This past week, I’ve learned a lot about my physical abilities and limits in particular. To begin, I’m learning that I’m a lot stronger than I believed I was. I’ve done some weight training in the past focusing on arms, but aside from that haven’t really had a chance to test the limits of my strength. Additionally, though this doesn’t surprise me, I find I really enjoy carrying the big rocks out of my unit. I love Rock Days, as I’m sure some others can agree, and I jump on the opportunity to see if I can lift a heavy rock. I think my reputation has been solidly cemented as 6B’s most enthusiastic fan of Rock Day….. I’m looking forward working on increasing my strength both during the rest of the dig and hopefully at St. Olaf as well. Conversely, I’m also beginning to reach some of my physical limits. In particular, I find that while working on passes and doing work on site that requires less standing and moving around, my knees and ankles get really sore, which has been frustrating because the best pose for daily work is the classic archaeology squat. However, I’ve been getting used to it, and find that stretching and this past Sunday’s yoga session have been very helpful for dealing with this.
My thoughts about archaeology and archaeological work have certainly changed since the first day. As other people have mentioned, I didn’t expect working on site to require so much physical activity, and that even doing regular passes is physically taxing. Archaeological work on site is also more ambiguous, so to say, than I expected. For instance, our unit has some suspiciously stacked rocks that SEEM to be a wall of some sort, but the continuity (or lack thereof) of those stones is perplexing, making it difficult to determine which rocks can and cannot be removed. However, these types of problems (figuring out whether to remove one specific rock) are not necessarily large enough to drag Tim over to answer every single time, so it requires critical thinking and decision on the part of our team to decide what to do. Though this can be stressful, because there’s always the possibility of making the wrong decision, I enjoy getting to help make these decisions and using the information I’ve learned from readings, discussions, etc, to make what we believe is the best decision.
