archaeology | Lorien Johnson

Archaeological Fieldwork

Posted by Lorien on Nov 8, 2004 in Odds and Ends | 0 comments

I participated in my first batch of archaeological fieldwork on Saturday. 9am-12pm. Nothing major, but it was exciting… shovel tests at twenty meter transects. Pairs of two dug foot round/deep holes and sifted the dirt/plants/rocks through a shaker screen. Anything of interest is bagged and marked. I’m trying to be careful about sounding too important… what I’m doing is very, very minor. But! I am incredibly jazzed and giddy about this whole project. So if I make it sound like a big deal, it’s not, but it is. This is my pet project at the Lab. I do grunt work,...

History Conferences and Spitting on Artifacts

Posted by Lorien on Sep 28, 2004 in Odds and Ends | 0 comments

I just printed off the lecture notes from my Latin Govt. class course reserves… 57 pages of testable material, and that’s assuming she’s only going to test over what we’ve covered. Doubtful. I’m spending this evening reading the textbook and reviewing these notes. I’ll do the same all evening tomorrow. Thursday, I’m going to try to spend the entire day at the history conference – I’m excited. This is the first conference within my field that I’ve attended. Four 2 hour lectures/discussions each day! More on Saturday, I think. The...

Lorien = Bad Archaeologist

Posted by Lorien on Sep 16, 2004 in Odds and Ends | 0 comments

I am a bad, bad archaeologist-intern. I was assigned to identifying this button medallion, today. Brass, horribly tarnished, can’t be soaked because it would ruin the paint. I was trying to brush off enough of the green gunk to read the Latin on the bottom, and all I could think was “just a little spit! One scrape of the tooth! All would be revealed!” But, alas, I was surrounded by the real archaeologists who would likely not appreciate saliva in contact with artifacts. Sigh. Indiana Jones wouldn’t have minded a little bit of tooth and spit. When looked at in a certain...