Ahhhh yes, waking up knowing that in less than an hour you will be completely covered, nay, saturated, in cow feces. Could you be anywhere else than North Creek Shelter? So I just got back from there last weekend, as did Brad, Holly, Molly, Mike, and Mark; all BYUers. A good time was had by all. We dug a lot, yet still did not hit sterile. At 3 meters below ground surface it eludes us. But from the very bottom we did pull the base of a point (looks like a Pinto), so that was great. What was not so great was that the feature that looked oh so much like a pithouse in profile turned out not to be….probably. Which does not bode well for my dissertation. Instead it looks like it was a heavily used use surface. It was chock full of pits. Which was cool and still salvageable, but all the fill above and probably on parts of the surface and in some of the pits was heavily rodent burrowed so that data coming out of there will be suspect. Not good. I am currently completely ignoring this problem and not thinking about what to do, but eventually (probably this weekend) I will have to evaluate things and decide if I can still do my dissertation on the Early Holocene on the Northern Colorado Plateau using data primarily from North Creek. I wouldn’t be extremely bummed if not for the amount of time and energy I have all ready expended in doing background research and writing grants. I don't have the official photos from the dig yet but will try to post one or two when I get them.
UNLV has me teaching two Cultural Anthropology 101 classes this semester. I have the afternoon and evening classes which means that they are smaller, only around 30 or 40 kids a piece. I didn’t know I was going to be teaching them until two weeks ago, and I was in the field so I couldn’t do any preparation. So this week I have been struggling to get things together. So far so good, no one has dropped anyway. A couple of other things going on but I’ll save them for another post; I’ve got to get back to work. It was good to see all the BYU folks again. Aaron, Chris, Cady, Scott, Mike….we were wishing you could have been there, it would have been a good time to have everyone together. Frescas all around!
2 comments:
Man, David. I feel for you. Are you done with classes, though? That would be a relief. Hang in there and don't let those students give you crap!
Sorry about the Pithouse thing Dave. But, remember how you wanted to do coprolites for your MA and that fell through? Maybe this is a sign.
As for teaching courses, congrats. It's really an eye-opener as to how much preparation it takes to stay ahead of the students with readings and assignments. I just shot myself in the foot choosing two different textbooks that I haven't read before.
Foolish me.
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