did this 10-day )

Now it's back to work on the project that just seems to get worse and worse.  Now they want to take away our travel days. 

Well, I'm glad I'm not on the crew in Florida.  They've all been stuck in the hotel without power while a storm rages outside.  I'm all about avoiding the tornadoes.  

    I wish there were more work days that I could spend tooling around in cemeteries.  Particularly if I know they're there before starting survey, so there is  no nasty surprises - not that that has happened.  Yesterday, there was a small family plot off the segment we had to survey.  It was established in 1860 to bury a nearby plantation owner and has remained in use until the present, with the last interment taking place last July.  There were three Civil War Veterans, what looked like a father, son, and the daughter's husband (this being Mississippi they were all confederates).  One guy was married three times in ten years, losing all his wives to childbirth (at least it looked that way since each wife's death date had a corresponding child's birth date).  And possibly coolest of all, the earliest and latest tombstones belonged to men with the same name. 

    Otherwise, this project sucks.  The head of my company neglected to tell the client something they should of, so we're currently all on a tight watch.  It's like being a teenager again and trying to regain your parent's trust.  Except those of us who are dealing with the massive amounts of  inconvenience had no say what-so-ever in the original problem.  Urg. 

1. It is not appropriate to bring your baby/toddler to No Country for Old Men.  Also, when said toddler feels the need to escape from your clutches, moving to the front row to give it more room to roam is not the correct response. 

2. What I like to call "that cool swivel move" is in fact a part of Lindy Hop.  It is called swivels, less clever than many a name, yet descriptive none the less.  Unfortunately, despite promises to the contrary, they did not teach it to us at the fundamentals workshop I attended. 

3.  We stay at nicer hotels when the client makes the choice then when our company makes the choice.

4.  Scheduling business meetings for 6pm is not cool.  It causes cranky employee. 

5. Don't Veer for Deer.  Don't I love instructional videos. 

6.  Paying the utilities works better when you put stamps on the envelope. 

7.  The Beauty and the Beast video now has another song. 

I was awoken last night by the sounds of loud pounding on my hotel room door.  I thought I had overslept and every one was trying to leave, as this is the last day of our ten-day (Travel day), but my phone  said it was 1:05  not 7:05.  Looking out the little peep hole I saw someone who might have been Jill - between the peep hole distortion and my lack of glasses I couldn't be sure - so I  opened the door with the safety latch on. 

The woman on the other side: Do you have a cigarette?
Me: No
Her: Okay, thanks. Bye
Me: *shut door*

Why in the world was this woman randomly knocking on hotel room doors in search of a cigarette at 1:00 in the morning? 

    We had looters.  I've never had looters before, probably because I was never really on a project before with anything worth looting.  We were surveying a 1000m access road with a lithic scatter across pretty much the whole thing.  About halfway through, where the artifacts on the ground were at their heaviest, we came across a series of holes that no one on the crew had dug.  They were much more frequent than general shovel tests, smaller in size, and in the center of the road while we usually dig along the sides.  Apparently one of the Civil Survey people was showing Jill pictures of his "arrowhead collection" a couple of weeks ago, so we think it may have been him.  But either way, looters!  It's almost like being Indiana Jones (which usually not so much). 

Also this news makes me not want to go on our Florida project.  I've finally accustomed myself to the cottonmouths, rattlers, copperheads, and assorted  non-threatening snakes.  Adding a new 20ft one = not cool!

    Mississippi is officially my new favorite place to work.  You only have to dig shovel tests to 50cm instead of a meter like Georgia and there is actually stuff to find.  We found  another prehistoric site today which means I have officially found more in one month in Mississippi than I did in the nine months I spent in Louisiana last year.  Also fewer swamps.  Any day I don't have to wade through a swamp is good day. 

    Today we were supposed to do a quick little area survey in the morning and then do some pipeline survey and finish an access road.  The area was a square 150m on each side, and should have taken no more than two hours to finish.  Turns out, the entire area was covered by a site, so we spent nearly nine hours delineating.  Steven got another point, which brings the total for this project up to six plus various partials.

    I'm really hoping that we get to take at least one of these sites we've located to a phase two.   I want the chance to dig units without having to spend 28 days at a time in Kansas while I'm paying rent in Louisiana.  Plus the woodland  site looks really cool, and I don't even like prehistorics.