Digging in flesh

Reading Cameron's 'Dont talk about death' post (http://cameronmackintosh.blogspot.com/) made me think of the project in which I took part while in my last year of Undergrad at McGill, as it was in itself a very disgusting (and immensely cool) project to explain to non-archaeologists...

For a term, we had to dig up dead animals in a zoo cemetery in order to map the distribution of the corpses and reconstruct a skeleton (in order, in the end to make an educational display). This project was my introduction to fieldwork methods and... most importantly my introduction to the delights (!?) of digging in a pile of bones and sometimes in stuff that wasn't completely decomposed yet (some of that was affectionately called 'cream cheese', you get the picture!). I'll always remember fondly when my colleague digging next to me shouted "Oh crap! I'm digging in brain!!" (which relates to the picture attached here, as it was the ram's brain that was being 'dug up').

Picture credits to Jess Beck (I think), taken from the McGill Zooarchaeology blog.

For the moment, I'll spare you the details on the leaking plastic bags we found in the pits, and the hair (animal, not human of course) we would find at the end of our trowels. You can ask questions if you want, though!

I'm attaching here the address of the blog we wrote during this project, as it relates to this class in a way (I know, they were animals, not humans but we were dealing with death and decomposition, believe me the smell reminded us of that every week!).

http://mcgillzooarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/10/week-1-initial-survey.html

By the way, it is still an ongoing project, so you can follow their latest discoveries on the same blog!

Money at funerals

I was taking some relax time while drinking my morning coffee and going through the News Feeds on Facebook, and read this interesting post from a guy I had been in High School with:

"Damn, will I play at the funerals of the whole city? At this pace, there won't be anybody left in a few weeks" (my translation)

It happens that this guy is a classical musician and seems to get contracts playing music at funerals (that I didn't know as I haven't seen the guy in over 10 years). So, today, he's complaining that he has 10 funerals lined up this week-end, including 4 at the same time (oops)... The post itself is interesting, but the comments on it are even better, as some people reflect on how strange it is to make money off of people's death (and mostly, to wish the dead keeps coming so that the mortgage can be paid), and others are simply trying to move their schedule around to take some of the contracts, without really paying attention to the fact that... they're working at funerals.

Well, it also made me re-realize that, at my funeral (if I get one), some people will be sad that's true, but others will simply be there to do business... life keeps on going... with death.

I hope technology will last

So, I read a few of the other blogs and realized that most of the people would like to be buried with books (which is not surprising given that we're all at school at the moment)... I found the idea interesting, and wondered if it would be adequate for me as well, as I clearly have been spending most of my awake time reading articles, books and others. But, I decided to be more specific than that.

Yeah, grave goods are fun, and might be useful to the ones who believe those objects might accompagny them in the 'after-life', but I'm not like that. I do believe that when I'll be dead, I'll be... well, dead. So, I would choose my grave goods in function of what they could tell a potential digger about me rather than what I feel comfortable with. This is why I thought: USB key!!!

Let's be honest here, if I do have the chance to be dug up and my bones do get published in a high-impact journal, that will probably be in at least a few hundreds if not thousands of years. By that time, the books or pictures I could have brought in my tomb with me will be long disintegrated and thus will not help anyone to understand who I was. This is why I thought I could simply put every important thing on a USB key, which would then be placed in a plastic bag (cause we all know how long those can take before decomposing, which in the occurrence is a good point).

On this important key, I could have scans of the book my mom wrote about me when I was growing up, scans of the shameful diary entries I wrote when I was a teenager (I'm not proud of them, but they do represent me at one point in my life). I would also include scans of my favorite books, the ones I could read over and over again... Scans of the journal entries of when I went backpacking in Europe, copies of the major papers I have written at the University and the ones that have been published (let's hope there are some), and of course: pictures of me, my family and my friends throughout the years.

The story of my life on a plastic USB protected from moisture and decay by a plastic bag... It sounds a bit too 21st century, but that's, in my opinion, the most effective way to do it simply without requiring a tomb the size of a house. Then, I just have to hope that future technologies will be able to retrieve the info. But that shouldn't be too complicated, right?!

Doing it for fun...

Here's a brief introduction of who I am and why I am doing what I am doing...

I am technically not enrolled in this class (even though I would have loved to take a class like this one when I was an undergrad); I am actually one of the TAs for this term.

My name is Claudine, I am a French Canadian from Quebec City originally, but as I've done my undergrad at McGill in Montreal, I consider myself a montrealese (or whatever you call it). A quick history of why I am now TAing for this class would be the following: I'm not one of those people who will tell you that they've always known they wanted to be archaeologists... far from it. In fact, if you'd told me 6 years ago that I would, one day, do an MA in archaeology, I would have thought you were completely insane (but I would probably not have said it out loud, I'm not a mean person)! I started my teenage years wanted dearly to be an actress. I studied drama for years and years but then... it didn't work as well as I had planned so I went backpacking in Europe on my own. During the 11 months I spent on the 'Old' continent, I learned about history and prehistory of course, but most importantly, I discovered a passion for travelling. I decided I wanted to travel all my life, but be paid for it (because the state of my bank account wasn't that great when I came back from this amazing trip). That's why I applied to do a BA in, at the time, Anthropology. And then, well, I quickly discovered that the anthro classes didn't appeal as much to me as all the archeo ones. So the choice was made and my future was set. I was to become an archaeologist!

During my undergrad, I had the opportunity to take a directed reading course in which my professor Dr. Riel-Salvatore and I worked on a study of beads in Upper Paleolithic (UP) burials. For this project, I produced an extensive database of the number of beads found in Gravettian burial contexts and analyzed their placement on the body. The aim of the study was to see if practices were the same everywhere (it was doubtful this result would come up) and if differences could be explained by factors such as age or sex of the buried individuals. This class project extended into a study on which my professor and I worked over the years, reinforcing the research and placing it in the broader context. This project has now been presented as a poster at a major conference last year and is now under review for publication... how neat is that, really!?

This project let me with a good understanding of rituals in the Gravettian and was a good starting point for another study I (again with the same professor) am currently working on. At the moment, I am compiling information on burials found in the whole UP in order to produce a synthesis of UP rituals at large. This project will be published as a chapter in an edited volume... and will also be the basis of the presentation I will do in your 392 class later in the term. I hope this will interest you as much as it interests me!

That's that for now. Even though I'm not a student for this class, I will try to take part in the blog experience of it... you know, just for the fun of it! Oh, and I'll read yours of course...