The day started off better than the others. I'm getting used to waking up early, and I had gotten a lot of sleep the night before. I was ready to go. I ate a bagel and Jackie and I headed to open lab. There was no quiz, which was great.
Today was more of an ethic day. We reviewed the codes of ethics that many major archaeological and forensic anthropology groups have and basically just discussed them and what it means to work with the dead. We also watched a movie called Bone of Contention, which was really overly dramatic and super great. It was about NAGPRA, and how many Native Americans don't want the bones of their ancestors studied even though scientists can find cured from them and discern migration patters. We also did a lab that involved attempting to distinguish non-human bone from human bone, and attempting to identify non-huma specimens.
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The sculpture I built from Oliver's
instructions. |
There was this one station that gave my group of three quite a bit of trouble. The set up was that there were six bones all in a row but you could only uncover two at a time. Yo\u had to identify the bone and the species before you could uncover the next two. All the bones were from the same animal, but it was meant to start hard and then gradually get easier as you gathered more information. That was not what happened. I swear to God we spent an hour at the station, with all the bones uncovered and no idea what species they belonged too. That's saying a lot considering the last bone was a fully articulated skull. We even had a reference book, but we just couldn't figure it out. We were pretty sure the skull was that of a black bear, but the other bones all seemed too small, the tibia didn't match, and there wasn't even a sacrum, vertebrae or rib of a black bear in the book to compare it to. And Nick, the TA, was not one bit of help. We kept asking if maybe we were on the right track? He would jut ask us questions back. Finally, we asked Heidi, told her our reasoning, and she told us it was in fact a black bear, but it was a juvenile. If I've learned one thing from this course, and I'd like to think that I have, it's that juvenile bones are incredibly difficult to do anything with, be it age, sex, or identify. So. That was fun. The other thing I learned that day was that the bones that were not presented on the previous day were bones I actually knew nothing about and couldn't side at all. Yay.
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The sculpture I was supposed to build from
Oliver's instructions. |
But, the real best part of the day was what Heidi called the Descriptive Writing Exercise. One skill that all archaeologists need to have in the field is the ability to take fast, descriptive field notes. Once a site has been excavated, it has been destroyed. Therefore, all the information about context and specimens need to be written down, or it's lost. The way Heidi had us practice this was to give all of us a unique lego structure. Our job was to describe it to the best of our ability in the time allotted, which was about twenty minutes, in every way except photographs. I thought we were just turning them in for grading. But no. We traded with someone else and were required to put their sculpture together from the description of it they had written. it was actually a pretty good time, and it was really fun. It makes me understand why we have generalized terms for positioning across disciplines, that's for sure. Today was also the day I truly discovered how great the instant coffee dad got me is. YAY! I finished the evening with a PB and J, homework, and the end of season one of Dr. Who. All in all, it was good day. This gets less frustrating as it goes on.
The mystery gril partied loudly all night and someone knocked on my door at 5am. GAH.
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