Ile d'Yeu 2012

Just a few pictures of a dig I went to on the Ile d'Yeu (France), because the setting was lurrrvely. About the dig: a Neolithic promontory enclosure with a dry-stone embankment on a rocky bit of island, just above the Atlantic. A lot of small flakes and tools (made from beach pebbles, quartzites etc.), a lot of wind, a lot of crying (sand... wind... eyes... tears). A lot of promising circular structures that we weren't allowed to touch because they were home to a rare endemic little yellow flower. And of course, as always with those sites that are just next to the ocean, it is fairly urgent to dig it up and record it because it will soon have been swallowed by the hungry Atlantic.

The structures-that-shall-not-be-excavated

No wonder Neolithic peeps decided to go there for their holidays!

Ready to dig!

Glamorous archaeology is a myth.

Fixing Helmut

2013 has been a good year for me so far: between two exhausting sets of modules/exams, I've had a chance, with a couple of good friends,  to go clean and glue back together some mammoth bones. This is thanks to Stéphane Péan, one of my professors at the museum and a specialist of prehistoric fauna, and to archaeologists at the INRAP (Grégory Bayle in particular), who excavated and are taking care of the mammoth. Helmut the woolly mammoth is thought to have died at about 35, some time between 200 000  and 120 000 years ago in Changis-sur-Marne (France). As it is rare to find a whole mammoth in our regions, an amazing cast of the bones was made in situ. He has some lovely bones, and some others that are more... challenging to put back together.

A youth photo of Helmut, which I had the chance to admire in the Rouffignac cave. He was dashing!

Helmut's unfused humerus epiphysis, www.lefigaro.fr

www.hominides.com, Helmut's jaw.

We had a jolly good time trying to put his ribs and part of one of his femurs back together, it was all very emotional (yes, there were tears. Tears of rage whenever a previously repaired rib decided that it didn't really want to stay put together after all. Tears of despair when we opened a new package only to discover bone dust. Tears of joy when, after three days of looking at the same bits of rib, we finally managed to fit one more bit in the big puzzle). We kept our eyes open for man-made cut marks and scratches, but the marks we found are likely to have been caused by natural displacement of the carcass. One of our priorities was to dry the bones out, as humidity was damaging them and some of them were even getting a bit mouldy. A number of people are working on these bones (about 500 days of work have been planned), so I'm sure we'll have exciting updates regularly. It is thought that Helmut might have died in a swamp, because of the sediment he was found in, right next to where the river Marne used to be. It's not clear yet whether he was killed by Neanderthals or if he died naturally, but it seems Neanderthal did make the most of him, as two flint flakes were found next to his skull. I'm not really up to date with the latest Helmut news as I worked at his conservation back in January/start of Februrary, so I'm very sorry if some of this is already out of date. I'm also not using the pictures I took because I forgot to ask the INRAP if it was OK for me to put them online, but it's a shame, as there's one where you can clearly see that Helmut's femur head is about the size of my skull.

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.

My toilet placement with YAT

 I'm just back from a four week placement with the York Archaeological Trust (helping out on the ArchLive! training dig), and as I'm stuck in my new (tiny) flat with my dog and no furniture, I thought I'd take the student experience as far as possible and start working on something useless. So here's a new article! First, I'd like to thank the trainees and the supervisors again for all their help, hard work and singing rooster impersonations. I had a great time and almost didn't want to come home (but then I thought about the food and the weather and I changed my mind).

Non-staged photos of my awesome trainees, weeks 2-4.

Second, I'd like to tell anybody who's got an interest for field archaeology and a bit of spare money (or a lot, if they don't happen to live in the UK) that if they're looking for a training dig, they should look no further. ArchLive! runs every summer in York and allows trainees to do a bit of everything, from digging to planning, finds processing and barbecuing. And if you've spent so much time volunteering on digs that you're as poor as a Church mouse (yes, there is a theme developing here), you can apply for a placement position and spend your days running wheelbarrows, demolishing brick inspection chambers, cracking tasteless jokes and passing on your extensive knowledge to your amazed trainees. For more information, see ArchLive!'s facebook page, their site diaries or their website.

Conscientiously scrubbing Victorian grime off pots and pipes. 

 I'll leave the site interpretation to the YAT people, as I have a sneaking suspicion that some out-of-place feature is going to contradict everything we thought we knew about the back yards of the rather shabby Victorian terraced houses of Carmelite Street, their bad builders and  their  failed attempts at improving sanitation. Suffice it to say that I have proudly excavated two ceramic tipper toilets and a palimpsest of drainpipes, puzzling brick structures, walls and rubbly make-up deposits. The toilets (which require the tipper to be full of water for the flushing mechanism to do its job) have been put in in several contiguous back yards, seemingly during one improvement phase, in order to try and make the sanitary conditions of the houses more acceptable, but they clearly didn't meet the health and safety requirements as all the houses were pulled down in the 1930s. To my despair, my placement was over before the whole drainage system was exposed, and I'll have to wait for the supervisors' conclusions as to how exactly the whole thing worked and why it wasn't so great.    

A non-scaled, north arrow-less picture of the tipper toilet of 11 Carmelite Street. Take that, good archaeological practices.

Anyway. Thanks to the magic of single context recording, we now all master the difficult arts of taming the dumpy level, off-setting and drawing plans, filling in context cards in a fraction of a second, and taking lovely scaled pictures. A few exciting finds came out of "my" section (anything excavated by "my" trainees is "mine". That's just how it works). A clay pipe bowl with a different man in profile on each side, a nude woman from another clay pipe, some bits of medieval pottery, a bead and a potential giant dog tooth, but no dead prostitute.

We were lucky enough to get quite a lot of sun, so we were able to sit outside and enjoy the weather while processing finds, ie washing a load of Victorian rubbish and of dead people from a nearby medieval charnel that was being excavated by YAT too. We had more fun than would be considered "normal" or "sane" trying to match bones together and got a bit sad whenever we pulled children's bones out of their plastic bags, but it was all very interesting. Sorting and bagging finds went smoothly enough, and sorting small bits of shell, charcoal and other sieving residues from soil samples was more fun than it sounds (a little bit). So I might just have to go back next year and visit more pubs  do more archaeology. Or maybe I should get a job? Who knows.

Evaaaa! Pass me my trowel!

     

I iz a published author!

I haven't been able to write much lately (Part II of my History of Violence will eventually be published, I haven't given up on it!) BUT I received a copy of The Archaeological Review from Cambridge with my own little article in it. When I say "article", I really mean "book review". So, I don't have "a proven track record and extensive publications on [any] subject" yet, but I'm working on it. I had a great time writing the review (and I got a free book worth £75 for my personal library), so I'd really recommend book-review publishing to any graduate student who wants to eventually publish their research, as it's easier than writing an article but still an excellent way to get acquainted with the publishing process and with a number of obscure writing conventions. Anyway, the article is online here. It's on Scarre's latest book on the Neolithic of Brittany (which I enjoyed a lot).

Also, special thanks need to go to Danika Parikh, the reviews editor, who was a pleasure to work with. That is all.

Field-walking with Daisy

You know how it's always people walking their dogs who discover dead bodies? Well, I don't walk my dog early enough in the morning for that. And I can't imagine anyone disposing of a recently- or not so recently- murdered victim in the field behind our house. Anyway, I still get to find stuff when running after the dog. Mostly it's barbecue waste and not-very-exciting pottery. But yesterday, while walking in a freshly ploughed field, I stumbled upon a lovely little flint blade, with a plump percussion bulb, compression rings and maybe even some retouches. I'm a little bit excited about it because apart from a pair of bronze bracelets and a possible Bronze Age barrow, I couldn't find any mentions of prehistoric activity or of lithic finds in Malpas (Cheshire) anywhere. Anything pre-Roman is really quite rare here, as far as we know, although you don't have to go very far out of the parish of Malpas to find possible Neolithic occupations and Iron Age hillforts.

So here's a picture of our little friend. It's just under 4 centimeters long, with a bit of cortex left on the distal end and a few negatives of previously knapped-off bits on the dorsal face. Given the form of the bulb, I'd say it was probably made with a hard hammer. It has an eraillure on the bulb, and it's triangular in section.

You tell me what this little guy was arrested for. Nice mugshot.

We also got a few other bits of flint, one of them largely covered in cortex and exhibiting what looks like part of a striking platform and the negative of compression rings.

Edit 14/05/12: We found another blade today, in a different field not very far away from the one in which we found the first blade. It's very different though, with the bulb and compression rings much more diffuse, possibly suggesting soft-hammer percussion. There are very extensive retouches on the dorsal face, my guess being that they were made using pressure-flaking. This is a really lovely little tool.

Unless there's a hobbyist in the neighbourhood who keeps dropping worked flint everywhere in order to confuse us, Malpas was occupied earlier than we thought.

While walking in the fields, we were quite surprised to see that there were a lot of pebbles everywhere, so we thought we might be in an post-glacial valley. It turns out, as pointed out in a 2003 archaeological assessment of Malpas by the Cheshire County Council, that "at Domesday the town [Malpas] was called Depenbech which means ‘at the deep valley with a stream in it’". I thought that the local substrate, red sandstone, could tell us a little bit more about the geology of the area, as it forms in specific conditions. According to this website, the Sandstone Ridge, made of layers of sandstone and pebble beds, formed in the Triassic era in semi-arid desertic conditions (who would have thought?). Forward to the last glaciation and the region was under a huge ice-sheet which depressed the surface of the earth and, while receding at the end of the Ice Age, dropped loads of boulders and ice-worn pebbles picked up in northern Britain while it was moving southward. Now, the pebbles make perfect sense.

I'm also posting a picture of my dog, because it's totally relevant to this article.

Daisy McWooferson, treasure hunter.