mumbling

I started growling the day before yesterday. This behavior I first noted in Sarah in Ossipee in 2001, when she had four tons of flake-laden kibble to get through. I thought it was a voluntary thing. It isn't. It just happens.

Yesterday I had all cataloguers who were in last week, so all of them knew what they were doing. This made me realize for the second time in 24 hours that sending the diggers to the lab really is part of the field school teaching gig (Commitment to Public Archaeology). I knew it was part of a plot to teach the fieldworkers to FILL OUT THEIR PAPERWORK BETTER! but it's also the best chance they have to see a lot of coal ash and slag (not so frequent these days) and even flakes, and get shown as any times as they like what a flake looks like and what the materials are and a bit more about ceramic technology.

Yesterday that chunk of my time and attention was filled with blissful calm, or it would have been if I had not had my Residence Lieutenant hat on; if the in-house lab network had worked; if the lab refrigerator had not chosen this week to give up the ghost (and this time it's plugged in, unlike the last time we thought it had died); if Dick had given me the correct number for the cell phone he is using until Verizon gets him a working battery for the usual one.


Regardless, I managed to finish setting out the information I copy out of the on-site Field (or Finds) Bag Inventory that I copy into the Lab Bag Inventory. Although I copy out the provenience numbers (grid numbers of the pits and zone and levels of the bag) I don't copy out the occasionally fanciful description of the contents, and then I send the FBI pages back to the dig. Since we are a couple of days behind in processing the finds, we don't have the descriptions at the lab as we would if we were having the lab pretty much onsite or even getting the books together with the bags at the end of the day.

So I have very little idea what is in the missing bags.

Missing bags? Sadly, yes. Some of them are due to more or less severe cases of humanity (numbering errors. Consecutive numbers are hard) Some of them turn out to have been misfiled, as when I found all of 353 - 389 in the 420's. Some of them....

It seems every year to take the better part of the dig to figure out how to do my job. Yesterday was the first day I got someone to go through the new incoming finds and put them in order, allowing us to give Dick an early warning that 703 was missing. This allowed him to call back half an hour later and tell us 703 had never existed. I was able to sit nicely and put all 400+ of the processed bags in order with little cards for the High Fondle Factor Finds, who live in a more easily accessible bag outside their number runs, and the flat-out missing ones. To lay the bags all consecutive and put them in green boxes and write the numbers on the green boxes telling which numbers each box contains, and put the green boxes on a nice high shelf in a disused lavatory in the basement with a broken staircase and a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." Is that asking too much?

Then I got into the car with Eleanor to go to Mikey's house for burgers and hanging around with other diggers. We drove perhaps slightly farther than we really needed to. For a long time. Viewing the Floridification of Southern New Hampshire. Getting hungrier.

At length we reached Mikey's. We walked into the yard and Dick gave me the Executive Crooked Finger and told me people would be coming off the site to the lab to work on their project. I had just got the bags all nice, cozy and settled, and now people want to paw through them. Grrrrrrrrrrhhhhh.

I felt much better after I ate, and after I sat around and helped drink half of Mike's personally imported Longmorn Scotch, and heard several fine stories about SCRAP digs past. We got home relatively quickly.


This morning I had only two cataloguers, and two people who want to do research for their projects (one of the requirements for college credit). I restrained myself from slapping them, and Ele and Veronica did over 100 cards by themselves. I also got to read an article about the Smyth site, the area where we park our cars. It has much more in common with our current site than Neville The First seems to, including the lost artifacts.... (the diggers in 1969 were allowed to keep the tastier things they found. I think I prefer 'catch and release,' at least into the state depository).

And Rich and Ele kept finding awful mistakes made by people I had thought were good cataloguers. I think I am possibly coming out in heat rash or hives or something - nothing shows, but I have defined itchy places like my shoulder and the outside of my leg. Not that I am stressed about anything.

In the spirit of an unproductive day, I made a mercy run with non-metaphorical dirtbags (soil samples) to Manchester from the lab, because Dick had a sedimentologist visiting the dig. It was much cooler in my car, and on the site, than in the airlessness of the lab.Tomorrow I get to go back to the site and admire how much deeper they have dug while not finding very much exciting. And it is the end of the second third of the summer field school.