Day of Archaeology #dayofarch and Then Dig

While I have been remiss at updating my own blog lately, I have contributed to two archaeology group blogs this month.

One is for The Day of Archaeology. Today (July 29, 2011), over 400 archaeologists from around the world and many disciplines are blogging and tweeting about their day. My contribution, about taking a mental health day, is here. I recommend reading the entries on this blog for a great overview of how archaeologists spend their days.

Earlier this month, I wrote a post about my snake guards for the Then Dig group blog. This month’s theme was “tools”, and I detailed why I think snake guards are a very valuable tool. You can read it here.

I also wrote a few tweets on Wednesday when I actually spent (most) of a day in the field doing a survey.

Have a nice weekend and I’ll try and make things pick up here soon! Unfortunately, the Turkey trip fell through for this year, so I won’t have that to keep me interested/interesting.

Cold cases

Haven’t been blogging much, as I’ve been working in the office on reports since returning from the metal detector survey over a month ago. Was also putting a lot of spare time into getting things organized for the Turkey trip.

In terms of the office work, it’s been mostly working on the final draft reports for older excavations. Right now, I’m working on updating the burned rock feature information for our dig at the Siren site, which happened in the second half of 2005 and early 2006. We did an draft interim report in 2008, which I don’t think I worked on. Since then, we’ve acquired almost 50 additional radiocarbon dates as well as results from macrobotanical, pollen, and phytolith analysis on feature materials, and starch analysis on groundstone artifacts. I’m updating the tabular data for each of the features, then I’ll have to add to the text. Finally, I have to write a general overview of the different types of features at the site. This is to see if there are changes over time in the types and sizes of features used, as well as any other patterns that might emerge.

It’s not uninteresting, but the challenge is trying to gather the disparate analyses, forms, tables, and raw data that have accumulated over 6 years. The project director for the excavation, while still involved in a limited capacity, moved on to an academic job several years ago. Many of the other excavators and crew chiefs, and some of the earlier authors and analysts, have also moved on. So we have cold data and loss of knowledge sources, one of the big problems in archaeology. The kicker is that this wasn’t really my company’s fault, but a result of budget cutbacks that led to the client putting this on the shelf for several years. Looking back, I was working on the lithic analysis almost three years ago.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Told ya you weren’t missing much