So...I guess its been about a year and a half since my last blog update, which means its just about time for my Biannual Blog Update Extravaganza (or bianbloupex for short)!
Lots has happened since last March, though I'm afraid the photos won't be quite as enthralling as the last update. Still a damn fine 18 months, if I may say so myself. But I digress. Here's my life since March 2008:
Ben and I excavating a lithic workshop.
The excavations at the Tree House site in Lexington County, SC, lasted from March - December of 2008. By far the longest project I have ever been on. Actually, this was the longest period of continuous employment I have ever experienced. There were definitely some low points, but in the end it was a great dig. We encountered every period of human occupation, from historic musketballs to the 2nd complete clovis point ever found in South Carolina, which dates to around 10,000 BC. For you non-archaeologists, clovis culture finds are a pretty big deal, representing the earliest confirmed presence of humans in the Americas. Most new world archaeologists will never come across artifacts of this antiquity. I was lucky to be around for it.
The clovis point in all its glory (recovered some 20 feet below modern ground level)
A mack point, much newer than the clovis, dates to the late archaic period (c.1000-3000 BC)
Once the project was finally done, I stuck around with the company for several more months, working in the archaeology lab and going out on subsequent projects in the southeastern US. The lab work was great, as I got to see lots of the restored/cleaned/fancied-up artifacts we had found two years earlier at a project in Wilmington, NC.
A great Spanish 8-Reale recovered during Phase III investigations along the Cape Fear River near Wilmington
A small prehistoric bowl reconstructed in the archaeology lab. When we found this in the field, it was in almost 100 pieces.
But, of course, it wasn't really the work that kept me in Columbia, SC. I met a girl named Nicole here. I decided to stick around :)
Towards the end of 2008, we went to upstate NY for a wedding and took the opportunity to venture a bit further north into Canada. We spent a few days poking around Niagara Falls , lake Ontario and Fort Niagara.
We had lots of other small trips scattered about throughout 2009, going up to the mountains of western North Carolina, the beaches around Wilmington, and down to Fort Lauderdale to hang out with my family.
If Canada was the best road trip of 2008, the winner in 2009 was definitely a weekend-long jaunt down to St. Augustine, FL, to explore around the colonial city, hang out with my best buddy Chad, and watch Propagandhi at the Harvest of Hope festival.
Chad and I, Propagandhi in the background
Nicole outside Castillo de san Marcos, the colonial Spanish fort in St. Augustine
Watching one of your favorite bands, who you have waited nearly ten years to see live, with some of your favorite people, who you don't see nearly enough of, fixes you. And I needed some fixing in March. Cause in March, I got laid off. Work in the Southeast had pretty much dried up as the economy hit the shitter in 2009 - nobody was building anything anymore, so nobody needed any archaeological mitigation done. Even survey work was hard to come by. I resigned myself to shovelbumming (archaeology term for wandering around looking for work) and wound up in Andalusia, Alabama on a Phase III excavation in the dead of summer.
The Andalusia project was hot as hell, and was being carried out by a company that didn't demonstrate a whole lot of concern for their employees or for proper scientific archaeological work standards. It was a six person crew, and I think we all kind of hated every minute of it. But with so little archaeological work being done at the time, everyone kept their mouths shut, did the work required, and eventually went their own separate ways.
One nice surprise on the Andalusia excavation was working with Brad, who I had worked with in 2004 at a massive prehistoric cemetery excavation in Miami, FL.
And there were a handful of nice lithics from the site, like this serrated early archaic spear point
And this archaic point reworked into a drill
And Andalusia itself was kind of cute, with a little two screen theatre and some great downtown architecture. Hank Williams used to call this place home.
With the fieldwork wrapping up in Alabama, I headed back to Columbia. I moved in with Nicole, got a job in a silkscreen shop, and enrolled in graduate school. This is the most sedentary I have been for years, and sometimes its kind of hard. But I've actually got a lot going for me here - an amazing girlfriend, good friends, a graduate degree in the works, and I'm even playing music again. I played bass on a new record earlier this year, but I am not yet sure when it will be released. I'll keep ya updated. In my next bianbloupex. I'll post a song from it on the "sounds" page at www.gozombie.com if anyone cares to hear it :)
Chuck during recording sessions this summer.
Our frankenstein studio, made from bits and pieces picked up over the years.
Till the next bianbloupex, take care!
(Actually, I am nearing my third-world-country-adventure-every-two-years deadline. Don't be surprised to see details from a South American backpacking trek in 2010!)
