TIA BABY!! PART TWO (Pt3)

That twisted maniac Herr Doktor Clay whined that I wasn't talking enough about the archaeology at Engaruka in the previous posts. Now, I assume that most of you reading this are not archaeologists, neither are you interested in archaeology. If you are, you're not right in the fucking head. But for the benefit of the poor buffoons that have a slight interest in Heritage Intervention and to stop Dr. Clay ringing me in the middle of the night, screaming down the phone and hanging up, I will give you a brief summary of the archaeological shizzle that went down at Engaruka.

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As I may have mentioned in previous posts, the Engaruka site was situated on the edge of the modern village of Engaruka, what a coincidence, imagine that! The fucking mind boggles! The actual archaeological site covers an area of over nine kilometers (that's over five miles in old money) from the base of the escarpments of the Engaruka valley. Think about that. Go on. Yeah, it's big isn't it? Although we had such a big team of archaeologists we had little hope of more than scratching the surface of the site. Even with Posh Bastard opening random holes all over the place, usually just before a meal break, there is still massive amounts left to do. Mind you, it's probably going to be difficult getting tools to site in the future since we buckled the chassis of one Landrover and fucked the shock housing of the other.

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Anyhoo. There was two main area that we worked on. One was on the flat part of the valley and consisted of stone built circles and field systems. HOW FUCKING EXCITING IS THAT? Field systems!! Holy fucking shit! Let's have a street party! The people of the past farmed in FIELDS!!! Just like us! They're almost the fucking same as us. Except they're dead and we're alive and we have stuff like tractors and combine harvesters and massive barns with massive chickens hidden away in. But except for that, people of the olden days are exactly the same. Peas in a pod. Because of this, I took on the task of excavating one of the stone circles. I figured no one these days has stone circles but people use fields all the time. We're tripping over fields there's so many of them. All across Britain Town Halls have to be regularly cleaned of field droppings, but stone circles? Name one person you know who owns a stone circle. You can't. You know why you can't? Because no one has them today. There is no greater symbol of the enigma of the ancient past than a stone built circle. It's like the dim and distant past rising from the grave and belting you round the head with a full round house kick from down memory lane. Tackling a stone built circle is the equivalent of recieving a full Nelson from a bygone age.

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So we decided as a collective that Kirk should get the easy archaeology of the field systems and Ted and I would tackle the elusive stone circles. I was joined by my hand picked team of savvy go-getters in attempting to answer the riddles of the ancients. Over the course of the excavations we suffered as Ted and Kirk stole all the tools and left me and my team with only rudimentary implements to excavate with. Undeterred we fucked a great big hole in the centre of the circle. We fucked everything out of it.

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We fucked so much out of it apparently we fucked all the evidence for any kind of occupation out of it as well. We found NOTHING in the quarter section we fucked out. Not a single fucking piece of pottery, not a single bead, not one tiny iota of testament that people had been anywhere near these stone circles. Earlier excavations on similar structures in the recent past at Engaruka had yielded so much pottery that it had to be air lifted off the site in shipping containers by Chinooks. At least that's what Posh Bastard told me. Engaruka has it's own type of pottery. It is unique to the site. It was not made on site and was most likely traded in to the area. It appears who ever was making the stuff was making it for the people of Engaruka specifically. A case of: 'Those daft cunts down at Engaruka like lines and dots all over their pots, so we'd best put a load all over them, but don't get them mixed up with the good stuff we sell to that other village.' But the circle I was working in had not a scrap of this stuff. There was only two conclusions to leap to, either they weren't living in the circles and they were being used as some kind of cattle corral OR they were the cleanest Iron Age folk in all of Africa, carefully picking up every thing they dropped. Sweeping up everyday and tidying the place constantly. Every day was a spring clean for them. I prefer the latter theory.

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The circles threw up more questions than they answered and in the end we'd have been better if we'd left them well alone. There was the whole riddle of the doorways and why a load of stones had been fucked about at the entrance like some kind of ankle breaker and 'unwelcome mat', if you will. But before I had a mental breakdown considering the eternal mysteries of our forebears I was moved up the hill. Above the valley sat the hills and on these hills sat terraces and on these terraces sat house platforms and on these house platforms sat... Oh fuck off. This is not a nursery rhyme. The hill was the ace in the hole for Posh Bastard. It was the place where the people of Engaruka lived and loved, laughed and cried, dreamed their dreams. It was going to make Daryl a rich man. If only he could work out the sequence in which the terraces were built. If he could unfurl the intricate patterns of confusion that were the embodiment of the terraces he would be revered in the archaeological world as a God, no longer a mere mortal but the living incarnation of archaeological science. He could retire on his discovery and live a life on a Bahamian island surrounded by dusky maidens surrendering to his every whim. There was one snag, he had Ted, Kirk and I in charge. He was completely fucked.

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The terrace structures are unique in African archaeology. They consist of a sequence of platforms backed by stone built walls, often ten feet high. It's the African equivalent of Stonehenge. What we did to them was the equivalent of taking a JCB piped with a breaker to Stonehenge and turning it from an attractive stone feature into a pile of aggregate. Oh yes, we fucked holes through those walls, we blasted chasms into the side of that hill. We were like Belzoni burying into the Pyramids at Giza. Did we answer any research questions? I've no idea but it sure was fun pulling the walls to bits. I think Posh Bastard had some idea of what was going on with the sequence of building, but you'll have to wait until the ultra-exciting report is published sometime in 2054 to find out the answers.

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OK, I think I've bored you enough with the exciting world of archaeology that I inhabit. The next post about Africa will be about the FUN things we did. I forgot to put these on the previous posts but here are links to the pictures from my Facefuck account:

Album One
Album Two
Album Three