Being An Archeologist Isn’t Always Glamorous…

When last I left you, I was recovering from all of my travels in Dijon with my friend Sarah. There isn’t much to share about the five days I spent there. A lot of sleep was involved. Sarah learned English at the university, so she is fluent in both languages which makes her a good French teacher. She is really patient too and I took advantage of her abilities to practice my French. We walked around the city a bit and saw a few movies (Sarah works at a movie theatre – she gave me a bunch of movie promo t-shirts for my excavation, but I think I like them too much to get them dirty!). I watched the newest X-Men in French since I already saw it in English and figured I could piece some of the dialogue together. I also watched the second Twilight movie in French along with the subtitles in French to get used to hearing it – I figured the story is pretty easy and lame that I could follow along easily. I have to say, I like the French voices much better than those of the actual actors; when I got too tired to listen to the French for the last half hour of the movie, I was really disappointed to hear the actors’ real voices. The French ones had much more feeling to them and were loads sexier. Twilight still sucks.

Anyway… I said au revoir to Sarah on Monday and caught a bus to Châtillon-sur-Seine. Luckily the empty-for-the-summer boarding school at which I’m staying was very close to where I exited the bus. The lunch hour was just wrapping up when I arrived and found someone right away to get me into my room. I’m staying in a lime-green bedroom on the third floor of a boarding school. No one is here right now, so it is super quiet and all the lights are timed, so it’s dark every time I open my door to the hallway regardless of the time of day.

I have a sink in my room and a shower that doesn’t work, but works well for draping my freshly sink-washed clothes (see where the not so glamorous stuff is starting to sneak in?). I have the room to myself at the moment, which is nice. I throw stuff on the other bed occasionally, but don’t really use it. I do use the other desk for my food storage and eating area (my desk is used for its intended purpose). I have a little armoire/closet-like thing that has some useful shelves, so I’m no living out of my bag for once. I have to walk down the other end of the long hallway for the toilets and functioning showers. I don’t have a kitchen, or microwave, which leaves me with limited food options at the moment since I’m fending for myself before the excavation – mostly baguette, stinky cheese, fresh fruit, canned or dried meat/fish, and peanut butter from home.

After I settled in at my new home, I decided I should check out the museum just in case it is closed on Tuesdays like most national museums in France. I arrived at the main desk and muddled my way through some French asking to speak to the conservator because I was here to study some stuff (I’ll fill you in momentarily). As my good timing had it, his assistant walked in and took me up to the area I’d be working. I essentially have a desk in someone’s office that is apparently never around or it is just sort of everyone’s office to hold random things for the museum. The assistant’s name is Patricia (said with a French accent) and I like her a lot. She is very sweet and was really good about immediately speaking French slowly so that I understood. I hadn’t really planned on looking at anything, just wanted to check things out, but she had me downstairs a short time later and was pulling things from the display case for me to look at. We took them back up and I sat with the objects looking pensive for a while (couldn’t do much without my computer). After a short while, the curator, M. Coudrot, walked in and greeted me and talked with me briefly about my research. I felt I could sneak away after that and told them I’d be back tomorrow. I found a supermarket, ate some dinner, and fell asleep.

Now begins the really glamor-lacking, unsexy, and dull part of being an archaeologist. My plans for this summer are split between museum research and an excavation (you’ll hear more about the excavation as it begins). The museum research is cataloguing, photographing, and researching objects from a spot in the city I’m staying called, Source de la Douix (the spring/source of the Douix [river]) that later joins the Seine river which runs all the way northwest through Paris. The city of Châtillon sits on the Seine, which is why its full name is Châtillon-sur-Seine (Châtillon-on-[the] Seine) – Hopefully you all don’t mind the French lesson! The objects I’m looking at come from an excavation where they literally pumped out and diverted the water as it came out of the ground so that cavers could explore the caves further back and underground and also so archaeologists could have a peak at what was in the cave area because water sources traditionally had religious significance to prehistoric people. This is the sort of thing I’m writing my dissertation about and why I’m here to look at these objects.

I was told before I arrived that there were about 30-40 sculptures, about 70 coins, and then a handful of miscellaneous objects that I would be able to examine. When I arrived and said I had 12 days to examine it all, they laughed because there wasn’t that much in the display cases, which surprised me too. My first day of work was spent looking at objects, but mostly me thinking, “How am I going to drag this out that long…I’m going to be bored out of my skull if I get this all done in a few days…” The next day I talked with the curator some more and he said there might be some objects on reserve and that he would go check. He returned with three boxes of small finds. At this point, my mind went from worry of being bored to panic, “How am I going to get all this done before I leave?” And to make my panic worse, I found out both the curator and his assistant are leaving on Wednesday for vacation and that I will have to be done by then. I’m currently still in a bit of panic mode since now I have about a hundred small objects to catalogue in the next two to three days.

“What do you mean by catalogue?” you might be wondering. Cataloguing involves some very boring and tedious tasks. Basically I have categories of information I need to collect. My database includes: catalogue number, object type, sub-type, museum location (storage or display), inventory number, period, dates, material, preservation, measurements of all sorts, description of the object, excavation location, photos, comparanda, comments, additional bibliography of the object, and several other similar categories. I have currently completed this for 86 objects in the past four days. I spent most of yesterday sorting the new small objects that I will have to fly through, but they don’t require as much description as sculpture does, for example, so I should be able to get it all done. On top of this stuff, I have to keep notes as to points where I take measurements from on an object, keep photos in order so I know which objects are which in the photos, and the worst job so far has most definitely been sketching both sides of the coins because photos don’t really capture most of the details on these, especially when they are worn away.

Now that you have a better idea as to what most real archaeology and research is like, I’ll leave you with the visual of me sorting, writing, typing, and photographing a whole bunch of objects that are about the size of the tip of my finger. Enjoy!