How Did People Live Before Toilets? They Probably Didn't.

So the day started off just beautifully as the construction workers decided to be extra loud today starting at 6AM.  But actually, it got better really fast because, as Jackie and I were walking down the hill from Cashin, Oliver, drove by, opened his window, and yelled at us asking if we wanted a ride to class.  Since the answer was immediately yes, Jackie and I proceeded to run across the street and get into the vehicle. Now, I wouldn’t say Oliver is an intimidating person, but perhaps that’s just because I’ve spent nine hours a fay with him for two weeks.  But regardless of what I think, he’s apparently a danger because as we ran toward the car, a construction worker yelled, “Watch out for that man!!!!”  It was a good time.   And then it was muffin day, so really, how could it be better?

See, that's an os coxa, a femur
and a tibia.  They don't even
look like real bones yet.

Today we had the lab to end all labs.  It was six stations and over two hours long.  It involved looking at skulls and recording everything we could about them, finding the age of sub-adult bones (which is super hard because none of the epiphyseal plates have fused yet), finding the age of individuals based on long bone length, attempting to fit a fetus skull through a pelvic girdle, and aging individuals via dental eruption and erosion.  It was really the last effort to prepare us for laboratory analysis after fieldwork, and I think I learned a lot.  Then we took the quiz. Today it was only on bone fragments, which threw me for a loop, but I actually got 29.5 out of 30, although that score is misleading as many of those points came from the bonus section.  Then lunch, which was the usual: a chicken and oat cheese sandwich, Cheetos, and sweet tea.  My life is pretty good. 

After lunch, we endured a safety in the field lecture.  Apparently, there are a lot of ways to die during an archaeological excavation.  You could get stabbed with a trowel, fall into an excavation unit, get hurt with a stake, get Lyme disease, stumble upon a snake, etc.  Also, apparently we are a “no trace” archaeological group.  This means that everything we bring in with us also has to be brought out.  Everything.  Plastic sandwich bags, hand wipes, coffee cups.  And used toilet paper.  EVERYTHING.  So.  That’ll be a blast.  We also went over the tutorial of how to use the woods as your own personal bathroom.  Exciting.  After that grand time, we got together with our teams, received our assignments and field kits, took inventory, made a list of all the things we need, and designed all the forms we think we’ll need for the entire excavation including check in sheets, mapping sheets, and evidence labels.  We were pretty thorough, but I still feel like we’ll probably be unprepared.  But I feel like that’s probably just kind of what archaeology is.  We had to be really over the top with the amount of forms we needed since we need to be sure to keep the chain of evidence unbroken, which is a little bit of a pain.  At least we don’t have to follow the standard procedure of wearing plastic gloves at all times because Heidi thinks it’s a waste of gloves.  If we want to indicate that were should have ben wearing gloves, we just put a G on the evidence tag, ad she counts it as uncontaminated. Today made me ever more excited to start the excavation on Monday, no matter how unprepared we are.