2 weeks, 2000 miles (to be continued)

Well... It's been a long 2 weeks and I should probably start from the beginning if I want to keep this blog post shorter than a novel! It'll be in two parts at least, anyway, I'm not staying up all night writing!

So I'll start with my first week, when I departed from my aunt and uncle in Alaska and headed East to the Yukon, Canada, to participate in an archaeology field school right on the US/Canadian border. Lorraine, a friend of my aunt, drove me there - I'd never met her before but she was lovely, and although it was over 8 hours drive, it wasn't so bad because when I wasn't sleeping, this was the kind of view we had:

When I got there it was pretty late and they'd already had dinner, so I didn't get the chance to get to know any of the other students at camp that evening, I was tired from the drive and we had to be at breakfast by 7.30am the next day. So I retired to my tent (after putting it up, that is) and set my alarm for 7. It was freezing when I woke up in the morning, and my clothes were too, and I'm no morning person... So I snuggled down into my sleeping bag for another 10 minutes. I ended up leaving my tent and getting to breakfast at 7.40, just 10 minutes late, and everyone had told me that camp hadn't been running on schedule anyway, so I wasn't worried. But when I got to the "mess tent" (the food tent), there were only a couple of people left washing the dishes! It turns out I was not ten minutes late but an hour and ten minutes late. No-one had told me about the time zone change from crossing the Canadian border.

So the day was off to a bad start already, I guess. I chomped down a bowl of coco pops and headed for work in the pits, armed with my trowel and the rest of my digging kit - a complete amateur at archaeology but willing to learn, and Lorraine had promised to teach me... And damn, she worked me hard, considering it was an 8 o'clock start in the cold and all... At lunch I was ready for a break - I was not used to early starts and outdoor work. So I headed for my tent to pick something up, and when I opened it, I was horrified. The mosquitoes and flies were not inside my actual tent, fair enough. But they were buzzing all around in between the net and the outer cover, and in the tent I could see and hear them swarming around above me.

So I was half way through my first day, and I was thinking to myself "It's cold. I'm being massacred by bugs, I'm tired, and now I have to sleep underneath a swarm of them tonight. I've been digging around in the cold dirt since 8am and finding very little, I feel totally inadequate because I know less about what I'm doing than anyone else on camp, and I don't have anyone to talk to! I have to carry on working until 6pm and I have a whole week of this to endure! Damn!"

Fortunately, that night we all drove to the nearest town (and when I say nearest town, I mean Beaver Creek: a shop, a lodge and a bar, population 100). And we went to the bar. And I got drunk. That was when I started to enjoy myself. It was a challenge on my lying skills because you have to be 19 to drink in Canada (still an improvement on 21 in Alaska), but I actually made friends with everyone. I made everyone laugh, and I made everyone marvel at my strange choice of drink - apparently they don't drink vodka with coke in the USA. 4 vodka & cokes, 4 shots of vodka and a tequila later, we were all friends, and the bugs did not bother me that night.

I am pleased to announce that I have improved in the waking-up-on-time-the-next-day department. Collapsed into bed intoxicated at 2am, up at 7am bright and cheerful without even feeling groggy! And I must say that the next day, things improved and even the digging started to be fun because I started to get to know what I was doing. I was learning the difference between a sharp rock that’s broken in half and a rock that’s actually been used a stone tool. And those tools were about 14,000 years old. You can see a few of the little things from this picture of one of the other students showing some visitors the artifacts:

So this is me working on site (don’t laugh if I look fat or stupid, camp was no fashion show and it was cold, so I’m padded out with several layers!)

Screening dirt for artifacts:

Putting up a tarp to stop the pits filling with rainwater:



Anyway, I found out that Lorraine had roped me into cooking with her the next day. On camp everyone takes turns – in pairs – to cook for the whole camp, and clean up after each meal too. Being on cooking duty means waking up at 6am so breakfast is ready for everyone else (about 12 people) at 7am. Fun… But at least now I know that if I can cook for 12, I can definitely cook for myself at uni. This is the mess tent we ate in every meal:

Note the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in progress on the left: you can tell the other students were all American… In fact, they forced me to try one. It wasn’t so bad after all, but I still prefer peanut butter without jam. Although we ate meals often comprising of leftovers from other days, we worked so hard with short breaks, so meal time was really looked forward too, and everything tastes good when you’re cold and tired.

We did fun things in the evenings. One night they went to play baseball at a field in Beaver Creek, and I went to watch. Watch… Ha. They forced me to play, and I’ve never played baseball or even seen it being played. They let me practice catching the ball in the glove a few times but that was it – I was lucky that the rules are similar to rounders, but its not like I was ever good at that at school either, or any sport for that matter. But I was pretty good at baseball if I may say so myself ^_^ Well, good considering it was my first time. I didn’t get a home run, but only one person did, and I did hit the ball first time and got round the bases without getting out! Yay.

Another thing we did was to go to a potlatch. A potlatch is like a big Native American kind of party. Well, I say party, it’s for when someone has died, but its not a funeral, its more of a celebration. In their culture, when someone dies, another clan steps in and helps with all the funeral arrangements. Then, at the potlatch there is dancing and eating and singing and they celebrate the person who has died. At the end they give out gifts, but not to the family of the person who has died. Actually what happens is that the family of the deceased one gives gifts to other people in the community, those who are not from the same family or clan. I think it was originally a way of redistributing wealth but now it is just to show how much they cared about the person who passed away. They usually give out blankets, and they had a huge pile of hundreds of blankets. They even gave me a big pile of gifts! They gave me two blankets and four towels.

I didn’t get many pictures at the potlatch – it was hard to tell when it was appropriate to - but here are a couple:

Giving out blankets and gifts:

Anyway, here’s another couple of pictures from camp:

This is the campfire we all sat around during our breaks and in the evenings to keep warm.

And this is how foggy and cold it was one morning in camp:

I’ll leave you with this, a list of things I read from the back of one of the senior archaeologist’s t-shirts:

10 Signs You’ve Been in the Field Too Long

1. You smell better with bug spray than without
2. Clean means bathing in the gravel ponds
3. You smell smoke from a forest fire and think it’s just your clothes
4. You are baffled and astounded by flushing toilets
5. You forget how to write your name but have no problems with words such as “paleosol” and “loess”
6. You have no qualms about eating the pretzel you saw on the ground by the dog’s foot
7. Your tan has an annoying tendency to come off with soap and water
8. You can’t tie your shoe due to “trowel hand”
9. When you hear the word “dating”, you assume that it means carbon
10. You are willing to fish a good marshmallow stick out of the fire with your bare hands

I can honestly say that pretty much every single one of those things applied to me by the end of the week. I even know what “paleosol” is (I dug four feet down to get to it with nothing but a trowel, so I also know what “trowel hand”). I definitely know about the dirt… On my first day my orange hoodie got so dirty and muddy I put it in my laundry bag to take home at the end of the week. Three days later, I got it out again because it was the cleanest thing I had left to wear!
In fact: to sum that all up, here’s me wearing that orange hoodie, sitting in the upper paleosol of my pit, dug by hand with a 5 and half inch trowel, and my first find – a bison bone (a very, very old bison! We later found the skull and a load of teeth too!)

Oh, and one more, of me standing in my pit proudly presenting my first profile (mapping of the soil layers ^_^)

Well, that’s all about my first week in Canada – working at camp. I have many more pictures too. And I’m sorry if I’ve bored you, but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn, because I’m not keeping a diary and even if this blog becomes uninteresting to everyone else, at least I’ll remember my holiday forever.

But if you are interested, watch out for my next update :-D There was too much to write about my first week at camp so the rest – my road trip through the Yukon with my aunt and uncle – will follow another day.

I MISS YOU ALL - and I can't wait to come home! And my exam results too!

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