AAM 2008 Denver

I am in a technology tutorial class that has kindly showed me how to use Blogger again. I have finished my 2nd semester of graduate school at Texas Tech Univsersity in Museum Science. I am currently dating someone (Chad DeMars). This is my first Museum conference and it is getting better every day. Parties, information, and maybe even a few contacts. Huzzah.

Work

Yesterday I stayed in the lab in all day. I finished the photo log we were working on. I had to rename the pictures, check to make sure the numbers matched up, and put the info. about the photo into excel. The rest of the day was simply sorting artifacts w/ Rey and Amber. We actually got all of it done. I was so proud. That night we learned how to float soil. We had to determine the type of soil it was, like clay, loam, silty loam, silty clay, etc. Then we had to take a subsample (simply bagging a little bit of it). Finally we put the soil in water, broke up the clumps of dirt, and then poured the top layer of water into cheesecloth to catch any artifacts. Some were empty, but some had some nifty things in them, like bone or pottery.

Today, most of the profiling of the unit walls was completed. I didn't do that, but I did help with the total station, which maps the area. Then we got to re-mud the floors inside the house we were working at. (Yep, some units were inside someone's house) We had to make our own adobe mud (dirt, hay, and water) and then put it on the wall and the floor. It was looking pretty nice. We'll be finishing the rest tomorrow and then we'll be done for this field school.

The 4th, Oh Yeah

We had to make our own breakfast this morning since the staff is off today. This morning, I worked on the photolog and everyone else cleaned the rest of the artifacts. We have finished excavating for this field school. YAY!!!! Nearly everyone went out to lunch since we have the rest of the day off. It's quite nice actually. I'm a bit bored at the current moment, but we're going to have a cookout later. It's been raining, so hopefully it won't ruin our dinner or any fireworks.

My Day

I cleaned artifacts in the morning. Some things can be put in water and other things have to be dry brushed. The most fun I have is when I get to dry brush bone. There's so much dirt on it and it comes off when I use a toothbrush. Whee!!!! I like cleaning bone, I like cleaning bone, I like cleaning bone. Although, it gets really dusty, so you have to make sure you don't kill yourself with all that dust up your nose. (Achoo!!!)

Firing

A few weeks ago we made our own micaceous pottery, so today we went back to fire them. 5 out of 8 of them had some spalling problems (parts of the pot sort of exploded off). Felipe was nice enough to fix them and finally fire them. It is really nice to be done w/ that pot and just have it. I'm so proud of mine. Woot. Afterwards, we got back and helped clean up stuff from the chaco trip.

Chaco Canyon

We left friday at noon on our world-wind adventure to chaco canyon. We made it to Coranado State Monument and had an interesting time there. We got to see reconstruction ruins of pueblos and got to go into a reconstucted kiva. The kiva had several paintings on the wall and the reconstruced ones in the kiva were actually in the museum there. We got to see the original paintings from that kiva. It was pretty amazing. Our guide made Sunday and her husband, Andy, dance for us. We all immediately got our cameras and took sooooo many pictures of them. One of the students even took a video of it. I hope it ends up on youtube. At the end of the tour, I ended up dropping my poor camera and the back opened up and exposed my film. The film rolls backwards, so maybe not all the pictures were destroyed. We went back to our "campsite" at KOA. It was a pretty terrible place and had dogs barking right next to us. In the end, we went and got a camp site at Corando and had a huge freaking space. It was pretty fun to camp out there and we all had a nifty time. There were fireworks (for some reason) and we had smores and there was some partying.

In the morning, we went to the Acoma Pueblo. It was placed on this high mesa so we took a bus to get up to it. It was such an amazing place. It had a huge church, a cemetary, lots of homes (some people still live there) and a huge amount of history. There were lots of people selling things, but i restrained and didn't get anything (though i had gotten tons of things from a previous trip). We had the option of taking a stairway back down that was carved into the rock. It got pretty steep at times, but was worth it. It was a stairway that was used by the people who went down at sunrise to farm and came back w/ their produce at sundown. I can't believe actually having to carry a lot of stuff going up or down. After we finished there, we drove to Chaco Canyon and set up our campsite for a 2nd night out. I decided to actually sleep outside, instead of in the tent and it was very nice to be in the cool night air, but still have a freaking awesome thermal sleeping bag when I got cold.

The next morning, we saw the sites at Chaco. The place is filled w/ the ruins of the pueblo peoples. There were several ruin sites to see. There was a 5 miles hike we could take, but i opted not to do it, so instead i got to see more of the site ruins. At the first one, Pueblo del Arroyo, we did a self-guiding tour w/ a booklet they had. It was pretty nifty to read what each of the rooms were and how they were used. Then we went to Chetro Ketl, which was even more impressive. I really like the huge huge kiva they had and this awesome retaining wall. We saw a chacoan stairway from far away (clearly not as fun as going down the stairwell at Acoma). Then we did a trail that had tons of petroglyphs along the way. There were so many fun ones. I liked how they drew people. Generally, it was a stick person w/ 3 digits on each hand and foot. There was also a place on the canyon wall that had foot and hand-holds for the puebloan people. It said it was part of their road system, but it was probably only used for cermonial purposes. The most famous pueblo, Pueblo Bonito, we didn't really get to see. We passed by it, but our group was going to wait for the hikers to see, but we never went back. The hikers did get to see it from above though, so i'm sure that was really nice. I'll just check out the pictures. We went to the vistor center and i bought way too many books. I decided i really wanted to know the area. I started reading one about the Wetherills (the first people to start working at the site) and it's been pretty good so far. We actually saw one of the Wetherills' grave, which was in the canyon. Apparently, the family were also the first to be taking artifacts and selling them, so they're blamed for everyone else doing it, but the book i'm reading is starting to clear up what was actually going on. Mainly that the smithsonian refused to help them do a proper dig, so maybe we should blame the smithsonian. i don't know. Anyway, we made our way home, ate dinner out, and finally made it back really late. I was happy to shower and have my nice bed to sleep in.

The End

Cannibalism

Today was pretty nice. I got to wash and sort artifacts again. I finished working on my pot. We made them about a week ago at Felipa Ortega's place. He's an amazing potter and we got to make our own. I just finished putting the slip on and we're going back to fire them. Leslie, our TA, cooked dinner for us. It was freaking awesome. Then Sunday's husband, Andy, gave a talk about Cannibalism and witch craft. I think it was the most interesting lecture we've had so far. He's a really good speaker and it was subject i was really interested in. It was his theory that certain burials (w/ human remains being cut, burned, dismembered, etc.) in the Southwest isn't really cannibalism, but actually about witchcraft and they were just destroying witches. It's a topic i want to learn more about now. Woot!!