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...