I’ll be leaving from New York on 23 May and arriving back in New York on 28 June.
Now I just need to finish this school year, which is shaping up to be incredibly stressful (5 papers and 6 finals) before I am off!
![aboutegypt:
P1060394 Temple of Deir El-Medina [con] (by LordLiverpool)
Deir el-Medina is actually a really cool site with a huge amount of ostraca which is casual and talks about real life of the workers living there. I’ll probably write something up about it.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1z2d9WzUU1qc33g2o1_400.jpg)
P1060394 Temple of Deir El-Medina [con] (by LordLiverpool)
Deir el-Medina is actually a really cool site with a huge amount of ostraca which is casual and talks about real life of the workers living there. I’ll probably write something up about it.
I am hopefully booking my flight to Egypt tomorrow!
It’s just under 2 months until I leave.
I’m taking a course on GIS and its uses in archaeology this semester. For those of you who don’t know, GIS stands for Geographic Informations System and it’s a way to work with (usually) satellite imagery of the earth. It comes in handy when archaeologists are looking for areas to excavate or when they want to do analysis of a larger area to do things like analysis of site distribution and the like.
I hate it.
I don’t think it’s a huge surprise that I’m not the best with technology. I tend to break a lot of it and I cannot understand why it’s so praised. Yes technology has it’s uses but there is also something to be said about the non technological side of archaeology.
First and foremost, archaeology is the study of people. It uses materials left behind to learn about people. There is a connection that archaeologist make with the people they are studying. Looking at what people left behind reminds us that we are all human and we can all find some common ground. (I was at a museum where I saw a child’s coin bank from republican Rome. That’s what I love about studying history, there is always something the same no matter how much time has changed) With the growing importance of technology we lose something. The way my professor makes it seem is that it’s more important to find as many sites as you can rather than focus intensely on one site. And in my opinion that creates issues. Yes comparison is important but having shallow (if you’ll excuse the unintended pun) cannot stand in for really studying a single site.
We were discussing predictive modelling today and it’s just such a problem for me. Yes you can have a general idea of where people might settle because of proper resources but you cannot predict with certainty, it’s just not possible. People, ancient or modern, cannot be reduced to a series of numbers fed into a computer program, we have more agency than that.
I decided it would be a good idea to start rewatching StarGate SG-1 from the beginning tonight.
As you may have noticed I am slightly in love with Daniel Jackson. Yes I know what he does isn’t ‘real’ archaeology but as I’ve said before, I don’t really have that much of a problem with the way archaeology is portrayed in the media. And besides, I adore Daniel as a person not just as an archaeologist. He’s incredibly kind and accepting of other cultures. If I were to ever marry, it would be to someone like him. When I was younger he was my idea of a perfect man, and honestly he still is.
He’s also the reason I ended up deciding to stay with Egyptology instead of focusing on post medieval Britain. It was a decision I agonized over, I just couldn’t decide. I loved both too much. I was almost certain that I wanted to focus on Britain until I was sitting in my Egyptology class and the professor mentioned Baal. If you don’t know, Ba’al was a part time villain on SG-1 and I thought about how much Daniel Jackson meant to me, and how thinking about him and how much he knew helped to motivate me to study through my Near Eastern Civ class freshman year and I realized I couldn’t disappoint him. It didn’t matter that he was fictional, he was still my hero and I didn’t want to let him down. So that night I called my mother to let her know that I was sticking with Egypt (and thus applying to a different study abroad school) and I have never been happy. I will always maintain an interest in post medieval Britain but Egyptology is really where I belong.
Let’s talk about field school for a minute shall we?
We all do it, for some of us it’s required at our school. At my school we need to do a minimum of 4 weeks of field school to graduate with an archaeology major. We also get no help paying for it, but more about that later.
Above is the Mut Precinct in modern Luxor, Egypt. One of my professors has been doing excavations there for the past several years and I have the opportunity to join her this summer granted everything works out politically. She’s hopeful that it all will and Luxor, she says, has been very quiet and safe. Yes, I know it could still be slightly dangerous, but they were there last winter when the revolution actually was starting and they got everyone home safely with out a problem. My father is still concerned though. He also didn’t want me to go to Belize 2 years ago, so I’m leaving that to my mother to convince him. I assume he will always worry when I go abroad but that’s what I want to do and I’m not afraid so he’s going to have to learn to accept it.
Anyway, this is probably the most amazing thing to ever happen to me in my entire life. Since I was in second grade I wanted to dig in Egypt, second grade! One of the professors here has a running joke that everyone wants to be an Egyptologist before they ‘grow up’. I think that’s why I love Egyptology so much, because I don’t have to grow up. I could go back in time and tell my 8 year old self that I am actually getting to live out my dreams, and that’s pretty damn awesome. And once everything is all approved I might just die of excitement. Until then I can only cross my fingers…a lot.
As I said before, we don’t have any funding for the field school requirement, which sucks and we’re trying to work with the faculty to scrounge up the money, but until then we have to pay out of pocket. And field school isn’t cheap, it’s several thousand dollars. Several thousand dollars that I don’t really have to spare, even with help from my mother. I’m also planning on going abroad next year and the passport and VISA alone are going to run me another couple of hundred dollars. Let me tell this right now, archaeology is not a field you go into to be rich, or really even comfortable. There’s really no money or glory in digging in the ground unfortunately, so if you’re actually going into the field be prepared to be saving and money concious for the rest of your life.
And I really hate doing this because I like doing things by myself but….I sell crafts online, it’s not archaeology related, but it is all handmade by yours truly and it would be cool if you could check it out, and maybe even help out a fellow archaeologist on her adventures.
Including myself.
And it’s not just the archaeologists I know online, it’s the vast majority of us. My professor today said something implying that he wouldn’t want to live in a house full of other people (it was during a totally unrelated conversation about sororities before class started).
I guess I find it unusual because so much of our field is about knowing people. We constantly have to make connections if we ever really want to get anywhere, and yet we don’t actually like talking to people. Although we are such a small field (especially when you break us up by concentration) that I guess we deal with it.
There also seems to be a very strong connection between other archaeologists, regardless of how long you’re known them and there’s a sense of loyalty to them. Despite that fact that I am such an extreme introvert I am always up to hang out with my fellow archaeology majors and it’s always a brilliant time despite the fact that we all have different concentrations.
Maybe we’re drawn to this field because so much of it is research that requires hours upon hours in a library or museum with very minimal human contact, maybe it’s because the field is already filled with other introverts so we know we’re in good company.
The pyramids (by Stravaiger)
Perceptions of archaeology
(via pretty much everyone I know on Facebook)
I’m back!
And am probably going to make this slightly more personal.
You can still expect informative posts and such, but there will also be stuff about my experience with archaeology classes at school and hopefully my field school this summer.
So here we go.
