Well hello Universe!

Hi there. This is my first blog attempt. Failure = shame. I think.

I'm going to be babbling with partial coherence about the six months I am currently spending in and around the vibrant cultural capital that is Thunder Bay, Ontario. Why, dear reader, should you care? Because This Is Archaeology!!!! Hence the title of this blog: anarchaeolog. Anarchy + Archaeology + Log = a new, senseless word. What fun.

I live (just so you all know) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and I work for an archaeological firm called 'Western Heritage'. Last year I was hired as a temporary field excavator. Since then I have the honour to be a permanent staff member of Western. There aren't many companies that specialize in archaeology and I'm incredibly happy to be working for Western Heritage. We spent 5 months last summer excavating a site called 'MacKenzie I' not far from Thunder Bay, beside a river called (can you guess? Let's see. No, you're wrong. Loser.) the Mackenzie River. If you're driven by curiousity you can find it crossing the #1 Highway slightly east of Thunder Bay. Check Google Earth if you are curious.

I'd tell you that the site's location is shrouded in secrecy except that would be stupid. Fun, but stupid. Archaeologists worry about looters, you see. We spend endless amounts of time carefully moving tiny bits of soil and rocks molecule by molecule, measuring everything about fifteen different ways so we can know exactly where each and every object was dropped, lost, thrown or placed all those many years ago. Then some doofus with a shovel and a lust for pointy bits of rock comes along and steals it all. Oh, the humanity! We sob, we rend our flesh, we gnash our teeth and chew angrily on our shields. We Don't Like It. So we try to make sure that these dirty rotten scoundrels don't get to know where these sites are. This site, Mack I as we so fondly call it is pretty easy to find. But I'm not telling you where it is exactly because I do worry about looters. So there.

The main reason I'm writing this blog is because my Auntie Sharon asked me to. About ten years ago I spent a long time stumbling around the British Isles, looking at some stuff, poking some other stuff and falling over yet more stuff. Excepting that last bunch of stuff, it was great fun. Because phoning each and every member of my family and group of friends would have been ruinously expensive I wrote a lot of long emails and sent them out for the world to read. My family said they enjoyed reading them. That doesn't mean they were good. My family also told me they enjoyed looking at the paintings I did as a four year old. I can't help but notice that none of those masterpieces are currently in any art gallery. Nor are they framed and displayed with pride in any house my family members live in. (Hear that, Mom? Where's my damn butterfly drawing? Huh? HUH??)

So there you have it, my reasons for entering into the exciting and vibrant world of Tuh Blogz.

Like everyone who talks to an audience (that's you, dear darling reader) I now think I have something important to say. So I'm going to go on for a while.

I've been in a wunnerful hotel for three days now aricraft whistling joyfully overhead, mostly because the camp we're going to be living in for 6 months isn't ready yet. The people who are building it somehow got the idea that we didn't need it built until sometime in July, which is interesting because the dig starts on May 11th. So currently the builders of the camp are having kittens trying to get it done on time.

To clarify, by camp I mean a set of fifteen shacks, wooden floors and walls with canvas roofs and oil heaters, a very nice collection of prime aged Porta-Potties, a food tent and shower tents carefully placed in the middle of bloody nowhere. The majority of the crew will be eating, sleeping, drinking and generally getting bushed in this aforementioned camp.

"The crew?" you ask? "How many?" you inquire? Well. Let me tell you.

50 people. That's a lot of people. I use the term loosely because we're talking about archaeologists. Remember when you were in high school and there was that pecking order? The one that went something like this:

Jocks
Uber-cool non-jocks (usually the Fashion Patrol)
The mass of Normal Folks
Band Losers
Drama freaks
Rockers
Punks (or your local equivalent)
Freaks
Stoners
Nerds
Uh.....

That last one? The "Uh...." crew? They were the ones that made the rest of the pecking order either flinch to one side or spit in a sort of Pavlovian response when the Uh rounded a corner. Well they were far cooler than the ones that eventually became Archaeologists. Now of course we are the cutting edge of cool. (I'll pause here so you can stop laughing. Better now? Good.)

Maybe I've indulged in a bit of hyperbole there. Just a little. But really, when the jocks, etc were going on about how cool they were, we were the ones who were wondering if it's true that the Clovis culture really is the progenitor culture for North America.

That's a lie, that one. A biggie. I was thinking about how nice it would be to be cool for a change and why Cathy wouldn't even look at me when I smiled hopefully at her. Now of course I know the answer to that: I was an absolute geek.

I had no real interest in archaeology. After all, I was going to be a famous... something. Disclosure time. I'm old enough that I was in high school before Indiana Jones and His Stupid Hat suddenly launched tomb raiding and looting into the realms of scientific respectability. How I curse him. Mostly for the Stupid Hat. Now we all have to wear them. When the movie came out I enjoyed it, shrugged and moved on. University raised its terrifying head several wanderlusting years later and I started thinking about things like whether or not solipsism really was going to answer all my questions (the answer is no) and if it's really true that Canterbury Tales was an allegory for baseball.

First year ended and I was wondering how I was going to make it through the summer without the kind of cumulative hangover that can kill a man when friends said "Hey, why don't you take a field school? It's fun, there's camping involved and you get credits for it." Being even more gullible than I am now I thought "Why not? I need credits like a fish needs water." So in the summer of 1989 I enlisted. Sorry, enrolled. And was sucked in. I loved it. From beginning to end, that field school was great. Being the first person to touch a stone tool in thousands of years was pretty cool. It still is.

Hey, funny story. When we first arrived at the Rush Bay Road site we were going to excavate for the field school, the maps of the site didn't make it with us. Rush Bay was a glacial moraine (look it up if you're curious) that had lots of cobbles of stone appropriate for making tools out of and the site had been used as a field school for a long time. But we didn't know what had been excavated because there were no maps. So our instructor plotted out a grid and told us to start working. We dug.

All around my meter-square unit giddy young archaeologists were finding tools galore. Me.... nothing. It got to the point that the prof and the two supervisors would oh so casually saunter past my unit, casting keen glances at the floor of the unit and digging their toes into the backdirt.

Backdirt is the stuff you take out of the hole you're creating. You put it into a bucket, carry said bucket to a screen and dump your dirt into the screen, then agitate. Not politically, just physically. What's left in the screen when all the dirt is gone is the stuff we were looking for, normally very small bits of sharp rock. I dug for nearly a month, drawing the floor of my unit with great care, collecting no information at all. I mean, how many different and fascinating ways can you say "Nothing here but dirt"?

And then! Something! Finally! It was a stick. A rectangular stick, with some flagging tape on it. It wasn't so much a stick as it was a survey stake. From 1975. Remember the backdirt I mentioned? When enough people filter lots of buckets of dirt through the screen there is a big pile of dirt. It's called, imaginatively, the backdirt pile. That's what I spent a month digging though, the backdirt pile from 1975.

Embarrassment all around. The prof fell all over himself apologizing, collapsing in a fit of giggles, then apologizing again. So in compensation he told me to go away. Okay, not precisely. What he said was "Gee, fellow, I really feel that this was not a great thing. So I will place your education in the hands of one of my supervisors and ye and he shall go thou unto the quarry that is known unto me where thou shalt look for more pointy bits of stone." I may have exaggerated a bit there. Anyhoo. This is where I met one of my closest friends, dammit what's his name.... Steve! Steve Lundin. He was a geek as well. But a fractionally cooler geek than me. He was a master's student who wore cool hats and did geeky things like make stone tools and fence and drive a tricked out hot hatchback. He also played Dungeons and Dragons. So did I. So we would spend many off hours sitting in a wet tent, making shit up while everyone else went around getting really very drunk and having something called sex. This we called fun. And, unbelievably it was.

That was one of my best summers. Steve and I have been friends since then. If nothing else happened that summer meeting Steve made it worth it. But that wasn't all that happened, because I fell in love with archaeology. Really in love. In university I had planned to do an honours in English and Philosophy, mostly because I had already read everything ever published in English and because I liked thinking about things like "Where does Satan lie in St. Anselm's hierarchy of the universe?" (No, really. I spent a lot of time wondering about that one. I don't even believe in him, but the theory was fascinating.) But after that summer I said things like 'piffle' and 'pshaw' to English. I was going to galavant about the world, laughing at danger and yanking precious information from foreboding land masses. So I did.

And now, after a couple of minor missteps, here I am, boring the crap out of you in a hotel room with a man who has 'fate is inexorable' tattooed in Futhark (Nordic Runes) on his forearm. Depending on who does the translation it could also be "No man can escape his Weird." Have fun figuring that one out.

His name is Gjende. He's from Climax, Saskatchewan. This is a real, actual fact. There is a place called Climax, and his name is Gjende. He works for Western Heritage as well. We are two of the Field Supervisors for this dig. We laugh a lot and discuss things like "Was Loki the blood-brother of Odin the All-Father or Thor's actual brother?" and "If the gunflint formation includes Taconite, should we be calling this stuff Taconite, gunflint silica or gunflint chert?" We quote Monty Python at high speeds and snicker at things that remind us of other things. Basically, we're about 15. Which is good.

The crew for this dig is large. 50 people will descend on Mack I in a few days. The camp will have about 35 people in it. Gjende, myself, Dave Finch and Doug Yahn are the field supervisors and Dave Norris is the director of the excavation and camp and our Supreme Commander. His eyes breathe fire and he heats the sun with the might of his breath. Okay, no. Dave is our boss. He will be making all the real decisions and talking to the people what are paying us to do this excavation.

Truthfully, 50 people is a huge crew. Frickin' huge. I've never worked on a site with that many people. I've come close, but then I was just another student/excavator/indentured servant. This time I have to be all responsible and stuff. Am I afraid? Hellz no!! I have experience in These Sorts Of Things. I think.

This site was supposed to be a single season excavation; well we were wrong. The site itself is 1700 meters square. That's a lot of dirt to move. In some places it goes down about a meter and a half. A Canadian football field is 110 meters long by about 40 meters wide. So that's about 1140 meters. (I suck at math so take this with a grain of salt.) So this site is larger than a football field by quite a bit and there are about seven of them piled on top of each other. We excavated about half of that last summer and we have the other half to do this summer. Plus 4 other, smaller sites. Plus some bushcrashing looking for other sites. And then there's the camp to take care of.

Because I'm somewhat slow in the mornings I got 'convinced' to become the Safety Guy for the site. Western Heritage just opened up an office in Winnipeg and there were three of us there. Dave Norris, myself and Ernie Reichert. WH believes in best practices so Dave asked me to be Safety guy for our office. Pretty easy. I say things like "Don't put your fingers into the light socket" and they say things like "Whoa! That's really smart. We sure are glad you're safety guy, Mark." I may not be remembering that quite right. Anyway.

Then when we started talking about this summer and what we'd need to do to get ready for it the subject of safety came up. Dave said something like "You're the closest Safety Guy. Tag, you're it." Then he laughed a lot and retreated into the bunker he calls an office, deaf to my pleas. Even the offer of Really Good Coffee couldn't sway him.

There is one thing I would like you readers of this increasingly book-length blog to know.

I like to be silly. It keeps me young and happy. So if I make light of something, it doesn't mean that I don't care about it or am acting unprofessionally. I care a lot about archaeology and what it can tell us about the history of all of humanity. I care a great deal about the difficulties of excavating what is essentially someone else's history. I think a lot about the ramifications of this for my culture, my country and the cultures whose ancients left behind these incredible artifacts. But I like to be silly, so I crack jokes and make light of serious things. I never intentionally will be disrespectful. If someone reading this blog takes offence at anything I say, please remember that I'm talking out of the side of my mouth.

This site is turning out to be an amazing one, possibly a game-changer in our understanding of the ancient peoples of North America. The spearpoints we excavated from last year are exciting comments from rather a lot of archaeologists around the continent and (so I hear it) around the world. I'm very very very lucky to be involved in this, and I honour the fact that I am allowed to be here. It's humbling, and I want to do the best job possible.

But I still like to be silly. And I'm going to be.

And now I have to go to work. Ta ta!