It Wasn't a Rock Lobster

It was really hard to get up today.  I’ve found the further into the week it gets, the more tired I am each day.  This trend continued through the entirety of class.  I dread to think of my awake-ness status tomorrow.  Anyway, the day started with a quiz, which went better than the quizzes have been going.  All in all, I got ten wrong, but I also got all six bonus points. So it’s cool.  Plus, we figured out today that you could refuse to take any of the quizzes at all and potentially stull receive an A in the class overall.  But knowing things is nice, so studying will continue to occur.  Jackie and I then presented our case study about los deceparacidos in Argentina during the 80’s.  this case was to stress the roles that forensic anthropologists can play in a human rights scenario, which is mostly victim identification.  We talked for about twenty minutes, so I think it went pretty well overall.  Directly after that, we had yet another guest speaker who came into talk about Cultural Resource Management, which is basically the only part of archaeology that has consistent employment and job security, and it is pretty much the only part of archaeology that all students would rather be unemployed than go into.  Basically, CRM work deals with all the sites that have to be excavated when something is build when they don't expect to find anything and dealing with the National Register of Historic Places and all the litigation that goes along with that.  Usually, the speakers get an hour to talk.  And we’ve had some really fascinating speakers.  This guy was not one of those speakers.  So why was he the only one to receive an hour and a half?  The world may never know.  Also his mustache made it look as if he was frowning always.

Lunch was super fun because it was trowel-sharpening day which means that Heidi ordered pizza and we all got to sit around and chill.  The best part, though, was we got to find out what team we’re on.  I’M ON THE FORENSIC TEAM.  Which is exactly what I wanted, so I’m kind of psyched.  Plus, I really enjoy all of the people on my team, as well.  In the afternoon, we did some mapping and surveying exercises with our team to get to work together and to figure out how to set up a site.  Turns out, I’ve been the nominated member to be in charge of mapping when it gets to the field.  Turns out, I’m pretty spiffy with a compass and a protractor, if I do say so myself.  But it also helped that I’m really the only one who’s ever had to map anything before in life, so I guess there’s that.  We also decided, as a team, that we will be getting t-shirt in light blue with a logo that Natalie drew today.  I’s a trowel crossed with a humerus in a circle of caution tape.  We’re gonna put nicknames on the back and everything.  It’s gonna be pretty epic, no big deal.  Lastly, we picked Rock Lobster as our theme song.  We’re going to rewrite all the lyrics to make it archaeology themed, but so far we only have: “We were at the site, everybody had matching trowels.  Somebody went under the dirt; there they saw a rock.  It wasn’t a rock.  It was a humerus.”  Anyway, yeah. 

We also had another guest speaker who talked about her work with JPAC, which was really interesting to me because I had been looking into that group for underwater archaeology because apparently they really need underwater archaeologists.  JPAC is basically the group that goes out and tries to identify soldiers missing in action, prisoners of war, or crash victims.  It’s mostly military members, but the civilians on the teams are archaeologists with different specializations.  Finally, I got a permission number to enroll in Beginning Tumbling and Gymnastics for next semester, so that’s neat.