Sucking the Sour Vine

Now that all the holiday and guest blogs are out of the way I can get back to telling you about the mundanity of my life. For the past two weeks I've been back working at the Brodsworth Archaeology Project for Sheffield and Hull universities. As ever with student excavations most days are as chaotic as a Chinese Fire Drill. This season I have taken on a larger role than I did last year in controlling things. Not only am I sorting out the roster for the students everyday, I am checking up all the records that are coming in from the other supervisors and running around like a blue arsed fly dropping off various bits of equipment for the other supervisors when they invariably forget to take them with them onto site. Added to that I am also giving advice on the archaeological excavations as they happen. Given the fact I haven't had a day off since returning from Italy there is little wonder that I nearly collapsed with a combination of sunstroke, exhaustion and dehydration on Friday and have taken the past two days off. As luck would have it I was going to take the weekend off anyway and head down to the World War One nerd fest at the Royal Gunpowder Mills, being run by my mate Dr David Kenyon. As luck wouldn't have it, I was too fucked to drive the two hours to London, so I missed that event as well, something I'd been looking forward to for ages.

Although this probably isn't actually happening at the Royal Gunpowder Mills WW1 Event, it's my impression of what I'm missing out on...

Also added to the piles of stress that I have had I have been having a running battle with Tim, one of the other supervisors, about his record keeping. Now, Tim may be fucking brilliant at painting Wargaming Miniatures, but his context sheets and registers could do with a little more work. Archaeology is by no means Brain Science, neither is it Rocket Surgery, but it seems to baffle Tim. As I have explained to him, at the most basic level is the importance of keeping good records. When the site is finished it is destroyed, we have no way of ever looking back at what we have done except through the records we keep as we go along. The very foundation of this record keeping are the registers. They help enormously during the post-excavation phase of the job but also they help so that we don't double up numbers during the actual site work. Every archaeological context we excavate has to have a number, it goes in the context register. Every drawing we do has to be given a number in the drawing register. Every sheet that every drawing is on also has to have a number which is put in the sheet register. Every photograph we take has to be entered into the photographic register. Do you see a pattern emerging here? Tim doesn't.

'Hmmm, which register is this? The one that counts how many mistakes Tim has made today?'

In Tim's world, I am a fucking mind reader who can second guess the work he is doing when I am not there on site. Usually I'm busy correcting his mistakes in the office. If I had a pound for each time I have had to rub out numbers or void them from the sheets and drawings, I would have about £3,987,456 and could retire from archaeology once and for all. Most basic of all, the registers are all sequential, i.e. 1001, 1002, 1003, etc (the thousand number indicates which trench is being excavated at the time, again so you know instantly where the number has come from). The most basic of basic maths. After nearly a week of beating this into him, Tim produced his context register for me to look at. It ran, I shit you not, like this:

3002
4001
3001

I think he must have set up some random number generator to get the numbers, either that or he just PULLED THEM OUT OF HIS ASS!!! Without my calm and reassuring presence, God alone knows what state the site will be in tomorrow when I return to work, I'm half expecting it to be a smouldering pile of ruins with Tim standing over it shouting 'What the fuck is going on?!'

'And the next context number is...'

I was trying, in vain, to find a picture of Myleene Klass presenting the Lottery for the above illustration, so to finish up here is one of her in just her pants instead. Don't say I never do anything for you.

'Calm down Alex, everything's OK, forget about the context registers. Look, I'm in just my pants.'