solid forged 4" archaeologist trowel

Long time no blogging. Skipping through my vacation, moving houses and a statistics project, term's begun again. Sap's rising, Cambridge is a pleasure to run through, breathing in its green and fragrant days, cool at the margins, warm in the middle, like fresh-baked gateaux molleux with ice-cream.

These weeks my dear fellow archaeologists and I have been weathering in the Fens, getting sun-burnt, wind-swept, sand-blown, mud-stuck, until at the end of the day we turn dark silty gray to reddish brown, like the soil we come from and go back to. Every next morning.
The protagonist of our excavation is an ancient river, whose skeleton lies tucked, folded under layers, in the buried soil, under an unremarkable field. We haven't found much, except for all the harvested flint, documenting where a hand struck a stone, and some badly made pot. The flat easily hides that this landscape was flooded regularly from palaeo-times until some 80 years ago. That most people who walked it were cold and their feet were wet when they went to sleep wrapped in wool, soaked with the smell of their sheep and the river. That the liminality of the environment was tangible as the sea came forwards up to the Fens, expulsing men and beasts towards the high ground. That in Roman and medieval times they had had enough with this liminality and cut a straight ditch, like we dig our trenches. That they enjoyed the sun as much as we do probably.
We have found out a lot. That we cannot walk the straight lines we aspire to. That a cut is a separate event within a feature with many fills, and they all have numbers with different kinds of brackets, documenting both the chronology of the dig and the chronology of the feature, and the 2- and 3-D arrangement of the site. That the record of an excavation can be more destructive to the salvaged information than millenia of erosion and worm-action. That interpretation begins at the end of the trowel before you decide to scrape further and break the boundary in order to learn about a new feature, while destroying it.

Then, as we embody the site, via mattocking calluses, burnt skin, iron-pan-stained trouser knees, it comes to the end of a day with watermelon, beer and sound sleep.
And I remember why I want to be this.

Well, ideally, I wouldn't be doing that much river and that minimalist Mesolithic folk, instead of some painted tombs with pretty pots for wine and a good fake Greek story.