Being An Archaeologist Isn’t Always Glamorous: Part Deux

From the research that brought you Being An Archeologist Isn’t Always Glamorous…  comes the thrilling sequel Being An Archaeologist Isn’t Always Glamorous: Part Deux! The location, Mainz. The cast, tripled! The weather, unpredictable. The commute, longer. The research, even less thrilling!

I have not written in much detail about what I am doing in Mainz for a month because there is really not much to tell. I arrived on *March February 25^th and settled into the museum owned guesthouse that is offered to visiting scholars for free if there is available room. I stayed there for a week, then switched to a friend’s (my friend from Vix 2011 that I referred to as The German) apartment for a week, and then back to the guesthouse.

When I have not been moving my stuff from one side of town to the other, I have been spending my days in a gigantic library. Why come all the way to Mainz for a library? Well, this library contains over 120,000 books on archaeology and history alone! Most of the publications are in various European languages (mostly German), and the focus of most of the literature is the archaeology of Europe. While we have many great libraries in the States, most of these publications are very old or difficult to come by across the pond. In short, it is a fantastic place for me to get some research done as many of the materials I need are available on site. Sometimes the reading is really great and I think, “This is just the thing I was looking for!” and other days, like today, I was almost bored to tears by a book I needed to finish and could do nothing after but watch a crappy zombie movie. Here is a highlight from Cockneys vs. Zombies:

So, on average, I am spending about eight hours a day in a library reading French. I have rather limited brain power for anything else after that. Luckily, after I arrived I realized I know several people in the city and have made new friends as well during my stay. I have been watching movies and TV shows as I do at home, and eating…a lot. I have rarely had a meal alone which is a nice change from my normal research schedule! The German has been a great host too and I have been comparing him to a Midwestern mother because he keeps making me eat! I fear I will be fat before I leave Mainz.

I have also shared some of my culinary masterpieces with The German and The Hobbit (another blogged about friend from Vix who came to town last week to visit!). As the former is an avid carnivore and the latter is a vegetarian, I tried to engineer some meals that would work for the three of our diverse food tastes. Baked gnocchi, stuffed peppers, and American-style pancakes were all successfully transferred recipes! Have not been drinking too much, though I was introduced to Schlappeseppel beer! Not only is it a delicious beer, it is a great word to say while toasting your beer (apparently the first time I tried to say it, it sounded like I already drank about five of them according to my wonderful friends)! I am trying to find a distributor in the States -- keep your eyes open!

To summarize, my time in Mainz has been spent walking from one side of town to the other, sitting in a library for eight hours a day reading French (because I cannot read German yet), visiting friends, and eating too much. All-in-all, it sounds rather boring, but each day has its highlights.

*Thanks Ami, for the correction! I am not that magical yet!

I Got a Bit Distracted

Well, the excavations finished this week and I realized that I have not provided an update in a long time. While this might make some of you worry (Mother), this is actually a good thing because it means I was keeping busy and was having such a great time with my friends that I was not on the internet all the time. Since I slacked off, I will give a brief summary of what I did and what we discovered at the excavations this year.

We were still working in the same area as last year on top of Mont Lassois. There is about 12 to 18 inches of soil on top of the bedrock which was removed with some heavy machinery. After much of the top layer was scraped off, we cleaned off additional layers of dirt to search for features, such as postholes, pits, and ditches. We opened a huge area and it took four weeks to get everything visible and clean. What we discovered were lots of postholes which indicated that there was another (or several) houses on top of the plateau in addition to the large house which they discovered several years ago. In the past then, the site had one very large house which they believe belonged to the princess of Vix and then there were several smaller houses, but still quite large, that were around the big house. The entire area was then enclosed by a ditch which we also explored further. Several structures of later dates were also evident during our work and two more graves were also excavated this year.

I did none of this work though. I was adopted by the documentation team and helped to describe and draw 300 of these postholes, pits, and ditches. I worked with then daughter of one of our directors to do this. I am incredibly grateful to her because, though she speaks English very well, she let me practice my French which improved dramatically in a matter of the first three days with her. She is only 19, but she is one of the sweetest and most mature people I have ever met. It would have been a long and more trying summer without her help! Anyway, we were quite the team and really kicked ass at getting all of these documents in order. I even got to do some drawings this year which turned out quite well in my humble opinion and much to my surprise. My supervisors were also quite happy with my work and I feel good knowing I helped make things run smoothly this year. The weather was also much improved this year and we only had one day of rain, but it was not bad enough to make us stop working.

In addition to the work, my very good friend The Hobbit was able to come to the site at the last minute. He is in the top ten of my favorite people in the world, so we had a lot of laughs and good memories again from this summer. There were a lot of great people at the site this year in general. I really liked the people on the Swiss team, which was a nice change from last year and the Austrians were great this year too! Overall, there were lots of good conversations, good jokes, and late nights this summer. I have never felt more exhausted after an excavation as I do this year. It was worth it though.

To recover so that I may do more work when I arrive home, I am going to Nice for a week. Many people know of Nice, a beautiful and expensive city in the south of France which overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. I am so excited to see the beach and the water I can hardly stand it. I am sitting at the train station now waiting for my train (which goes back to Lyon first). Why did I decide to go all the way down to Nice? Well, there are Minnesotans in Nice. A couple who went to high school with Reed and who I have met several times have taken a year off from the States to live in Nice. I am looking forward to some familiar faces and accents and I hope they are too! After Nice I will go back to Paris for a day or two and then will finally fly home on the 21^st of August. I will write again before then to share my adventures, but for the moment, just know that I am happy, relaxed, and going to a fantastic place in just a few hours!

Hugs to all!

"Allez la France!"

Excavations continued this week with a little less rain finally, though we’ve still had to start and stop several times because of the weather. It has been quite cold too, which is surprising. I woke up this morning with a bit of a sore throat which has been going around the French-German team. I’m hoping it’s just because I went to bed late last night and not that I’ll actually have a cold for my last week of excavation…

The excavation itself has been a little under-whelming much to my surprise. Instead of moving many wheel-barrows full of dirt each day, I fill maybe twenty buckets of dirt in an entire day. I’ve been digging post-holes (the holes which held the framing for a house) for two weeks now and am bored to tears with it as are most of the others working at the site. These post-holes are cut into the natural soil, which is rock. I clean the dirt (mostly mud with the rain) and debris out of these to make them ready for photographing. 

It’s the same thing every day, though sometimes I get to “spice it up a bit” by cleaning a ditch instead. Some graves were found, but they are early medieval and only a few people have been excavating these. It has been quite difficult to go from being the person in charge/responsible for an area and all of its data collection and paperwork back to a person who is merely there to move dirt. I feel no connection to the site as I don’t know what is even going on here. I expressed these feelings to one of the supervisors who is responsible for all of the note-taking and it sounds like he may put me to work this week with more of the mental work, which would be a nice change. Here’s hoping. 

Despite the monotonous work, I am enjoying myself over all. We get coffee breaks and ice cream breaks which is nice. I can listen to my French lessons or music on my iPod if I like, which helps the day pass a little more quickly. If I’m actually working near others, we have entertaining conversations while we work. We were all so miserable on Friday that we wrote a song about being miserable in our ditch and it turned out quite good!

I’m not sure why, but we had the excavation party in the second week of excavations and also on a Thursday night. I haven’t been drinking much at all this excavation, probably because there is so much drinking going on around me all the time, but the others more than made up for it that night. We were divided into teams based on country (German, Austrian, Swiss, and the French legionaries which included me, some Germans and the actual French because there weren’t enough for a full team) and had to play archaeological games such as tossing a trowel into a bucket, a blindfolded girl pushing a wheel-barrow with a boy inside around a series of obstacles, and a pick-axe toss. I didn’t even want to participate, but got stuck doing the trowel toss – and no, I didn’t make any into the bucket.

After this was the wheel-barrow race. We needed three girls from each team to participate and a quick count revealed we only had two girls on the French team and I was one of them. I finally agreed to do it one minute before the race began and quickly threw on some sneakers which looked pretty funny with my dress. I got up to the wheel-barrow and got ready to start when they told me I had to be blindfolded. I was in the first race, so I didn’t know this was coming and all of the directions for the games were only given in German leaving the French team quite clueless about most of the rules. I managed to get around and back, though it’s a bit difficult when the person giving you directions speaks only French… I was thankfully finished with the games after that race. We were still short a girl and they wouldn’t let our other girl go twice, so we dressed up one of the French guys in a skirt and sweater and he played for us – we had no other options! We ended up tieing with the Austrians for third place, which was fine with us since we really didn’t care that much. We just cheered a lot and waved our baguettes, French flags and pirate flags while shouting ‘Allez la France!’ (Let’s go France!).

 Last Saturday a group of us went to Bibracte, an important archaeological site for Gallo-Roman history. We decided to change it up this week and go to the medieval city of Troyes. Before we left, The Hobbit, the French girl, our blonde German boy, and I went to the Douix and had a picnic breakfast with croissant, homemade jam, baguette, juice, and fruit. It was quite lovely and there were ducks there that day too, so they enjoyed some breakfast as well. We usually have the same breakfast every day in the cafeteria making this a nice change.

After this, we hopped into the Red Fox (a car) and were joined by our driver who looks like Sigmund Freud’s twin. We made our way through the hilly countryside to the city and spent the day walking around. As it is a medieval city, there are a lot of old buildings, many of which look like they might tip over if you leaned against them – they are very tilted and sagging, but still standing! We had some Lebanese food for lunch since there was a vegetarian with us and it seemed like the best option for all. We ate in a small park next to a fountain and then met up with another group which included TSP, another really nice German girl who I like and a few others. We visited the cathedral and after the museum which has some regional archaeological finds on display. The other group left after the museum, but our car walked around for a bit, visited some shops, and had some ice cream. It was a really perfect day from start to finish with a lot of laughing and joking, good music in the car, and perfect sunny weather. It certainly rates up there as one of my favorite days I hope to remember always. The rest of the night was pretty quiet and I got caught up in conversation with some friends until about 5AM. Overall, it was a very perfect day!

This morning was a bit rough because we were getting up early to go to another flea market. I was in the Red Fox again with ‘Freud’, TSP and the French girl. We were following the car that had the map and was supposed to know where this place was, but they somehow managed to get us lost in the woods and countryside making the drive about 45 minutes long. After we arrived, everyone walked around really quickly and wanted to leave about 15 minutes later. This happened last weekend to the French girl and I who are slow and like to look. We hide when we notice them waiting for us so that we can take a bit longer. This flea market was too small to hide for long and we reluctantly left shortly after. The drive home took only 15 minutes because we saw that it should have been a direct line between the cities – oh well.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. I napped for about 3 hours, ate dinner, and then went to visit a local cemetery at night. I am in the home-stretch so-to-speak, and finish my time at Vix this week. Hopefully it will be a more interesting week for me and the others! So long, for now!

“The [American] Cheese Stands Alone”

Well, excavations began on Monday and went better than I anticipated. “Why do I say that,” you might be asking. The weekend was a bit rough for me after I arrived back in Châtillon. There were a bunch of people at the school when I returned, none of whom I knew. I put my stuff away and came back to introduce myself to German speaking folk (we have Germans, Austrians, and Swiss all staying at the school, so I had no idea where this group was from). It was pretty awkward even though they all spoke English easily. Turns out they were from the Swiss team and there was even a Vikings fan among them. After a short while, I saw a German I met from the week before return to the school with his son. I went to say ‘hello’ and ended up chatting with them most of the night since I sort of knew them and they are on my team. After they decided to turn in for the night, I returned to the Swiss who were still up. I’ll chalk it up to the excessive drinking they were doing, but they weren’t as welcoming as before and some decided to go off on a long tangent about American politics (as if I have any control over that) as well as the general stupidity and ignorance of many Americans (and yes, some points were valid). There was one member of their team who did have enough honor and kindness to defend me and my country (he was actually born in another country but grew up in Switzerland and his family is quite fond of the States I learned). After a short time I grew tired of hearing about NASCAR and Chuck Norris, so I went to bed and tried not to think about it anymore.

I woke up the next morning feeling quite enraged and wronged. I decided I’d try to focus my attention on my database, which worked for a few hours, but by 3PM I was still feeling quite annoyed. I resolved that I would tell the Swiss guys who bashed my country and its people that if they want to continue to believe America is made up of only the stereotypes presented in movies and TV that they were as ignorant as the Americans they complain about. I also had to tell myself to not seek out drama before the excavation even began, especially with people who work on a different team. I decided if it was brought up again, I would use my thoroughly planned comeback at an appropriate time. 

Just before dinner, the two French students I learned about arrived. I asked the girl if she would mind speaking French with me because I needed the practice. She was very welcoming and so we ate dinner together and chatted (as best I could) in French. The French boy came by shortly after we started eating and joined us. He asked where we were from in French (since we were already speaking it) and after I said I was from the States, he talked only to the French girl. I felt ignored for most of dinner so I excused myself immediately after I finished and went to my room where I proceeded to cry myself to sleep. I felt rejected by my peers, alone both linguistically and nationally, and like a victim of a great injustice – I know nobody did anything outright hostel to me, but I think after being on your own in a foreign country for three weeks, some things begin to feel a bit bigger than what they are. I was feeling frustrated by my lack of ability to communicate and therefore, even more isolated from all of these Europeans. I tried to tell myself that the excavation would start tomorrow and I would either meet new people who would be forced to speak in English since it is the language used by the French and Germans on the team, or I would take my rage out on the dirt.

My rational side proved to be right and the next day was better. The French boy, I came to realize within a day, is just shy and as with most of the French, he knows English well, but it afraid to speak it in front of a native English speaker. I also was reacquainted with two people I met last year – a girl from Austria who is very cool and friendly and a guy, who I shall refer to as ‘TSP’ that I taught to speak Minnesotan. They both remembered me which made me feel welcome and the French duo also continued to talk to me more and more throughout the day in both languages. I also met two other German boys who I shall refer to as ‘The Hobbit’ with whom I discuss movies and television, and the other as ‘Germany’. [These nicknames are intended to provide them with some confidentiality and have been acquired through the course of the week from various jokes which I will not even begin to try to explain here]. These are the people I wake up with, eat with, work with, eat with, work with, eat with, and socialize with in the evenings, usually over drinks or German-style ping pong. 

The latter is a most ridiculous and entertaining way of playing ping pong in which there are usually about six players to begin with who hit a ball and then run counter-clockwise to the other side of the table to hit again when it is their turn. It goes quite fast and if you miss a ball you are out until the next round. I was coerced into playing after they said I should play for the honor of America since I’m the only representative from my country. I agreed and immediately missed my first ball. TSP decided he wanted to represent Canada to inspire me to do better by beating my rival – it didn’t help, but it sure made the evening funny and others picked a country to represent as well. We ended up with America, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and of course The Shire (for the Hobbit), all fighting for a win. I won once beating the Hobbit which was shocking to him because I am really seriously wretched at ping pong. 

Why have I been talking about ping pong for what seems like an hour? Well, its really the only thing there is to do around here in the evenings other than watching bad movies – its that or drinking which I cannot do every night of the week. We have also been rained out every single day this week except for Friday. Apparently this is really, really uncommon and super frustrating for all involved. I would definitely prefer excavating than waiting around to see if the rain will stop. It is also particularly difficult to excavate after it rains because the soil here is rock, rock that cracks every winter with the freeze-thaw or any vegetation growth. The soil falls between these cracks and it takes ages to clean, especially if it is wet because you can’t just brush it clean like I normally would do. 

For most of the week, the focus has been on cleaning this bedrock and for the Austrian girl and I, cleaning (making the borders more visible) post holes from a house. Tedious, yes. Pain in the back and knees, yes. Fairly boring, yes. Would I rather be doing something else with my day, no. It sounds a bit cheesy, but this is how I know I am doing what I should be doing with my life and that I am a good archaeologist. There is tedium, physical pain, and boring tasks in many jobs out there, but I wouldn’t put up with it and enjoy it in the long run like I do in archaeology. There are very few jobs that take you to far off places (everyone here can’t believe I came all the way from the States, though I think of Europe as being quite close now), give you a chance to meet wonderful people who are both so similar and so different from me, and let you play in the mud and make up songs about loving post holes. It just doesn’t happen. This American cheese who initially stood alone has bonded and melted into a giant fondue pot of diversity here in France and is now enjoying her time with new friends and colleagues.

P.S. Oh yes, here is the thing I mentioned before that I said would make you Iron Ages folks a bit jealous. I also think most of us don’t realize how gigantic the Vix Krater actually is, but this definitely illustrates its size quite well. That is the curator of the museum with me in the photos. The last one was our ‘politician’ photo!