Detached from the World

I haven't blogged, emailed, texted, or made very many phone calls in the past month.  And I have come to learn how foreign a life like that is for most people.  I work outside and a lot of times that outside is a long way from civilization down dirt roads where there's no service for anything for miles around.  I have been camping and working in Nevada this month and its surprisingly been wonderful, if a bit frustrating, being completely detached.  I only used my phone as an alarm to wake me up and hadn't touched my fingers to a keyboard until yesterday.  I hiked up and down hills all day long and came home to a camp I shared with 6 other people.  I made all my meals which consisted of cereal or oatmeal for breakfast, PB & J and fruit for lunch and a dinner of burritos, jambalaya, or spaghetti, which i thought about eating all day long with so much excitement.  I took baths with a wet washcloth and Dr. Bronner's soap.  And when I couldn't take it anymore and needed to wash my hair it was a water bottle, shampoo, and leave-in-conditioner.  My camp overlooked a mountain range where we heard coyotes howling nightly.  I had a supply tent with my dry food and clothes, a kitchen area with a water cube and a cooler full of food, and my car which made a close quarters bedroom but comfy enough.  My front seat was the library, full of magazines and books to help me wind down for the night.  There was a roaring camp fire every evening for communal cooking and always sharing.  Sometimes there would be guitars brought out and concerts given, but mostly just hanging out after a long day of many miles of hiking or many hours of recording sites.  After 2 ten day sessions of this I emerged from the woods a bit apprehensive about checking my phone.  No matter how many times you tell people you won't be able to use a phone for awhile there will still be messages asking where you are and do you have service yet and why don't you have service yet.  After some phone calls to family members I come to terms with reemerging into the world of the civilized where walking around in black fleece pants, a pink shirt and cowboy boots may get you weird looks.  Back to the Internet where I'm greeted by why haven't you responded to my email emails.  I love computers, phones, and all the modern conveniences, but sometimes it's nice to be detached from the world for just a little while. 

My Job: Part 1

I have been wanting to explain what I do to my friends and family for a long time.  I know people know I am an Archaeologist, but I doubt anyone really knows what all that entails, well, at least for me.  So basically this is a day in the life of me at work.  First of all there are multiple jobs I can do as an archaeologist such like research, lab work, survey, excavation... The diversity increases with education.  The two I do most are the latter.  Survey means different things depending on where you are.  The way it all starts is an organization, company, or government has a piece of land that is going to be developed or maybe it was burned in a fire, or possibly a timber sale.  Whatever the reason at this point you can survey, which means look for sites, artifacts, etc., one of 2 ways.  For example, at home in Tennessee I would do shovel testing which  means that a grid would be set up on the land being surveyed and a hole would be dug every so often (in a systematic way) and all the dirt would be pushed through a screen to see if there are any artifacts.  If you find anything then you set up units in four directions around that unit to see you find more.  And this is how you locate sites in areas where the ground isn't always visible because of vegetation. 

 I much prefer the way we do it out here in the Southwest.  We do pedestrian survey which means you get up super early to go hike in the woods or desert.  This is how it works.  You have a parcel of land you need to cover entirely by walking and trying to find all the archaeological sites present.   A crew of people line up anywhere from 15 to 25m apart and walk in straight lines whcih we call transects.  Someone leads the group with a compass, GPS, and map and we go up and back over and over again moving over each time to cover new ground.  We have to keep a vigilant eye on the ground looking for signs of historic or prehistoric occupation.  It could be anything from a can from the 30's or maybe a projectile point to flaked stone.  When you spot something the group stops and walks around the area to see if more artifacts can be found or if it's just an isolated find.  If lots of artifacts or a structure or other kinds of features (like rock piles) are found then we stop to record the site.  This involves everyone taking a different task to quickly get what information we need before walking again.  Someone maps the site, someone photographs it, others analyze the artifacts (types them so dates can be given) and a quick overall write-up is done about what we found.  Then we are off to walking again.  Looking for archaeology on survey not always means watching the ground.  Sometimes you have to look on the trees, aspen mostly, for dendroglyphs, historic tree carvings.  This may sound odd, but it can be really interesting.  Last year I did a survey north of the Grand Canyon in the Kaibab National Forest and most of what we recorded was dendroglyphs from sheep herders from the early 1900's.  Some carved very intricate pictures and others just their names and dates.  One particular guy, who the company eventually found in the Kanab, UT cemetery, carved HUNDREDS of trees leaving behind addition problems, money amounts, initials, and dates. 

Other things you have to look for are rock shelters or caves once inhabited, petroglyphs or pictographs (the difference is the former is carved into the rock and the latter is painted), and also any kind of feature.  A feature in this sense usually means any kind of structure or something earth altering like a sleep circle where a shallow depression is dug out for the purpose of sleeping (I found these near Yuma, AZ).  A feature could be a million different things from a rock alignment, to an old road, to a house.  

It's not always about the archaeology.  You have to be careful of animals like bears and mountain lions.  I did see a mountain lion once on survey.  It ran across my path just a few feet in front of me.  Sometimes you're walking over flat desert terrain and sometimes you are hiking up and down mountains.  There are so many different things you have to keep in mind while surveying from your purpose to just trying to stay upright and not trip on the lava strewn ground.  Sometimes its so exhausting and mentally draining, but it is my favorite work.  I love being able to hike and see new terrain in new places, while doing archaeology.

Excavation....

Peppersauce Cave

      Last weekend Jeff and I went to Peppersauce Cave near Tucson, just on the other side of Mt. Lemmon. It's a wet cave open to the public (no gate over the entrance), which gets lots of traffic from local weekend warriors. We drove north to Oracle then headed east on the dirt road that heads up the backside of Mt. Lemmon. A few miles up we passed Peppersauce Campground, and continuing on we crossed a bridge and parked just past it. We walked up the wash a few feet to the cave entrance, a small opening in the rocks. Just in we had to get down and crawl through a tight spot. In the next room we discovered Jeff's battery life was insufficient so he headed back out to get spares. I sat down on a rock and turned off my light and sat in the dark, quietly waiting. After 10 minutes of my eyes adjusting I still could see no daylight coming through the crawl space.  It was dark.  Jeff returned and we went on deeper into the cave passing a few others exploring the depths. We passed a lake with crystal clear water, but were warned by a sign at the entrance that there are mean little bacterias swimming around in the seemingly beautiful water. We were in a large room with a slanted floor trying to carefully get to the other side without falling on the slippery, very muddy floor. We read prior to coming to bring clothes you could throw away and it turned out to be true. We came to a room full of candles left by previous explorers and were told that the "rabbits hole" was in this room and was the key to the rest of the cave. Others we had seen in the cave had given us conflicting conditions of the hole.  One person said that the hole had collapsed and you couldn't get through anymore, and another told us it was flooded out. Both were false. We found the hole by climbing down a large boulder and underneath another, then down a tunnel to a hole with cool air rushing out. We climbed through head first into wrist deep mud.

I pulled my hips through and stood up to see a pool of water up ahead. We waded through it up to our ankles and headed onward through the passage getting muddier and dirtier. At the top of a narrow slick tunnel headed uphill we came to 3 different passages. Throughout the cave the walls are marked with spray painted arrows telling you the direction to head and the way out. Sometimes the amount of arrows makes it hard to know what to do so we picked the door on the right. After about 20 minutes of exploring we discovered we had come back to the same spot through another one of the 3 ways. We took note of the possible dangers of getting lost and were grateful for the arrows despite their excessive abundance. We back tracked a bit and saw an opening we had missed because it was above our heads. We climbed up and continued on weaving in and under and through, but paying close attention to our surroundings.

The cave is full of trash left behind by irresponsible people and the good people who clean it out every so
often can't keep up with the traffic coming in and out. The ribbon and string laying around, however, helped me keep track of were I'd been. After a bit more we decided that was enough for the day and we would leave more for later. The cave is over a mile long and we probably only covered a third, but that's just a guess. Back in the daylight we saw the extent of our filth and were glad to find extra clothes buried in the
truck. We continued on and over the mountain back to our borrowed home in Tucson.