Pshaw - you aren't required to read my LJ archives before you can ask a question. :) Besides, my field days are sufficiently behind me that they predate my time on LJ.
Associate Curator at the Met, you say? Have I mentioned that the Met is my favorite museum to visit? Have I mentioned that I'm planning to install myself there next week when I get to NYC? (Well, AFTER I go to the Brooklyn Museum.) Turkey sounds like a wonderful place to be. I'll probably know nothing about it, but what are his main interests? As a kid, I was a total ancient history geek. My first crush? Apollo. Not the Battlestar Galactica Apollo; the Greek god Apollo. I read Homer for fun. Hell, I practically memorized every book I had on Greek mythology. Edith K. Hamilton and I were like this *does cross-y thing with fingers*.
When I was in school, I was most fascinated by boundaries and how humans adapt to change. In the New World, the end of pleistocene fascinated me. In the larger world, what first drew me into the field was paleoanthropology and primatology. I really wanted to look into the emergence of neadnderthals as well as the places in which neandthals and anatomically modern humans occupied overlapping territories. Also? The Rift Valley and the Afar Region. All wonderfully exciting times/places rife with change -- and the evidence preserved to study.
I never did make it to Africa. I had an offer to work on a dig in Mali but it was the standard offer -- we'll get you here, provide you with a place to pitch your tent, feed you...but we don't have money to pay you. I got the same offer to work on a dig in Mexico where I would have at least gotten to work with human remains. Honestly, I burned out as a student and after seeing how the university I attended treated its anthro grad students, I couldn't muster the enthusiasm for another god knows how many years of penury known as grad school. So, I worked in cultural resources management as a "Trowel for Hire" for a while.
Where I *did* work was mostly in southeast Wyoming (12,000 y.a. to historical), west Texas (prehistoric), and east Texas (some prehistoric but mostly historical) and a tiny bit of Gulf Coast work (shell middens, historical piers). That link I added to my post? The pics of people digging in flooded units and trying to figure out how to water screen clay? The joy of profiling only to realize that your dig was mostly pointless because a huge channel used to run through the site where you've placed the units? OMG - that WAS my life here in SE Texas. Finding broken ceramics and glass is so much more fun when they're invisible bits in the middle of clay clods. Heh.
Here I will shut up. I can go on and on and on about the love/hate relationship I developed with cultural resources management. If anyone really wants to know, I'm more than happy to babble but I doubt most people really, honestly care. :)
no subject
Associate Curator at the Met, you say? Have I mentioned that the Met is my favorite museum to visit? Have I mentioned that I'm planning to install myself there next week when I get to NYC? (Well, AFTER I go to the Brooklyn Museum.) Turkey sounds like a wonderful place to be. I'll probably know nothing about it, but what are his main interests? As a kid, I was a total ancient history geek. My first crush? Apollo. Not the Battlestar Galactica Apollo; the Greek god Apollo. I read Homer for fun. Hell, I practically memorized every book I had on Greek mythology. Edith K. Hamilton and I were like this *does cross-y thing with fingers*.
When I was in school, I was most fascinated by boundaries and how humans adapt to change. In the New World, the end of pleistocene fascinated me. In the larger world, what first drew me into the field was paleoanthropology and primatology. I really wanted to look into the emergence of neadnderthals as well as the places in which neandthals and anatomically modern humans occupied overlapping territories. Also? The Rift Valley and the Afar Region. All wonderfully exciting times/places rife with change -- and the evidence preserved to study.
I never did make it to Africa. I had an offer to work on a dig in Mali but it was the standard offer -- we'll get you here, provide you with a place to pitch your tent, feed you...but we don't have money to pay you. I got the same offer to work on a dig in Mexico where I would have at least gotten to work with human remains. Honestly, I burned out as a student and after seeing how the university I attended treated its anthro grad students, I couldn't muster the enthusiasm for another god knows how many years of penury known as grad school. So, I worked in cultural resources management as a "Trowel for Hire" for a while.
Where I *did* work was mostly in southeast Wyoming (12,000 y.a. to historical), west Texas (prehistoric), and east Texas (some prehistoric but mostly historical) and a tiny bit of Gulf Coast work (shell middens, historical piers). That link I added to my post? The pics of people digging in flooded units and trying to figure out how to water screen clay? The joy of profiling only to realize that your dig was mostly pointless because a huge channel used to run through the site where you've placed the units? OMG - that WAS my life here in SE Texas. Finding broken ceramics and glass is so much more fun when they're invisible bits in the middle of clay clods. Heh.
Here I will shut up. I can go on and on and on about the love/hate relationship I developed with cultural resources management. If anyone really wants to know, I'm more than happy to babble but I doubt most people really, honestly care. :)