Just finished our first week of excavations here at Ashkelon. We're kicking back here in the hallway at the Gane Dan. That's our hotel, and 'we' is me and a bunch of folks from the dig. I've been making them listen to Led zeppelin for the last half hour, and now we've moved away from that because apparently not everyone can handle excellent music.
The excavations are going smoothly, and I'm getting used to the different modalities of supervisory work (about 4 volunteers work directly beneath me, hierarchically speaking)(If we're excavating a pit, then sometimes they excavate beneath me, spatially speaking)(and if they ever make terrible jokes, then I usually consider those beneath me, qualitatively speaking). Clearly, I have yet to bleed myself completely of the paper on polysemy that I wrote a few weeks ago. (bring more leeches!)
Surprisingly, we had a fantastic discovery in our first two days of digging. As we took down a few balks we discovered a cypro-minoan stamp seal, another indication that this script was used to write the language spoken by the philistines. (since the script has yet to be deciphered, we're not sure what language that was, exactly. probably something like pig latin).
I've been trying to make theoretically responsible decisions during excavation, were precision and rigorous collection sometimes give way to exhaustion and the irritation at having to write up (yet another) MC tag. (Material Culture - anything man-made or man-modified that's not architecture). It's also been a good experience to be confronted with a square under my control, and therefore to face the task of creating, in light of past excavation, research questions to guide my digging over the next few weeks. (although it's not really up to me, since there are broader interests in play...). Right now I'm looking at a large Late Bronze (~1300 bc) outdoor surface, like a courtyard, with evidence of grain processing activities (large pits, work platforms, grindstones). The area is cut by a large Egyptian wall (~1250-1200) and so I'd like to take that thing out to have a clear view of everything beneath it (sampling a tell with squares is restricted enough, it gets a little ridiculous when you limit yourself even further), but I may have to wait on that.
As usual, I'll be heading up to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem sometime in the next few weeks to visit a few friends coming through town (B, G, R, J...maybe M?). If you're in the country and I know you, and you read this, send me a message or something.
Time to go scrub some pottery.

no subject

About to hit NY with the back of my hand. ("back..of the hand.." 2:35-2:44).
I'll be heading out to Israel in just 3 days now. At which point I will also hit tell Ashkelon with the back of my hand. (and a pick).
In the meantime I've settled into that lifestyle which makes up that delightful fraction of a grad student's career: doing nothing. While the reader may be inclined to think and then suggest that I must, in fact, still do something (I mean geez, he's still alive, right?), I am adamant: nothing. Deal with it, reader.

For those more inclined towards the anxious, wide-eyed, intellectual-hopes-and-fears kind of posts, I have no doubt those will find their way back here in due time. It's hard to be existential all the time. It's even harder to be not-existential all the time. I suppose we can only hope that I'll be near a laptop when it strikes.

On the back slope

In just about a week I'll be hopping my annual flight outta here to Israel. It always strikes very suddenly, this summer thing (which I suppose is liable to elicit a few disgruntled ... grunts, from readers who have real jobs). It'll be interesting to get back into the field and see if I'm able to keep thinking when I'm in the heat of the action, so to speak. More heat than action, typically. The skeletons are mostly pretty tame.
That is to say that after a first year in grad school (3 huzzahs) and the ensuing layering of perspectives,* ideas and entirely too much theoretical thought (I don't actually think there can actually be too much), I'm curious to see whether it will really be impossible to make room for critical thought during a dig. As a staff member (10x10 meters for me, this year) the workload is prohibitive, which means that usually any free time is spent staring at walls hoping for a quick death, and not in profound (or affected) consideration of what cultural assumptions I may be expressing by my choice to excavate those pits in a certain way.

"Following this prodigiously verbose and obscure statement, he returned to occupying an otherwise delightfully vacant evening with video games."


*en français, s'il vous plait.

It's been such a long time

If I could be any song, I might be Foreplay/Prelude.
I've just about survived my second bout of gradscholasticus finalius, which is, as are most things, much better appreciated with a bit of retrospection. I can imagine myself whyinmydaysing some poor kids in 20 years, scaring the living daylights out of them, only so they can discover on their own time (as I have) that it's not quite as apocalytpic as it is played up to be (le style s'inspire de G Keillor)(y tambien de Kerouac - esp. lo que sigue). I rushed into the museum this morning in a fustle, thinking my german competency exam would be starting, scampering from room to room trying to find where it was (where the hell was it, anyway??) only to realize, as I retreated to a computer equipped with internet in order to "find it out for myself, damn them" (random students sitting in empty classrooms are of no help whatsoever) that the Deutschefest was scheduled for 10 am, not 9 or 9:30 as had been my proto-diurnal, self-righteous conviction (I still think someone changed the internet behind my back).
And the natural thing to do, when you realize that you have a full hour to review before a required test, is to remain on the internet, check facebook, dilly dally around, and throw some shwag onto the blog.
Das Schwag wird geworfen.*

* en allemand dans le texte

l'œil rougeâtre

Il y avait de ces saisons où, malgré moi:
Succombant sans émotions aux charlataneries
Délicates de la jeunesse (un doux trépas).
J'en reste pétrifié, souvent, sur un portrait.

When I wrote

I sat down last night to begin writing a paper that has been running around in my head for some time now. It's a wonderful experience, to find oneself in the presence of that simulated alterity which springs out with the pen. There's a struggle, because our ability to delude our minds is much greater than our ability to trick a simple piece of paper (or in this case, a computer screen) into believing that our ideas are well-formed. And there is a bit of terror involved because the concept, once it leaves the comfortable womb, is no longer quite yours. It grows on it's own, rambling across the pages, taking sometimes unexpected turns which might better be attributed to muscle spasms than pure intent. The concept may remain friendly, but it often becomes a burdensome companion, which must be walked patiently to its end. Its incompetence is frustrating: it was so crystalline before it emerged!

Or maybe it's a phoenix, and as it burns itself out, it beckons other concepts to existence. Their incubation may be swift - they jump out a few days later and die on a post-it - or it may be long, paced, perhaps the work of decades. The latter bide their time (watching the seasons change) and they feed on the many deaths played out before them. It is never quite clear, with them, that they will care to emerge at all.

A day at the races

Actually, just a day running around downtown Boston, which is surprisingly rare for someone living in Cambridge. I'm a little past feeling like that's too bad. I usually just constate it now.

Fenway park is pretty cool. I was there with A. for this afternoon's game against the Angels. We wandered down into the sun and snagged some seats we had scoped out. It's funny, because it's a relatively normal thing to do, and I'm an adult, but I still felt a bit naughty for it. And therefore, it was better.

The big jolt of the day was realizing that because I turned my VA license into the MA Motor Vehicle Registration to get a local driver's license, I now don't have an ID for the next week and a half. It's like 1932 all over again (this is a clumsy reference to the Prohibition, whose exact dates evade me, the archaeologist)(it's all about culture history)(sort of).

And so I'll listen to Ramble On, because what can be more true to life than departure.
...but now it's time for me to go...