Our first guest post!

[We have decided to occasionally incorporate guests posts from wise and/or witty acquaintances. Naturally, we launched this initiative with a contribution from one of our wisest and wittiest friends. In her post she skillfully describes an experience most of us will never get to have. This Do Right Woman is uncovering archaeological artifacts for posterity. Here you go - !]

Our guest blogger in front of a small Austrian palace she dug up

Hello to all the loyal readers of BBFT! You probably don’t know me (but you really should, you’d probably like me) my name is Jeanine, and I am an old friend of Nadia’s—I knew her back when her bangs were not so chic and she “knew” how to drive a car (she was particularly apt at applying the parking brake). Although, to be fair, Nadia knew me when I was dressing like a JCPenney runway model and wrote angsty entries in composition notebooks. But I digress. Nadia did not ask me to guest post about our former selves (though she should, those stories would prove much funnier than the ones I am about to tell). She asked me instead to guest post about a recent academic experience I had, likely my last one ever; which in and of itself is grounds for a personal existential crisis about who I am now that I am not a student. But again, I digress.

Jeanine on an excavation. Tip 1: Make sure to pack your whip to fight snakes and dastardly Nazis.

When one imagines an archaeological site, I would assume they imagine a Bedouin-style encampment, of linen tents and dust storms, of sexy, dirty people in khaki sitting around a fire swatting at mosquitoes and drinking some sort of local moonshine talking about the divergent human lineages and cultural groups in excited, breathy whispers. Sounds sexy, doesn’t it?

I regret to inform you that my digging experience was nothing like this. It was, for the most part, a group of women digging in the dirt on an unassuming patch of grass on an inconspicuous hill in Alexandria. While quaint in setting, this site was a total pain to access. Firstly, I know nothing about Alexandria. So when I got off the metro on that first day, I had my iPhone and my piss-poor sense of direction to guide me. I could see where I was supposed to be, but I had no idea how to get there, since where I needed to be was on the other side of several train tracks. So I followed myself as the little blue dot on the map on my phone and tried to make out street names and guess which way was “north.” (I often like to blame my poor sense of direction on being left-handed and the oppressive nature of such things). Naturally, I ended up going all the way around the wrong way, making me late, after the professor expressly said that the one thing she would not tolerate is tardiness. Also, it is uphill the whole time, which Nadia can attest to, I hate.

The excavation team found evidence that Jeanine and Nadia's colonial era doppelgangers had indeed existed

and, as it turns out, Gen and Zach's did too.

Colonial gen experimented with many hairstyles

and colonial Zach loved shoes.

Off to a great start, I had only a few moments to glance at the impending splendor of the George Washington Masonic Memorial which is an incredibly beautiful, formidable, and strange place. I still don’t actually know what it is or why it’s there except the Masons want it there, and want to keep it extremely clean. Though they graciously allow the field school students to use the facilities, we would remove our dusty/muddy/grassy shoes every time we went into the Memorial to use the restroom. We also had to use the side door and ring a doorbell to be let in by a security guard. Once inside, we were confronted with lots of marble, and upon peeking into some of the exhibit galleries, mannequins in full Mason regalia holding small children, or honest-to-God altars in an Egyptian style, which made our brains buzz with the implications of cultural appropriation. It was, needless to say, weird; picture 7-10 girls and women in dirty clothes wandering around an immaculately clean granite and marble building in their stocking feet. But their facilities were much nicer than a Porta-Potty, or peeing in the woods.

The site itself occupies a small fenced-in space next to a giant tree on top of what is known as Shuter’s Hill (I won’t bore you with all the details of the history of the site, but it includes a plantation, a few mansions, a Civil War headquarters, a golf course, and a proposed subdivision that the Masons bought and preserved instead). Our site manager, Fran, drives a 1984 white Chevy van with the words “Alexandria Archaeology” on the side in blue letters; think of the type of van you’d expect a suburban sex offender to drive, and that is what our “base camp on wheels” looks like. Fran parks it under a large tree, next to chain-link fenced in area where our site is. Obviously, if there is a thunderstorm of any proportion, we would be extremely safe.

The George Washington Masonic Temple in Alexandria

The site has been continuously open for like 10 years, which is not good archaeological practice (which Alexandria Archaeology recognizes) meaning there is a big hole in the ground of various depths, covered with a series of tarps, held down by rocks, bricks and tarp pins. It is, in a word, underwhelming.

Likewise, actually excavating is underwhelming. The first day our site manager, Fran (who reminds me of every crazy mom I know, so I loved her. She came to the dig one day wearing a FC Barcelona shirt and I asked if she was a fan, and she looked down at the shirt quizzically and replied that it must be a gift from her son who lives in Barcelona to her husband) marched us over to a patch of grass, handed us some shovels, and swore up and down that underneath these carefully outlined squares of earth was an archaeological feature (a significant artifact that cannot be removed from the ground—often an outline in the soil of something used by humans at one point) that was directly related to the laundry outbuilding, which was the associated building of our excavation. Additionally, on the first day, after a long weekend of rain, we had to bail water with a series of pumps and an assembly line of buckets. We initially joked about not having to go to the gym that day, which would later turn out to be a cruel joke, as our fingers, hands, shoulders and knees began to slowly deteriorate beneath us. Because the thing you don’t see in Indiana Jones movies or National Geographic documentaries is that digging is manual labor. One spends half the day kneeling over a hole with a trowel, scraping away, with varying levels of exertion and strength, across a clearly marked “unit,” making sure not to collapse the walls (this will royally ruin your unit and your work, as the soil will get all mixed together and “contaminated”) or dig through the level into the next one. After scraping, one uses a dustpan to scoop up all the soil, dump it into a bucket, and once the bucket is full, “screen” it, which means to sift through it like a surveyor looking for artifacts.

In our case, we were looking for historic artifacts—ceramic sherds, glass shards (yes, there is a difference), metal, bone, building material, anything that would indicate human modification or use. We weren’t finding whole bowls or diamond rings; we were finding minuscule bits of decorated ceramics, animal bones, window glass; the most mundane evidence of human activity ever. At the beginning of our dig, a mere glimmer of painted ceramic or animal bone was met with a squeal of delight (it was a class of only females, like most of my classes in grad school), “Oh! Porcelain, true porcelain! What fine dining these people were doing! And I’ve found it!” Which would then turn into a fantastical diatribe about a raucous dinner party gone awry (we had a running joke, based on the artifacts we found, that at our site was a pig roast, accompanied by several bottles of beer and wine, which ended in a drunken brawl in which one person lost a tooth—that I found!)

But save a few thrilling pieces (and “thrilling” is a relative term—I’m talking manganese glass, a human tooth, large animal bones and a Civil War shell casing—hardly the Missing Link) we found hundreds of nails, bits of ceramic, and windowpane glass. And when I say bits, I mean bits—miniscule scraps of mainly unidentifiable dinnerware that had to be washed and analyzed by hand in the lab later. But after a dig, the lab was a dream to me—I’m one of those people. Our instructors say you are either a lab person or a field person, and I am definitely a lab person (it’s honestly one of the main reasons I went into museums and not anthropology—the idea of spending long spans of time “in the field” wearing khaki pants and Merrell hiking boots does not suit my sensibilities or my delusions of fashionability).

Because when you’re in the field, you’re dirty, hot, wet, itchy, sweaty, hungry, which leads to general crabbiness. The week I was in the field it rained. Every. Day. And because we were only in the field for a week, and in the class for two, we could not afford to waste precious digging time. So every day we would bail water, erect a canopy (think of one your parents put up for a backyard party) and work underneath the canopy while it rains. The canopy then creates a steam room like atmosphere, and you’re sweating through your bright blue poncho you insisted on buying at Target and every step you take your sneakers are making that squishing noise. You sit there and think no person ever in history could ever have wanted to do this with his or her life, which is why everyone digs in the desert (or so you think).

In between the pottery shards we found THIS. Holy DINOTOPIA.

And other thing about participating in a field school in a reasonably urban setting is that when you take public transportation to your site, you get a lot of very strange looks. Fran swears that one day after a dig a person on the metro offered her money, seeing as she looked so homeless. Indeed, the wardrobe for field school was a major concern of mine; I don’t have much in the way of field clothes (unlike Nadia and Gen, my boyfriend Zach and I aren’t really into “urban hiking” or hiking of any kind). As a result, I wore the same pair of khaki pants (a botched attempt at online shopping at Banana Republic, before I realized that there was no way the pants would like they did on the model) and weird Nike sneakers my brother bought for me at a Goodwill online auction (yes, I am being serious) and white v-neck t-shirts I stole from Zach. So when I rode the metro in the morning, with all the federal employees and non-profit do-gooders in their Ann Taylor Loft and J. Crew clothes, I looked like a very unusual construction worker (the large lunchbox never helped). And then when I rode the metro home, I was covered in dirt, grass, sweat and surrounded by an unmentionable odor. Needless to say, no one sat by me.

By the time I got home at night, I was exhausted. I had to prop myself up with a heating pad and a BIG glass of water while I toiled away at my field notebook. Inside I had to record daily activities (“We opened the site this morning only to immediately close it again, due to torrential rain. We later opened it up and took soil samples, which were somewhat skewed by being soaking wet”) and all sorts of soil descriptions and color measurements that I barely understood, but being somewhat adept at writing (though by this point, you may disagree) I at least managed to BS my way through it. Much like the way I had to BS my way through lab analysis. Remember all those bits of ceramic? They are very different, based on composition, time period of production, glaze used, and so forth. So once they had all been cleaned, we had to compare them to examples from a study collection, as well as a huge three-ring binder of photos. We painstakingly identified tiny sherds based on fluorescent testing (who knew that porcelain fluoresces differently than pearlware? Or soda glass fluoresces differently from lead glass?), eyeball identification and our instructors’ help. I can pretty surely say I don’t really know anything more about 18^th or 19^th century ceramic except that there is often a difference.

Jeanine's monster truck is prohibited from entering the dig site.

I also can’t say I know that much more about being an archaeologist. You have to be deftly skilled in geology, archaeology, history, soil science, anthropology, and so forth, which I am not. I did learn how the process works, and to appreciate it, which will hopefully help me in my career as a museum professional. And I will give Werner Herzog some credit; when he asks the French archaeologist in Cave of Forgotten Dreams about how we can never what the hopes, dreams and fears of these ancient people were, he’s right. We can’t. Even in historic archaeology, where there is written record available, documentation still poses many obstacles. Historic documentation is often only pertinent to those who had access to it: literate individuals, with resources to write, which are often white, wealthy, landowners who were men. And even their records often only pertain to aspects of their lives that they deemed important at any given time; such records often negate the ordinary everyday lives of people in the past, which we in the disciplines like anthropology are wildly interested in. Historic archaeology, in the same vein as anthropology, or museum studies, or any type of cultural studies begs two very important questions: what is at stake? And, who gets to decide? (Hops off soapbox)

Note: My field school was sponsored by the dedicated and talented women at Alexandria Archaeology (http://alexandriava.gov/Archaeology) who have spent 20+ years preserving the archaeological record in the city of Alexandria. Indeed, Alexandria was one of the first cities in the nation to have a citywide commission dedicated to the preservation of the city’s history by archaeological means. It began as a rescue-type practice, saving historically significant areas from development without first preserving the contents and the features in the ground, to full-fledged community archaeology. This means that the local community participates in the digging, processing, and discourse of the city’s archaeology. The idea behind it is that the local history belongs to all the local citizens, and as stakeholders, they should and can be allowed to partake in its preservation. Alexandria Archaeology has a museum space in the waterfront Torpedo Art Center in Old Town Alexandria; if one expects a traditional museum and exhibition space, he or she will not find it here. The museum very openly practices what its mission statement preaches: preserving and studying the archaeological record is done in the lab, which is the exhibit, which is the museum. On Fridays, the museum is active with volunteers and interns cleaning and analyzing artifacts within view of the visitors, so they become a part of the exhibit, according to staff, who also mentioned that the Alexandria Archaeology Museum was one of the first museums to have an open lab. This practice directly creates a connection between the past and the present for visitors and community participants, which in turn then hopefully encourages a feeling of stewardship to all who visit and participate.

Until we meet again!