A Confederacy of Dunces

Since my last posting I have been working every day God sends. I may as well, these opportunities don't come around often so I may as well make as much out of it as possible. Brodsworth is quite a laugh anyway. Especially when I'm doing everybody else's paperwork. I have been going over Kyle's records. I was quite dreading it, given the struggle I had with Tim's paperwork, but it was surprisingly easy to clean up. The best thing I found was on one of the context sheets, the sheet for context 4018 in fact. In the relationship box, where one describes the context and it's place in archaeological space and time, Kyle had written '4018 was the context below 4018'. I was scratching my head for a while wondering how an archaeological layer can be below the same archaeological layer? Then today I was going over the paperwork for the testpits and I found one of Ryan's context sheets. On the reverse is a box for the interpretation of the context. There is a 'preliminary date' box in which one writes the date one assumes the context is, i.e. Roman, Medieval, Prehistoric, etc. Ryan had put '18/08/09'; the date he'd filled in the context sheet. I told him would have worked had he prefixed '18/08/09' with 'pre-', but that's just semantics.

Meanwhile, back at Trench 3...

In other news, back at Summer House Plantation Trench 3, the battle to win the hearts and minds of Tim goes on... The trench was supposed to have been finished last week, but Tim was allowing the students excavate mouse skeletons. I stood on the side of the trench and asked why they were excavating mouse skeletons when we had deadlines and was told 'the Romans ate mice, so it could be an important find.' Arthur the Farmer who owns the land was also there and was also berating Tim for this stupidity. We got into a discussion about whether the Romans had farms to raise mice, before they realised that cows and pigs have more meat on them...

A Roman Mouse Farm, before the culinary revolution that introduced beef and pork to the Roman diet...

Today I was, again, breathing down Tim's neck to finish Trench 3 when the following happened. One of the girls was excavating the bottom of the ditch and Tim shouted her in a humorous fashion about her trowelling. She didn't hear him properly, because she is hearing impaired, and she told him so. Tim responded with 'Oh that's a very convenient excuse isn't it?' To which I was desperately trying to get his attention, saying 'No Tim, it's true, she really is hearing impaired.' To which Tim's completely monstrous reply was 'If you don't want to do something I tell you to do, you can just say that your battery died!' I think he outdid anything I could ever come up with with the crassness of this remark...