And it Begins….Ever so Slowly

Hello to everyone from sunny old England. I arrived in London this past Saturday, the overnight flight from Ottawa of course, only to be treated to a quirky British tradition surrounding Guy Fawkes day. In a small, yet enormous by London’s standards, back yard I spent the evening watching people set off fireworks and stare into a bonfire in honour of the parliament not being blown up back in the day. There’s a lot of information out there on this so I won’t dwell on it.

Sunday might as well not have existed thanks to jet lag but I did catch up on sleep. This was a good thing because today was the first day of my Archaeological Soil Micromorphology course at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. The course is focused on a technique that involves collecting intact sediment samples, embedding them in resin, slicing and dicing, sticking them to a glass slide, and finally grinding them down to 0.03mm thick before sticking them under a microscope for description and interpretation (includes both geological and archaeological sediments). I have been looking forward to this course for months, reading as much as I could and looking at as many images of thin sections as possible. I thought I was somewhat prepared…boy was I way off.

The course started with an introductory seminar, followed by 3 hours looking at reference thin sections under the microscope. Lunch break was great! I found a nice sandwich and bag of crisps (aka chips) for 3 pounds. Then the afternoon was a lecture on buried soils and the numerous taphonomic factors that act upon them. This included marine water fluctuations and the resulting cycle of pyrite formation and oxidation, as well as other things like the velocity of deposition in flash floods and the sorting patterns produced. This lecture was again followed by a few hours of browsing reference samples under the microscope.

Today’s class was not overly uplifting. The lectures were great, the concepts all make sense and the interpretation that follow are somewhat satisfying. Even the basic principles of deposition, soil formation, and post-depositional alterations all fit nicely into my head. My biggest stepping stone is understanding the identification process. How do I know which minerals are quartz, pyrite, tourmaline, muscovite, etc. from clay, shell, bone, flint, and ash fragments.  Coming from a purely archaeology side of things (specifically North American archaeology rooted in an Anthropology department) my optical mineralogy, and mineral crystallography are a little weak…if not non-existent. So, some pretty major hurdles and there was quite a bit of frustration today but at least I know what I need to learn. To me, that’s a pretty good first day. I already know what I need to get out of this 2-week course.

So after 6 hours with the microscope today and a couple more reading, the screen is starting to go a bit blurry. It’s time for me to stop and do some more reading on birefringence. I’ll be back tomorrow night with some updates on the course and my progress.

 

 

As Promised….Parc Safari Pet Cemetery

As I left things hanging a bit in my last post I guess it is only fair to fill in the missing pieces before moving on to something else. This requires me to back track a bit first….

In September of 2007 I moved my life to Montreal to start graduate school. On my very first day, literally the morning after I moved into my tiny apartment, I strolled into campus to meet my MA supervisor, the same individual that is now one of my PhD co-supervisors. I barely made it through the door of his office before he asks me to take a look at this amazing e-mail he just received. It was from the director of zoology at Parc Safari, an African animal park south of Montreal in Hemmingford, Quebec. The park had decided they needed an educational display in their entrance building and the perfect complement would be some articulated skeletons of African wildlife. Logically this meant they should contact the McGill archaeology department and ask them to dig up the park’s cemetery and then articulate the skeletons they found, particularly hoping for an elephant or rhinoceros. This is exactly what was in the e-mail my new supervisor read to me, only to follow it with his plan to turn it into an undergraduate field methods and zooarchaeology course. All this before I even got a chance to introduce myself. Regardless, I was sold and so began the first year, we’re now in the third year, of the Parc Safari field methods class.

If you want to get caught up to date on the past two seasons you should swing by the McGiil Zooarchaeological Field School blog that is put together by the students each year. This year’s group is ironing out some details and will be posting updates really soon, so keep an eye on it. As a taste I will tell you that last Friday we mapped and removed approximately 75% of a large male watusi. We know it is large and male because we excavated and re-articulated a complete female watusi during the first season.

Don't be fooled by the scenery...under this surface lies a cemetery for African wildlife

Although it may sound like just fun and games there is in fact a lot research going on at the site in addition to those fun and games. We are looking at the taphonomic impact of decomposing cadavers, vegetation reflectance signatures that can help in the identification of clandestine mass graves, 3-dimensional reconstructions of excavation pits, and more. Don’t take my word for it though, go see what the students think about it all.

The Curse of the MA thesis

Hello to those few readers that still care to stop by my measly little blog, I thank you. The extreme lack of posting has been in large part due to my cursed MA thesis that is now officially done, graded, and formally accepted. The only thing left is the actual convocation which I am told is a formality, one of those necessary human ritual things that through a public display formalize things (we sure are a weird species).

So, now that I am deshackled from my thesis I have moved on head first into a PhD at McGill, and over the next little while there are some exciting things happening that will appear up here on the blog. I have switched gears for my PhD, embracing the geoarchaeological work I have done in Jordan and has been mentioned a few times on the blog. Nothing against the archaeology on the Northwest Coast, definitely still an interest of mine, but I really enjoy the geoarchaeology and working with the people I met in Jordan, a great crew! This switch means I need to brush up on some geography, geology and soil science and as a result am auditing a class on Soils and the Environment this term, which is going great. It is through Geography, meaning I get to play the fun game of trying to relate pedogenesis and nutrient cycling for temperate environment agriculture to 300,000 year old buried soils in the basalt desert of eastern Jordan. That being said the course is incredibly informative and I would recommend a contemporary soils class to anyone doing field archaeology.

That course is great but the thing I am most  excited about this term is the course I have signed up for with Prof. Rich Macphail at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. In a couple weeks I am heading over to London for an intense workshop/course on Archaeological Soil Micromorphology. While I am over there I will keep you all up to date on what the course is like and the trials and tribulations of learning micromorphology.

Have to run. Time to head out to the Parc Safari cemetery to finish digging up and mapping the remains of an enormous male watusi…yes I am going to leave that hanging at the end of the post…don’t worry I will fill you in shortly.

-Chris