picture post ii

From Lipstick Archaeology

Our bush taxi to Dassa.

From Lipstick Archaeology

My lovely survey crew.

From Lipstick Archaeology

Bashiru, one of the local guys from Totah who works on survey with us. We flagged him as a marker for the car which was on its way to pick us up.

From Lipstick Archaeology

Waiting in the morning for cars to load up and head out.

From Lipstick Archaeology

A bit afraid of the hermaphroditic ostrich in Dassa.

picture post i

I've been rather bad about posting any picture of this trip so now I bring you a picture post (with another one to follow soon) of things in no particular order.


More or less how I appear each day on site: disheveled and incredulous. This is at the Cana-Totah site, which is part of the UCLA field school. I occasionally help out on the survey project they're running there.

Me in Ketou, my first solo (or sans organized group) trip in West Africa.

Team Awesome Fix-Crew McMaster 3000. Also, my coworker.

My favorite baobab thus far.

My project director in a souterrain we found on survey.

Outside the internet cafe, looking out on Bohicon.

Ganvie, the Venice of Benin.

betty, we miss you.

We've been digging about a week now and time is slipping through my fingers at an amazing rate. I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get organized but survey is a go and I have cool pottery and slag to prove it.

Today we were running intensive survey through clear fields we'd passed while digging our shovel test pits and the work was exhausting but rewarding, we found an amazing site that I'm very excited about. The best part of the day, though, was the comedy of errors that followed.

Too far from the village we started off at, we called our assistant to tell the car to meet us at the road. After relaying this, but before confirmation, my project head's phone runs out of credits. Mine is already out, as is our assistant's, as is everyone we're with. So the question now: did our request actually make it through. We head for the road and find no car, so we walk what felt like 10 kilometers to the main road. One of the crew hops a zemi to the village--no car. After a number of other errors, our car appears. We hop in, pick up our other crew... and then the car breaks down less than a mile later. We get it going again but only for about 20 feet. Next thing you know, five archaologists are poking around under the hood of poor Betty, our beat up Ford Explorer. Even with the mechanical knowledge of one staff member and despite creative use of flagging tape and bobby pins, Betty is still on the site of the road somewhere outside Bohicon. Get better soon, Betty, you can't quit on us now.

marriage proposals at the market

We're still encountering some rather irritating hold-ups so one of the other staff members and I went to the market to talk to the potters and try and gather some information for an ethnoarchaeological project she's working on. Five marriage proposals later and we felt our resolve waning. The funny thing is, even if you try to tell them you're already married, they just insist that you need an African husband, too. We've contemplated buying rings to wear on our ring fingers just so we can navigate the market more swiftly and efficiently, dodging all but the most determined. I will have to report back on the effectiveness of this ploy.

Spent yesterday building book shelves out of cinder blocks and spare wood and meeting the mayors of the towns I'll be running surveys through. Resourcefulness and patience seem to be the main things holding this project together right now. And alcohol. Nigerian gin (in a Dutch gin bottle) and fresh squeezed orange juice (as in, I just stuck a fork through an orange) are my saving grace right now. We've already polished off a bottle of Jack. Please let us start digging soon.

a classic tale of hurry up and wait

So they've managed to lose one of my bags en route and the department took a week to give us our permit and the roadblocks continue to pile up, but it looks like we will actually be digging very soon. I am without hiking boots but an emergency pair will hopefully be arriving with one of our field school students.

The days are noisy with the sound of zemijeans (motorcycle taxis) and we navigate the market while children sing at us: "Yovo yovo bonsoir, ce va bien, merci!" "Yovo" being the word for foreigner and the rest of it being the extent of French one needs to know to deal with said yovos.

We're still a bit in the rainy season and afternoons usually mean intense rain showers followed by an invasion of huge termites (I first thought they were locusts) that descend on the house as soon as night falls. Apparently you can eat them and one of the other staff members told us how the children in Banda would sit there with a pot of boiling water, catching the termites and throwing them in, creating a sort of termite stew. The termites only live a few hours and then things are quiet again.

Once we break earth I'll hopefully have a bit more to report, so until then.

in which i attempt to pack thousands of artifact bags into my suitcase and not look like a drug dealer in the process.

I'm surrounded by debris and debating the merits of bringing trashy romance novels (of the True Blood sort) or archaeological texts to the field. I've settled on both (plus some Neil Gaiman and Nabokov) and so my carry-on is a rather strange mélange, especially since I've stuck the field microscopes in there, too. June 30th will see me head out to the field, Chicago to Paris, Paris to Abidjan, Abidjan to Cotonou. I'll be in Benin for two months

This is how prep for the field looks like, well for me anyhow--a complete disaster. Reminder to self: never simultaneously go to the field and move to yet another city. It brings new meaning to the word chaos.

I should get back to packing so let me sign off with the greatest archaeology-related article I've seen:
Archaeologists Discover Remnants Of Legendary Party Out By Train Tracks

Who we are & what we do.

The idea for this blog came about a year ago when three of us were stranded in a rather isolated corner of Utah, 30 miles from the Colorado border and 50 miles from Wyoming. Summer was meandering along and we realized we had great stories to tell and no one to tell them to (drunk bears, rednecks with shotguns, old cars riddled with bullet holes--these were all part of our every day work routine).

There's been a shift in archaeology and those who choose careers in it. What used to be a completely male-dominated field has slowly been changing, universities across the country seeing more women than men in each graduating class of archaeologists. That summer, we found ourselves part of a completely female crew, headed entirely by males. It seemed the perfect illustration of the way the field is evolving. At times, though, it 's like we're still in a man's world, like we shouldn't brandish pick axes or haul wheelbarrows of dirt. We're here to dispel a few of those myths.

It's summer again now, which means we're packing up our Marshalltown trowels and khaki pants and heading back into the field. We'll be spanning three continents these next few months and representing both CRM and academic projects. So here's to hoping we can convey what it's like to live this unconventional and highly nomadic existence we've chosen for ourselves. And to proving that the Golden Marshalltown can just as easily be wielded by a woman.