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Questions! Answers!
It has been brought to my attention that I've been completely remiss in my promise to post here about archaeology and Iceland. Yeah, yeah, mea culpa. There are a few reasons for this which can be summarized as (a) busy and (b) inertia and (c) some things that have been troubling me wrt one's right to privacy and oversharing on the internet - but mostly (d) increasing awareness of my own intellectual inadequacy (which I hear is something that happens when you learn more, go figure).
But I have an MA in archaeology now (have had since June, didn't post, oops?), which means I Know Things And Have The Documentation To Prove It.
Far too much has happened, and has led to what is happening, for me to summarize here. Also, I am hungry, and have been too distracted to eat most of the afternoon (because I have just finished a really outstanding novel called Eifelheim by Michael Flynn).
So if there's something you want to know and/or talk about, why don't you ask it here? I will possibly expound in comments.
But I have an MA in archaeology now (have had since June, didn't post, oops?), which means I Know Things And Have The Documentation To Prove It.
Far too much has happened, and has led to what is happening, for me to summarize here. Also, I am hungry, and have been too distracted to eat most of the afternoon (because I have just finished a really outstanding novel called Eifelheim by Michael Flynn).
So if there's something you want to know and/or talk about, why don't you ask it here? I will possibly expound in comments.
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As for the science, due to differences in the soil composition and the fact that Greenlandic turf is vastly inferior to Icelandic turf, we didn't have much luck finding buried turf, but we were able to locate Viking Age irrigation channels, burials, and stone foundations. Honestly I could go on for hours about the specifics. The report is online here if you want more info!
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I relate to all of your reasons for not posting or writing these days, and have even more reasons myself, but I am glad you posted this! I have missed you and the old LJ days.
About archaeology and your life: Do you have a specialty or a favorite area of interest? What projects have you done in the US? Do you want to work in the field mostly, or become a professor and teach? Or is it more like other humanities PhD's work, and you teach in order to have the opportunities to research/work in the field? Where are you living, and do you like it? How is your family? Do you feel at home where are you, do you have some good friends, or other hobbies right now?
About Iceland: What exactly do you do when you're there, and what is the overall aim of the project? I remember reading some entries from your first trip there, but that is all. What are the people like there? How long are you there for, and how many times have you been, etc. Do you have pictures? And I am pretty interested in Icelandic history, esp. early medieval/medieval/pre-modern. Did you have the opportunity to tour the island or go to other historic sites?
And finally, when is the last time you watched The X-Files? ;)
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My specialty is landscape archaeology and political economy, including things like environmental reconstruction, geophysics, economic anthropology, and the recursive relationship between society and environment. This also encompasses questions of colonization and colonialism, and the causes and consequences of social inequality, among lots and lots of other things. Basically, through what I've been doing and studying at UMB, I've learned that I'm most interested in answering big questions that require regional-scale survey and analysis, as opposed to questions of individual identity that are best addressed through single artifacts or sites.
The projects I've worked on in the US since I left Virginia have all been in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. I went to field school at Whitehall (claim to fame: Berkeley lived there for about two seconds), then I worked at the Munroe Tavern in Lexington, and did some environmental sampling and wet screening at Faneuil Hall, and last summer we ran a dig in a historic backyard in Newton. I've also helped with a few other assorted geophysical surveys around the Boston area. There are more reports here and also some stuff on the Fiske Center blog. (Oh wow, I forgot my presentation was the first thing on the blog! Well, you should download that powerpoint and let me know what you think. *g*)
This actually ties into your questions about my specialty, because my degree is in historical archaeology and I do consider myself an historical archaeologist, I consider it to be more of a theoretical perspective than a temporal or spatial concentration. I got really lucky in that I was able to get this grounding in historical archaeology in theory and method (which is where a lot of the really cutting-edge archaeological theory is being developed these days, including by several of my professors) while also being able to work outside of the traditional "historical archaeology" realm of North America in the last 500 years. I love being able to work both locally and globally, and I want to be able to apply what I've learned in any time and place in a comparative context. So while I love working in Iceland (and in New England) I don't necessarily want to be a regional specialist, and I think I could not have asked for better preparation than a course in historical archaeology with side orders of Iceland and economic anthropology!
This year I have field work lined up at a plantation site on Dominica, another season in Iceland, and (you will like this one too!) castles in southern England. There are also some projects coming up in New England and New Mexico that I will probably be only marginally involved in if at all.
Uh, where was I?? ... I suppose it's like other humanities: I could work in cultural resources management, but I don't really want to do that, so my goal once I get a PhD will be to become a postdoc or a professor somewhere where I can do field world, write papers, and presumably also teach.
I'm living in a Boston suburb right now with a roommate and my kitties. It's not far from the T so I don't have a car. I don't think I'm very good at being roommates, though, so I think I'll try to live alone again the next place I go. Boston is a wonderful city, I really do love it here, and I'll be sad to leave before I've explored all of it!
My family is fine - my sister has been updating her blog a lot more often than I have, so you might want to go check that out if you haven't been keeping up with her! As for feeling at home, like I said, I love Boston, and I've really felt like I belonged in the archaeology department at school. That said, though, I seem to have set myself on a path where I can't really count on permanency until I have tenure, heh. Luckily I have rather itchy feet and I like moving around to new places with new people (even if it does piss off my cats). I do have a lot of good local friends, mostly from my cohort, and we still hang out a bunch even though many of us have graduated. That's definitely a factor in my lack of posting, in fact.
My hobbies are much as they have always been, though I've been reading more nonfiction and also cooking a lot more than I used to. My advisor has a theory that there's a link between anthropology and foodie-ism and I think he's probably not wrong!
The goal of the Iceland project (which has been ongoing since 1999) is to perform a settlement survey of the Langholt region in Skagafjörður to understand how and why the social organization changed from the settlement to the early modern period. The website is here and there are several reports up, I think. I went for about 8 weeks in 2009, which you read about. In 2010 there was Greenland instead, and last summer I got a grant from the school to go back and take a lot of soil cores to cover some of the areas that I had poor or spotty data coverage for my thesis, and that was about two weeks. (Btw my thesis is posted here; it's a huge file so be warned.) I do have pictures but I haven't posted many - I should at least put some on Flickr one of these days. I haven't been *all* over the island, yet, but I've done the Golden Circle twice, seen almost all the exciting parts of Reykjavik, driven around Snaefellsnes, to Mývatn, and all around Skagaströnd. Haven't seen any of the east, or the Westfjords.
And I've seen the X-Files quite recently, actually, my roommate has decided she wants an education! We're just watching the good ones and we're about halfway through S3.
Whew, ok. Any questions? :D
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And I'm glad your roommate is getting such an education! ;)
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This is all so good to hear! I am really glad that this path has turned out so well for you, and offers so many opportunities! I will definitely look through some of the work you linked and tell you what I think, although I doubt my comments will be very profound! I think it's very cool that you get to pursue what is (relatively speaking) local history as well as more distant places and eras; that is the kind of thing that gets my excitement up, for some reason -- the cross-pollination of eras and histories, even just in the historical imagination.
I hope you will post about your various adventures this year! But if not, it is just good to see that things are going well and you're doing work that interests you so much. So yay!
P.S. re: posting under OpenID -- when did captchas get so hard??? geez!
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(also btw you should just get yourself a DW one of these days!)