The ARCSmart Experience

So this semester was my second time around as a volunteer for ARCSmart.  Although waking up early on Friday mornings are sometimes rough, I always have my travel mug of coffee handy to get me ready for a group of eager sixth graders. But enough about my coffee addiction, I volunteered for a second time with this program because of the positive experience I’ve had with the program. It’s a fun, tiring learning experience all tied into one.

Not being an archaeology major, I get to learn along with the kids about the artifacts we bring in. Or at the very least, I get a refresher course on what I did learn when I was younger. It’s also a nice break from memorizing and conjugating Russian verbs (I know, the life of an undergrad is rough). The only downside is I don’t have any cool stories of field work to tell them. Ah well, we can’t all be as cool as the archaeology majors at USC. (But hey, isn’t travelling to Russia this summer cool too?)

The different sessions of the program include a day of artifact handling, working with Inscriptifact and Google maps.

Of course the best part of the program is the final day when the class plays Jeopardy. Obviously it’s not the best day because it’s the last day but instead it’s when we get to see what the students have learned over the course of the program. And of course, this is also the day when the competitive nature of the class comes out and who doesn’t love a good competition? After the game, the kids are allowed to ask us questions about our lives as USC students outside of the classroom: “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you go to parties a lot?” etc. Understandably our answers are kid friendly but it’s cool nonetheless to find out what their perspective of college life is.

Talking to these kids, I find out what they want to do when they become our age: engineers, football players and some haven’t thought about their future yet and worry that they won’t be able to attend college. Growing up, going to college was never a doubt in my mind, in fact I knew it was expected of me. Universities whether public or private are difficult to pay for for many families today. Were it not for my financial aid I would not be where I am now. Actually being an undergrad and working with local kids, makes me want to tell these kids that college is an attainable goal for everyone. It may not be easy, but it’s attainable. Sometimes I forget about the community outside of the walls of the university but volunteering and interacting in the local environment helps me come to my senses.

Now the downside of the last day of the program: having to say goodbye. As much as I love sleeping in on Fridays, knowing that I won’t be seeing them anymore is always hard. It’s a good feeling knowing that I imparted some knowledge to these kids and hopefully I made a positive impact on their educational future.

 

Ethiopia Excursion

So this summer I ended up traveling to Ethiopia to participate in a pilot archaeological study spearheaded by Dr. Michael Harrower, an assistant professor currently working at Johns Hopkins University.  The overall goal of the project was to begin excavating a large, very important site known as Baita Semati, situated on a hill in the Mezbir Valley (located in the northern province of Tigray) that stands about 7 km from the Yeha Temple, the largest standing structure in Africa south of Egypt (built between 8th-5th century B.C.). British, German, and American teams led archaeological expeditions in this valley during the early to mid-20th century that largely focused on the major Yeha Temple site. Preliminary surveys limited in terms of scope, data collecting were literally conducted by archaeologists on mules in the Mezbir Valley. Small sites around the Yeha Temple were indeed recorded, but the majority of archaeological work has historically been concentrated on the Yeha Temple. Baita Semati represents the largest recorded site (approximately 20 ha) in relatively close proximity to the Yeha Temple (approximately 7 km). The site contains a high concentration of diagnostic pottery sherds as well as rectangular cut-stones, of which a few had apparently been dug out and used to fashion houses in a nearby village. Of important note, it is this type of cut-stone that was used to construct the Yeha Temple  Could this site be the residential sector associated with the Yeha Temple? What is this site’s relationship to the other smaller sites recorded in the Mezbir Valley that are within line of sight? What is the chronology of the site? These are the salient questions that members of Dr. Harrower’s SRSAH (Southern Red Sea Archaeological Histories) team sought to gain insight into.

We spent the majority of our time excavating a 2×6 trench on Baita Semati.  Our approach to excavation was primarily digital-with an R4 base station and a GeoXH GPS device we were able to not only map out find spots, new layers, and new features but also record the majority our observations. Paper forms were indeed used (i.e. C-14 forms, photo logs, and bag logs) but they played a refreshingly nontraditional and minimal role in recording observations. Our GPS set-up allowed us to record archaeological data to within 2 cm. New layers were photographed with a photo-chit system-we distributed photo chits (small, laminated squares containing an I.D. number) across a layer, recorded their coordinates, and georeferenced and rectified the photos within arcGIS. These images can then be laid over the layers (which we recorded as outlines but will be post-processed as 3D polygons).  We discovered large numbers of Aksumite (the prominent African empire that ruled from the 1st century A.D.-6th century A.D.) and Pre-Aksumite pottery, 5 coins that bear crosses and a sun-atop-crescent moon symbol of the southwestern Arabian god of Almaqah, glass slag, metal slag, beads, and a possible arrowhead. Since I plan to utilize arcGIS extensively in my future archaeological endeavors, I had a wonderful time learning about the integration between arcGIS/GPS tech and excavation. I particularly loved this streamlined approach to excavation as it is efficient, highly accurate, and more importantly, well-integrated within the arcGIS environment. This approach grants us with the possibility to utilize the analytical tools of arcGIS to frame our excavation in new exciting way in order to derive new insights. Overall, the excavation was incredibly productive and the site itself is quite promising!

Aside from the field experience, I had a great time learning about the Ethiopian culture. I was mistaken to be Ethiopian several times as numerous Ethiopians customarily spoke to me in their native language of Amharic (in the capital of Addis Ababa) or Tigrina (spoken in the northern province of Tigray, where we worked on our site).  I’m not a huge fan of the country’s food, but I must say that it does offer a unique taste. Their staple food is injera, a spongy bread made of a crop called tef. Ethiopians wrap literally every other food that they cook (i.e. goat meat, fried chick peas, chicken, etc.) with injera, thereby obviating the need for eating utensils. Notable events of awesomeness included crashing an Ethiopian wedding with one of my supervisors in Aksum, finding an arrowhead on-site, and witnessing a few of Ethiopia’s most fascinating archaeological sites. I visited a tripartite sanctuary in Wuqro, Ethiopia that contains a remarkably preserved sacrificial altar complete with Sabean script, a bull spout, and a drain (presumably for blood or water) that leads into a round basin. I witnessed the towering stelae and underground internment chambers of Aksum (the capital of the Aksumite empire). I stood in front of  the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, the rumored location of the Ark of the Covenant. I also marveled at the aforementioned Yeha Temple, made from cut stone that is so precisely fit together that one wouldn’t even be able to slide a thin piece of paper through the construction.

The extent of the poverty in the country was shocking and humbling at the same time (I’m used to seeing poverty, but not at this scale). While working at the site, we stayed in a very modestly outfitted field house with no hot water, limited electricity (a generator was turned on for around 2 hrs a day), and no internet. A beautiful view of the Ethiopian countryside and a quaint, peaceful atmosphere propelled us through our most difficult days of lab work. The living experience was quite refreshing because it led me to better appreciate the comfortable lifestyle I live back home and not take it for granted.

Overall, it was a wonderful experience both culturally and archaeologically. I hope everyone else had a wonderful time this past summer conducting fieldwork and I wish STARC, ArcSmart, and everyone else affiliated with USC archaeology the best this year. I hope to finish my grad school apps as soon as possible so I can fully enjoy my year off. Notable plans include interning at a Roman museum in Tongeren, Belgium and spending time with my Dutch relatives in Holland, annnnd doing more traveling of course!

-Jacob

 

Dinner in the village

There is never a dull moment in Tayfursökmen, the Turkish village that contains our dig camp. This is my first experience with both survey and excavation, and it is fabulous so far. I have really enjoyed sorting pottery (and bone) in the pottery yard before dinner; I think I have learned a lot just by asking about the pieces I find.

Along with learning tons of new things about archeology and how it’s ‘done’, I have really enjoyed visiting some village families in the evening, once even for dinner. I have been taking some observations each time I go, and here is an excerpt from the dinner we had with an Arabic family (you think understanding Turkish is hard, but Turkish-Arabic!?):

At 7:30, we headed back to the Arabic family’s house for dinner. We met them a few hours earlier while wandering the village. As we turned left from the bakkal onto the family’s street, the children ran to greet us. The street is a dusty road that is used for cars, tractors, cows, goats, dogs, and many other things that move. They walked along with us (and behind us) to lead us toward the house. We took off our shoes, walked up the narrow steps to the second floor of the house, and were seated in a traditional Arabic living room with some of the little girls and their father. A large carpet covered the floor, and cushions lined the walls for people to sit. A calendar hung from the wall supporting the MHP, or Turkish nationalist party. The centerpiece of the room was a television on a stand, and the father of the girls switched the channels between Turkish and Arabic stations. Finally, he decided on an Arabic music station. “Probably from Egypt,” he said. A belly dancer flashed across the screen with Arabic writing scrolling across the bottom.

The physical characteristics of the family differed quite a bit from person to person. The father and mother both donned bright blue eyes and lighter skin. Some of the children had the same, with light brown hair, while others had quite dark features, including dark brown eyes.

Before dinner arrived, Michelle taught the little girls how to play some hand games that we learned when we were little. It was an immediate hit. The girls learned our games, showed us some of theirs (some that were the same). We also taught them rock, paper, scissors and tried to explain that you can use this game when making big decisions. We played for a while, and then dinner arrived.

The girls (all of them, except the mother) brought bowls of salad, fresh cut herbs, a mezze of eggplant and other vegetables, and huge black pans of chicken, fresh cooked. We drank the cola that we brought as a hospitality gift.  We also brought along some cookies and chocolates. The men (the father and Trevor) sat at the ‘head’ of the table; farther from the door than all the women. The girls also brought out huge circles of flat bread, which one girl informed me was baked by the mother only hours before. We ate until we were full, and then we ate more. The parents and girls were very eager to know how we liked the food. We confirmed that it was delicious (it was), and thanked them. They shook off the thanks; it was their pleasure. After we had convinced them that we were full, the plates cleared (again by the girls) and one girl in a headscarf (around 16-17) swept the carpet. The father asked us if we believe that President Obama was not born in the United States. When we replied ‘no’, he told us he never believed the rumor either. The TV turned on again, and we watched more Arabic music.

Finally, we played more hand games. The girls started to ask me about my family. “Do you have a father?” they asked, “what is his name?” The girls ran out of the room at one point and returned with some jewelry, with which they proceeded to adorn my ears and hands. One bracelet had a ring attachment and chains crossed along, sort of like a henna design. I tried to give the bracelets back to the girls when we left, but they sincerely refused and told me to keep them.

 

USC Archaeology Field Season is in Full Swing!

USC Professor Lynn Dodd has taken several students to the Hatay province of Turkey. AVRP Survey 2011 is about wrapping up and the students are now preparing for Alalakh Excavations:

2011 AVRP Survey Team

In the meantime, a handful of USC undergraduates are just beginning their archaeological excavation in Rome. The students join USC Professor John Pollini to excavate Ostia Antica. Grant Dixon will be blogging daily about the experience, so check out his blog here: http://grantdixonrome.blogspot.com/

2011 USC Undergrads Fight On during a break from excavation in Rome

 

Greetings from Tayfursökmen

Tonight as the 2011 AVRP survey team prepares for our first day in the field, the ezan echoes through the village and into our compound from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque — a call to prayer in digital distortion. This happens five times a day, including every morning at around 4 AM which turns out to be very a convenient thing since we begin our day at 5. Tonight the Turkish skies also play host to ay tutulması, or lunar eclipse (peep the commemorative Google logo, exclusive to this side of the world), a good omen I’m sure as we set to make our way through the rich landscape of the northern Amuq valley. Over the next two months, I will be participating in my very first archaeological survey and excavation season. I could not be more thrilled to be here and to be working with the incredible Alalakh team, whose knowledge and enthusiasm inspire me daily. I am also thrilled to receive the support of AIA Los Angeles summer fieldwork scholarship (awarded to USC archaeology students for three years running) and hope that this summer is only the beginning of a long (unpredictable, strange) foray into our past (present, future).

In case you forgot - http://alalakh.org/ !

-Michelle L.

 

Post-USC academic life: an update

So today I received an email from the lovely Tiffany, and it made me realize that I haven’t posted anything exciting on hunterblatherer for about 8,000 years (+/- 7,999 and a bit). I suppose it’s debatable whether I was posting anything exciting before, but let’s pretend for my sake that I was.

I’m still here in Sheffield, getting ready to submit three papers and a dissertation proposal on May 31st. Naturally, that’s what I ought to be doing right now, instead of posting blog updates, but I think breaks are conducive to my health. I have the same policy towards chocolate and periodic naps, with the result that today I’ve taken a nap and eaten an entire chocolate bar. Also, I’ve written 919 words. Success! But I can do better than that, so after I post this I’ll go right back to writing.

The program here is still wonderful, and I’ve gotten some great opportunities to talk to and work with phenomenal scholars in the field. In February I got to attend the Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology Round Table (SCAA website here). It’s a small, informal conference held every year, in which groundbreaking research and theory is discussed for several days by very important people. It was incredible meeting people I’d heard of, whose articles I’d read: Colin Renfrew, John Bennet, Cyprian Broodbank, Michael Vickers, Carl Knappett… and the list goes on and on. These are the rock stars of the Aegean Archaeology world, and their presentations were all fascinating. It was a privilege to listen to them, and to top it all off, I was able to hobnob with them throughout the conference. I can say that they are all lovely, kind people who are perfectly willing to talk to a visibly nervous MA student. I was so nervous meeting John Bennet (he of the Linear B tablets) that I fumbled my reception snack and ended up throwing some sort of half-eaten pastry across the room, where it landed on a professor’s trousers (Notice the use of ‘trousers.’ “Pants’ means something quite different in Britain, and I’d like to be clear that it was a social gaffe, but not THAT much of a social gaffe). Luckily, the professor didn’t notice, and John Bennet still spoke to me afterward.

My class at the Ashmolean with our professors, learning about Cypro-Minoan

Yesterday I went to the Ashmolean museum at Oxford with a group of archaeology students and two professors. We wandered around looking at artifacts (artefacts, for the crazy Brits) and got to play with some objects incised in Cypro-Minoan script. Cypro-Minoan and Linear A are two undecipherable Bronze Age scripts. I think it would be fun to get a tattoo of an inscription. Either you would never know what it said, or archaeologists would finally decipher it sixty years from now and you would find out it said something like “the king demands wool for taxes” or “Kushmashusha was here.” Which would actually be pretty cool, since it would verify Cyprus’ identity as the Alashiya of the Amarna letters, a point still up for scholarly debate.

Ashmolean Museum - I'm pretty sure this says "The king's squirrel demands tribute"

In other news, I wrote a sonnet about Linear B yesterday while pretending I was going to write essays. I’m writing about various Late Bronze Age related topics for the end of term, and Linear B is an inevitable part of my research, albeit one I don’t necessarily enjoy. Take this as proof that I am quietly going mad.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Sonnet

The Pylos archives bring me to my knees
The pinnacle of pinacology
I have no life, you say; I don’t agree
I have no friends, but I have Linear B!

Oh, Tn 316 can thrill me more:
The human sacrifice; a hasty plea
Your text meant naught, alas, Hand 44—
All kingdoms fade to dust eventually

The po-ro-ko-re-te wants fifty sheep—
Such poetry sends joy throughout my soul!
Redistribution haunts me in my sleep—
Obsession, yes, my passion takes its toll

I welcome scorn, for desperate as I seem,
I much prefer my Mycenaean dream

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Actually, I don’t think I’m going “quietly” mad, I think I’m probably doing it rather loudly. Anyway, if you didn’t enjoy that poem, I don’t blame you, and if you did enjoy it I seriously question your sanity, but you are probably also an archaeologist and therefore already certifiably insane.

I suppose there’s a point to my rambling, and it goes something like this: I am really enjoying graduate school, and I never would have been able to be where I am if I hadn’t gone through the archaeology program at USC. I’m so grateful I stumbled upon the ARC website one day and went on a tour of the lab, because my life has been altered in incredible ways since then. I’ve been to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Chile, Ireland, and England, and all because USC sparked my passion for archaeology and travel. To the undergrads, I would definitely recommend grad school if you are interested in archaeology, because it’s been a phenomenal experience so far, no matter how many jokes I make about it in my blog posts.

So thanks, Professor Dodd and Ashley and ARC-peeps everywhere, because you prepared me for the next steps in my education and encouraged me in the adventures that brought me where I am today.

~Sarah Hawley

 

ARC Students Continue to Win Awards

Hi all,

I just wanted to take a moment here and brag about the amazing students in the ARC Lab. I know they won’t write their own praise here, so I will go ahead and take a moment to do so for them:

*Sarah Butler is currently studying abroad in Australia and received the Weibel-Orlando Undergraduate Research Fund awarded by Dr. Weibel-Orlando herself from the Anthropology department. Sarah will be traveling this summer to Turkey in order to participate in survey and excavation under the supervision of our own Professor Lynn Swartz Dodd.

*Michelle Lim received a USC Summer Undergraduate Research Fund award. She will also be joining Professor Dodd for survey and excavation in Turkey.

*Jacob Bongers is a Senior and was awarded a $10,000 prize from the USC Global Scholars program to be used for graduate school. Jacob is also one of only two 2011 USC Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Award Winner. Jacob focuses his research in Andean Archaeology and has been an important part of the ARC Lab since he was a freshman. Congrats to Jacob and Good luck!

Jacob works on survey during summer 2010

We have had previous posts regarding our great success in the Humanities category at the USC Undergraduate Research Symposium, Danika Jensen receiving an undergraduate scholarship fund to excavate in Rome through AIA, as well as AIA recognizing our ARCSmart program with a Society Outreach Grant. And these all happened this Spring! Hopefully we will have even more honors and awards to share with you soon

–Ashley

 

ARCSmart: educating kids ages 12 to 22

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”- Mahatma Gandhi

I’m absolutely thrilled that ARCSmart has received the Archaeological Institute of America’s Society Outreach Grant. I am personally involved with the program as a coordinator and volunteer, and while getting up on Friday mornings is sometimes hard, it’s totally worth the payoff. I know this program is working, not only for the students themselves, but also for me.

Paul Salay, USC Graduate student, teaches local elementary school students about archaeology

I think one of the most underrated aspects of volunteering is what the volunteer reaps from the experience. I don’t mean a sense of self-worth from vanity projects or generating personal good karma, I mean actually taking a good hard look at the human experience in the microcosm of schools. For example, during the Fall semester, I volunteered at a school deep in south Los Angeles. I have a lot of awesome memories from that school. The particular day of the week that I volunteered for was always before my Japanese class, so between rotations I would carry around my kanji flashcards or be furiously scribbling characters to finish my homework. A few saw this, and suddenly I was writing everyone’s names down in Japanese so they could display them on their binders. The word spread to the next class during recess, and I had kids asking for their names in Japanese again. Some chatted me up about my interest in anime, manga, and my excavation experience in China. I had to miss a day to do something, and upon my return the next week I had kids frowning at me saying I am not allowed to miss another day because they missed me. The unconditional love of students for being nothing but what they consider “cool” (heaven knows I am not, nor have ever been, cool by the standards of my peers) is awesome.

It was the last session with this school that really touched me the most. We played a game of archaeology Jeopardy, and the kids got prizes, and all was well and good. Usually at the end of the last session, we open up the floor to the whole class to ask us anything about archaeology, college, growing up, whatever. Standard questions include, “What is the most interesting thing you’ve ever found?” and “When did you decide you wanted to be an archaeologist?”. All fun things.

Beyond that, we start to get questions about college life in general. Do I get to sleep in a lot? Do I live with my boyfriend? Do I get to stay out late? Is it true that USC has a lot of parties? Is college hard? These are all really cool to answer because I can see their eyes widen when I tell them that I can eat whatever I want, and that I can more or less do whatever I want as long as I keep my grades up. To them, college is the enticing reward at the end of all the arithmetic, cursive and geography they endure.

The questions that make me uncomfortable are ones involving cost. Is it true that USC is incredibly expensive? How do you afford to go to college? I don’t want to discourage them from bothering to even try to go to USC, or any university for that matter. I take this opportunity to tell them about USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative, which works to prepare students in the USC neighborhood for university and beyond by providing academic support for committed students and full financial packages to USC. This last session, however, raised some worrying questions in general. These students are very aware of the California state financial crisis, that their education funding is being hacked left and right, and that their resources are limited. Small voices throughout the room murmured that they would never be able to go to college because their families could not afford it. This was especially heart-wrenching after spending five weeks getting to know them, knowing that they are incredibly bright and creative, and knowing that they deserve every bit of support getting into college that I did.

While I was carrying our materials back to my car, two young girls walked next to me. Both of them were told me that they would never be able to go to college. I misunderstood them, thinking they meant to continue the financial conversation from before. I told them that there will be a way to make it happen. I hate to sugar coat things for anyone and any reason, but I felt I had to mask my own feelings on the matter so they would not despair. In fact, they did not mean to continue the financial conversation– they said they would never be able to go to college because they were not American citizens, are scared of applying for federal funding because their families are all under the radar, and that without funding, they would never be able to go to college. This is all in light of the current events in the US with the immigration issues. I was left speechless. I mean, I really don’t know what to tell these kids. I felt awful, answer-less, and sad getting back in my car and driving back to my ivory tower institution.

ARCSmart getting this grant means a lot to me in that we can continue helping kids. Unexpectedly, this grant also means that we can keep helping ourselves. Most students I know at USC have done some sort of community service– whether that’s working with the Joint Educational Project teaching math and English, reaching out to the homeless, or simply donating blood is up to the student themselves. This grant has ensured that we’ll be able to keep educating kids, and in the end, educating ourselves and giving ourselves a holistic education beyond books and research and into interactions with real people, real issues and the reality of a world that I don’t think many USC students ever grew up knowing about, let alone immersed in.

–Sarah Butler

 

ARC Smart wins a national grant from Archaeological Institute of America!

Hooray!!  Arc Smart — USC’s community archaeology outreach project — has been awarded the AIA’s Society Outreach Grant.

This nationally competitive grant will help our excellent archaeology students to deliver hands-on, interactive archaeology activities in 6th grade public school classrooms.

Thanks to all the great people who support the partnership between USC’s Archaeology Research Center,  USC students (our ARC Smart educators), the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the USC International Museum Institute, and the local AIA society.

Cara Polisini, USC Undergrad, teaches local students about archaeology

 

USC student awarded national summer archaeology scholarship

Congratulations to Danika Jensen!  She recently was  awarded a Jane C. Waldbaum Archaeological Field School Scholarship from the Archaeological Institute of America, or the AIA.

Along with a good sized group of other USC students, she is headed to Rome this summer for the Ostia Antica Field School run through USC by Professor John Pollini.

Next year, if you are thinking about your first field school and are interested in classical archaeology, check out this link. You could be the next winner for Summer, 2012!

http://www.archaeological.org/grants/708