• Life as a Canadian Archaeologist

    06May
    Categories: Uncategorized

    Inspired by Christie Lynn over at Observations of a Nerd, I’ve decided to post a bit about myself and my strange career choice. I always enjoy learning about the person behind the words that I am reading, so here is a bit about my life and my work.

    I am an archaeologist. No, I don’t dig up dinosaurs. I don’t fight Nazis. I have never found any gold. I have not found an ancient lost city today and no, I can’t go dig up your garden for you.

    I spend most of my time wandering through various fields of southern Ontario. I am a contract archaeologist. I don’t work for a museum or a university. I work for an archaeology company that gets hired by construction companies. In Canada, as in many other countries, whenever someone wants to develop any land, they are legally required to get the land checked out for archaeological purposes. Here is where I come in. My crew and I show up, shovels in our hands, steel toe boots on our feet, trowels in our back pockets and we often find…. absolutely nothing. We spend days surveying land - whether walking through it, looking at the ground or digging test units - and, quite often, the land is written off and we go off on our merry way, never to be seen there again. And the land miraculously becomes a new housing development.

    But sometimes, we find things. A lithic scatter - a place where people made stone tools, leaving behind evidence of their work. A village - longhouses and sweatlodges that were once full of people and are now full of artifacts, marking their presence. Historic sites – houses that were built when the European pioneers first settled the land. Sometimes, my job is as simple as picking up an arrowhead directly off the ground and making a note of its location. Other times, I have to dig metres into the ground and accurately draw, to scale, each tiny little deposit layer and figure out their relationships with each other. Each little bit that we find, regardless of how insignificant it seems, is a part of our history. A part of us. I find that endlessly fascinating.

    It is not glamourous work. We don’t use brushes and casually flick off bits of dirt from perfect specimens. Most of our work is done whilst slogging through mud and thick bushes, with a giant shovel and a metal screen. My fingernails are constantly full of dirt. I have large calluses on my hands and feet. I bring spiders into my home on my clothes and virtually everything I own has a layer of dirt covering it. I go home every day physically weary, wanting nothing more than a hot shower and the chance to curl up on my couch with a good book. I inhale bugs regularly (by accident). My back and knees ache nearly constantly. I work under the hot sun all day, in all sorts of weather. I’ve gotten heat stroke several times. I constantly develop mysterious cuts and bruises all over my body and I get insanely uneven farmers tans. And I get laid off every Christmas until the snow finally melts and the ground dries, sometimes four or five months later.

    I love my job. There is just something purely awesome about being out under the sun with a shovel in my hand and dirt under my feet. Even on the most brutally frustrating days – slogging through thick forests, in 40 degree weather, impaling myself on thorns and finding absolutely nothing -  I don’t regret my choice of careers. I love relying on my own strength to do my job. I love grabbing my shovel and breaking through the topsoil, not knowing what I will find beneath it.  I love working on a new site, in a new city, almost every week, sometimes every day. I love finding things that have been unseen for hundreds or even thousands of years.

    And I get more than enough material to have my own cool stories to tell. Like the time I accidentally put a shovel through the skull of a 700 year old two year old baby. Or the time I picked up a point and realized that I am probably the first person to touch this in 10,000 years. Or the time the crazy turkey hunter came out to our site and started telling us about how the government was watching us and that we should not give out our phone numbers. Or the time I had to wear a Haz-Mat suit and breathing mask since the dirt and air were potentially toxic, as I knelt in the trench and attempted to draw the profile. Or the time that my co-worker got cornered by raccoons in a cave. Or the time a deer leaped out in front of our site and stood there, watching us, for several minutes before bounding away. Every day is different. Every day is weird.

    Archaeology gives you random skills that don’t have much use anywhere else yet are fun to possess. I can throw dirt, accurately, into a wheelbarrow ten metres away. I can flip my trowel twice in the air and catch it without impaling myself. I can look at the ground and instantly pick out dirt covered artifacts and reconstruct a site by looking at the scatter of artifacts on a map. I can look at a wall and tell by the brick formation when it was built. I can look at a rock and tell whether it is culturally modified. I actually use Pythagorean Theorum almost every day of my life.

    It’s a weird job, it’s a hard job, it’s a fun job. It’s my life.

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