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.

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.

Pâté and roast digger: Gréez-sur-Roc 2010-2011

Digging in France is very different from digging in the UK. It's usually free, with accommodation (or at least a place to pitch a tent) and food thrown in and paid for by whoever's excavating the site. There are less chances of trenches being flooded and more chances of ending up with a sunstroke.  Gréez-sur-Roc (in the Sarthe département) had all of this. Delicious food, starry skies, scorching heat and a couple of locals bordering on insanity.

The vast Neolithic settlement site of Gréez, discovered by local teacher and researcher Jean Jousse, has been excavated every summer from 2003 to 2011 by J.N. Guyodo of the University of Nantes, with E. Mens studying the surface of stones and the traces left by successive detachments of matter and A. Blanchard carrying out her doctoral research. The village itself owes its name to the rocky substrate of the region, with Gréez being derived from 'Grès', meaning 'sandstone'. Because of the presence of sandstone close to the topsoil, the site has never been subjected to deep ploughing and has remained almost intact.

Neolithic people made use of some of the natural cavities in the sandstone, using them and creating new ones to hold the wooden posts of their houses, as illustrated in the following picture. Not all the houses were oriented in the same way and they may have been organised around a central village place.

A huge amount of pottery fragments and flint flakes and tools has been recovered from the site, the distribution of which will be studied thanks to the recording of the location of all material found in the Neolithic strata of the site. Faunal remains have not been preserved because of the acidity of the sandy soil.

Unearthing two 6000 year-old polished axes while digging next to house remains may be one of the best ways to relate to Neolithic people and to get thinking about their work and their daily lives. Maybe for the first time since the end of my childhood, I have been truly amazed again. Among the significant 2010 finds was something that was, at the time, interpreted as a pendant made out of a broken Villeneuve-St-Germain schist bracelet. This VSG influence would then be one of several suggested cultural influences for this site (Chambon and Cerny types of pottery having also been recognised there, as of 2006).

As we students need to be entertained during rainy days, we decided to put our zooarchaeological skills to the test by putting back together the (relatively recent) skeleton of a cat, without much success. Apart from people being thrown into the village's old lavoir (where women used to wash clothes before running water in houses was cool) and from the lovely cities around, one of the major bonuses of this dig was the proximity of a farm where they sold amazing rillettes and foie gras. Nom.

Gate at La Ferté-Bernard (Sarthe). Pic from the town's website.

More information about the site (in French) here and here.