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!!

Last Night

We had to heat up and use the cafeteria food for dinner last night on our own since everyone is gone and they aren't serving dinner anymore. However, it was interesting to use one of the guest apartments. Today is going to be about sorting the artifacts and hopefully using the new database that was just created by Pipad.

The Field

Yesterday I went out in the field and pretty much sifted all day. I decided it was easier to work without a mask so i could breathe better and it wouldn't be as hot. It was also nice to sort through the cool dirt with no gloves, but it is so much safer if i have the gloves so I don't stab myself with rusted metal. We stopped early and went over to a church and then Lupita's father's home. His house was so freaking awesome. All the furniture and doorways and other things were hand-carved by him, and it was extremely well done. Today is a day for the lab. I sorted through the bags of artifacts to make sure our bags matched the paperwork. There's still plently of cleaning the artifacts left to be done, so i'll be working at that.

6/25/2007

Good times in the archaeology lab today. Ali and Lauren stay with me today and we amazingly got everything washed and sorted today. It's quite nice to be caught up with the lab work. I've also gotten pretty good at sorting items now. Certain things like glass, plastic, metal, and bone are usually really easy to sort. However, dealing with ceramics can be really tough. The worst is trying to decide if something is rock or ceramic or something completely different. It took a few times to get the hang of sorting in the first. What was harder was setting down an identification system. It took a decent amount of trial and error, lots of retyping the list, and multiple printings of each time. Poor trees, they must hate me for doing so many copies. Though, when I printed the labels to put in each bag, that probably made the trees even sadder. It was nice though getting to rework the labels so that they were appropiate to this field school. It was also really nice to be able to clean out the lab that had decades of junk piled up. It took some serious cleaning skills to spurse up the place, but it's clean and so much is organized. This is all a really helpful pre-cursor to going to graduate school in museum science. My first classes will be collection management, data management, and preventative conservation. It'll be interesting to see what I can transfer over.