MSc Dissy: the love and hate story of a student and her paper.

In a vain attempt to prevent all undergraduate and postgraduate efforts wordlwide from falling into a void and being forever forgotten by normal people and the academic community alike, I decided to post my MSc dissertation here, so that I, if nobody else, may remember it everytime I have a look at my blog and reflect upon hundreds of hours of hard work, procrastination and complaining. Bits of sentences have mysteriously vanished from my paper thanks to the magic of Microsoft Word (I think it happenend when I added the images, a job only trained professionals should attempt). I'm sure it's full of mistakes, but there's no point changing it so I'll keep telling myself it was just the work of a young and naive student of Archaeology.

I invite all graduates to post links to their own dissertations so that they may finally get out of the dark underground corridors in which all student papers are confined for eternity! Whaddya mean, nobody cares?

Oh and in case anybody wonders, it's about Iron Age roundhouses in Britain and in France. And also cultural diffusion, identities, and other stuff. I had a great time writing it (if you forget all the issues linked to the fact that I'm naturally super-lazy), and my tutor was amazing. Yay Edinburgh Uni!

Here it is.

The following pictures show why Daisy is to blame for any inaccuracies in my dissertation. She's been rolling over on my work material and tampering with my Word files.

Neanderthal and stuff...

Coming out of Niaux cave, lamps in hand.

Cave art projection, Musée National de Préhistoire.

Reconstitution of Neandertal life, Musée
National de Préhistoire

Perfectly accurate re-enactment (2): prehistoric
 rites at the Cro-Magnon rock shelter.

No posts in a long time! I've started studying at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and have thereby surrendered both my social and virtual lives. As one of the Prehistory and Quaternary '14 promotion, I've been sent on a trip to Dordogne and the Pyrénées to visit caves, drink wine, eat foie gras and climb up hills in the rain. I don't think I can explain how fantastic and moving it was to stand in a pitch black cave and suddenly see engravings and paintings of mammoths, rhinos, horses and bison appear as the guide lifted his or her lamp and shed light on the cave walls, or to know that Magdalenian adults and children had walked barefoot for hundreds of metres in these cavities (and no, I'm not making stuff up to try and make the story better, researchers did find and date adult and child-sized footprints at Niaux, one of the caves we were lucky enough to visit). So I'm just going to post a couple of pictures instead! Oh and I'd also like to point out that the INRAP (our national preventive archaeology institute) found a mammoth near Paris a few days ago, while excavating a Gallo-Roman site! That's just how random and awesome prehistory can get. [EDIT: funny how things work out, I actually got to do some conservation work on this mammoth! There's an article somewhere on this blog that covers this]

Homo Neandertalensis watching over the valley
from a rock shelter at Les Eyzies.

Bison skeleton, Musée National de Préhistoire,
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.

Flint debitage explained, Musée National de Préhistoire.