After 150 page views with no guesses - and as a tacit acknowledgement of this venal and wicked world - I am raising the stakes by offering a real prize to a virtual quiz.
** The Prize **
The Question
What would you would teach in lesson 1 - paragraph 1 - to your new student or employee about archaeology?
The first steps are an important moment on the path to being an archaeologist, so where would you start?
Or perhaps, what were you taught first on your first day in archaeology?
Please feel free to confide, speculate reminisce or guess in comments below.
All answers may be marked out of 10 and the first to the correct answer will win the prize [1].
The Prize - a Corinthian oinochoe height 95 mm [N.109]
[1] Marked for conformity to the appropriate marking framework draw up in accordance with a subsequent clue provided or in relation the usual regulations, and in particular, those pertaining under the remit of the Sub-committee for Arbitrary Subjectivity as constituted in accordance with the accepted practices of Non-Accountability Policy Commission at the Examinations Board of Tyneside University, produced in association with Bet-your-life Educational Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of G4S Premium Pedagogy [China] inc. of Panama [2]; Your life may be at risk if fail to choose the correct option.
[2] All apparent acronyms are entirely fabricated from existing letters, which are coincidental with publicly available and locally sourced generic alphabets, and notwithstanding any intrinsic plausibility, are works of fiction and as such are inherent deniable with no intentional resemblance to any existing, co-existing, non-existing or metaphorical abbreviations.
OK Geoff, challenge accepted. I've just (coming up to eleven o'clock) seen some accredited Doctor bloke from Huddersfield University burbling on to the BBC chap about how they'd "reconstructed Stonehenge using architectural software" and such. I'd happily award him a 2"x4" across the snout. About five times.
ReplyDeleteTo do with imaginary trumps of doom and the like. Because caves, in Aurignacian Spain, or some such.
Geoff, I have to take one of the kids' pets to Dr Tim, in your toon (Orchard), soon. Do me a favour, and say that this musical Stonehenge stuff is true, and I am required to believe in it. Then get professor Tim to put us both down.
Ta very much, dustbubble.
Used to get my 2nd Proper Girlfriend to help me sniff and lick all the bombylioi (is that it?) and unguentarii in the collection, just to make it official when we were caught in the stacks and racks ("Yay! Research!1!!").
ReplyDeleteNever found any that smelled of more than dust rather than opiates, of course.
[Er, that's my opener for making it real, my man. C'mon, what's in the pot?]
Hi DB
ReplyDeleteTruly mindless - bringing our intellectual culture into disrepute.
When my late Farther saw this story - he thought it was an April fool; but no it is real and represent real money that could have been spent on real archaeology.
Anon - it is an empty jug - it should, as I understand it, contain wine.
Good post.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing archaeologists should learn is the value of the word 'don't'.
ReplyDeleteDon't dig it up and lose it.
eg things from the Great Pyramid sent to the British Museum.
Don't destroy it by excavating it.
Later people may find less intrusive methods.
Don't assume a right to destroy the past -'because you can' or because it gives you a job.
Don't act as if your modern attitudes and technology make you the pinnacle of existence with a right to look down on your ancestors and treat their remains with what they would probably regard as contempt.
Don't intrude on the living or the dead.
Don't think that people with their noses in a midden have the best view of what was important.
Don't disregard the mental and spiritual life of the past and the probable purposes of the remains in favour of the material.
Don't think that concepts like desecration, blasphemy and grave robbing don't apply to you.
Don't disturb the dead, especially for trivial egotistical reasons.
Don't be vandals of the environment of past lives. Stop mining the dead.
If you want 'doctorates', remember the doctor's Hippocratic oath. First do no harm.
Sorry if that appears rather negative, but modern archaeology has become rather negative, and ought to improve - or cease.
To emphasise the essential destructive nature of many archaeological processes is very important, and we should distinguishing between rescue and research is this context.
ReplyDelete7/10
Day one, lesson one. All archaeology is destruction. In the course of deposing our witnesses, we kill them, so everything we do must be documented completely. Someone should be able to look at your records, and using them, they should be able to reconstruct your site in its entirety, in their minds' eye...
ReplyDeleteSomething along those lines was the introduction given by my professor at field school.