Day 1 of Session I

It is still too hot. Sometimes it rains very hard. I think my eyelids are reacting to being sweated in or on; they feel chafed. There seems to be no end to the 80's-plus heat and matching--or higher--humidity

Last night I stood vigil at Southern New Hampshire University and not only did all four of the diggers we expected show up, we got one more I had thought was scheduled for Session II. Doug and Matt kept me company while I waited. The coordinator and I had not quite managed to plan to meet and give me keys, so the campus cop let the students into their rooms. Three of them had parents with them; I was glad I looked respectable enough. I am not sure I would have trusted me. The dorms were insanely overheated, not having been opened up for a week or two. But everyone survived and today we got them keys (so they can leave their suite and return at will)and internet access (so they can either find out where they might go or decide not to bother).

Most of the day, we were at the lab. There are, I believe, 15 new people, only one of whom has dug before, and no one has dug prehistoric. They were mostly high school and college students, but we have a woman retiring after 20 years as a police detective and a couple of people somewhere around my age who just wanted to try archaeology. Dick gave his "semester course in archaeological methods condensed into about two hours" speech, sort of exegesis on a unit form and a bag tag. It is an excellent speech, even though the lab was much too hot, but possibly the new part of his talk was the most interesting:

The last few years' field schools have been mostly Paleo sites with very few bones of any kind surviving that long (say ten thousand years), but there is a reasonable chance we shall encounter Native American human remains; they did on the Smyth site, up the slope. The dig protocol (http://mysite.verizon.net/ddboisvert/nevillesitewebsite/protocol.html) says that if we find someone's remains in the field, we will leave that square and go to another. NOT going through the area looking for goodies, not taking the remains and measuring the daylights out of them to find out what he or she ate or died of -- which is the way we find out something about how she lived while she was alive. Part of my affection for archaeology seems to involve witnessing on behalf of the people who are no longer around to speak for themselves -- they WERE here, they lived fairly well in circumstances I cannot imagine, they had skills I admire. For me, a very old dead body gives the person whom it once was another chance to make her or his point. And just leaving them untouched takes that chance away from them.

We usually say "Well, how would you feel if it was your grandmother in the museum?" but I think that might be kind of neat. My ancestors used to take coffin portraits of nicely composed dead people to remember them by, which isn't my cup of tea, any more than Victorian mourning jewelry braided out of one's loved one's hair. We do go to great lengths to recover people's bodies from disasters or wars, maybe mostly these days in the name of 'closure'(a culturally acceptable euphemism for 'keeping the dead from haunting the living'). We are quite willing to dig up our ancestors to find out how they died. But my culture has been distinguishing very carefully between body and soul since about the 4th century CE, not one of the best things to happen, either.


Dick managed to discuss the change -- from an archaeologist's delight at finding a grave unplundered by anyone previous to himself, to a thoughtful person's respectful retreat -- without making any snarky remarks. I don't think I could have been so polite. He points out, accurately, that sensitivity to the feelings and beliefs of people who are not archaeologists, or even Western Europeans, has come a long way in the past, say, 35 years. I know I should think this is a good thing; in fact, in many ways I do. But I also can't help thinking of how much MY culture has learned from picking through other people's graveyards. And I cannot conceal that I really like looking at the grave goods, which are often better made or in better repair than most things we find, as well as somehow personal to that one dead person.

Fortunately I have no power to break or amend the law, and NOT excavating something is much easier to change than having excavated something. If I am going to maintain the distinction between controlled, prudent, appropriate Looking for Stuff and vicious, destructive Treasure-Hunting, it would be well for me to try to develop some scruples.

Tomorrow we shall take surveyor-type elevations on all the points of the grid and the centers of each square, both to have the record and to allow Mark to make beautifully rendered contour maps on a human-sized scale. Actual digging. I hope it doesn't rain as much as it did today.