Hell with Cape Town... archaeology!

Well, I was going to talk about the second half of my time in Cape Town, but the truth is that there is so much to talk about in Mossel Bay that if I don’t catch up now I never will. Suffice to say, I met up with my classmates, professor, and her husband at the airport. We all stayed in a lovely beach house, visited an organic farm, and went shopping at an open-air market. 

On Sunday, we then drove 4 ½ hours through agricultural land west to Mossel Bay. We checked into the hostel that will be our home for the next six weeks, and then drove to the Mossel Bay Museum, where the archaeology lab is located and where everyone else had already started training. The view from the lab looks like this:

What we found were a bunch of people on the front lawn learning how to operate a total station. What is a total station, you may ask? Well, they’re these thingies:

I’m sure you’ve seen them on the side of the road. They are used for surveying. The idea behind them is that they use what are called control points, which are set points for which the machine knows the exact location in space, to find the stations’ exact point in space. It then uses lasers to take a reading of where every artifact is found and creates a 3D map of a site and its artifacts to analyze. They are very expensive, very sensitive, and use brand new software no one is quite familiar with yet. We trained on them for the rest of the day and the first part of the next day, learning how to set them up, take them down, and configure them.

Then it was on to learning to sort. Providing us with examples, they gave each of us a tray and dumped a bunch of rubble into it. Then they asked us to pick out the things that were archaeologically significant (i.e. shell, bone, lithics, and the like). This was surprisingly difficult, and everyone struggled through it a little.

Then we just screwed around with Jamie’s, my professor’s, reference collection of bones.

There are actually two sites we are excavating this season. The first one is called PP 5/6. It's a rock shelter that dates back about 90,000 years up to about 50,000 years. It has been intensively occupied by Homo sapiens for much of that time and there are a lot of artifacts to be found. The second is an open-air site, basically a beach, called Vleesbaai. This is a site that has never been excavated before, but heavy rains and erosion have brought, what I’m told, is any insane amount of lithics to the surface.

There are two main jobs you can do at these sites in field school, and we rotate through them at both sites so everyone can get to do a little of everything. The first job is excavator. That is the person who digs in the dirt, finds the artifacts, and marks them to be shot into the total stations. The second job is the gunner, who runs the total stations. I was assigned first to PP5/6 as a gunner.

So the next morning we got up at 6 am for breakfast, and headed out the door at 6:45. PP stands for Pinnacle Point, which is the name of the area where the caves are. It also happens to be the name of the golf course and resort just above the caves. We told them at the gate that we were the archeological team, which made me smile, and they let us through. Most people were given an equipment assignment, a pack with certain equipment they are responsible for carrying in and out of the site every day. I and one other girl were assigned as “spare backs,” meaning we take whatever miscellaneous stuff needs taking. This day I brought only my personal pack.

 We hiked through the golf course and down through the tunnel where they store the golf carts, out a gate and into this:

The view left us all breathless, as did the stairs. Once you hit the beach, you hike right over about half a mile of rock and cliff, then about 20 meters back up to reach PP5/6.

The first day was mostly unpacking equitment and hauling sandbags around to create platforms for the guns.

I got back exhausted and woke up even more so, and sore as hell on top of it. But I wasn’t the only one, the sandbags took their toll on everyone. Yesterday we kept to the same schedule, but it was the first day performing our actual assignments, which meant I was in charge of the gun.

I do not mind telling you that this gun kicked my ass two ways from Sunday and back. I fucked with it for 12 hours straight and barely got anything done. Each excavator is assigned a stratigraphic square in which to dig. To open that strat, we plot out the beginning surface topography, and then stake the four corners using .5 meter intervals. But you are only given the NE coordinates for the larger quadrant of 4 stratigraphic squares and the cardinal directions of each strat. So you have to create a map in your head, or in your notebook (which everyone is required to keep) of what the ideal coordinates of the four corners of each of your excavators (I have 3), and then slowly move millimeter by millimeter until you get as close as you can to stake the points.

I wasn’t even finished with this process by the end of the day yesterday and don’t mind telling you I came back feeling discouraged, exhausted, sore, and wondering if I had any business being here. Everyone kept telling me how well I was doing for someone who had never touched a total station before, but I felt like I had just spent the day slogging through concrete for nothing. I passed out around 9:00 wondering if I’d even make it through my first week.

Today, after a solid 8 hours of sleep, we hiked back down and I rushed to finish my stake points before morning tea. Finally, we were ready to start digging.

Slowly but surely, we started pulling things out of the ground. I began getting the hang of plotting the finds with my total station, even learning how to fix it when things went wrong. All in all, my excavators and I pulled about 150 artifacts out today. It sounds like a lot, but really that’s nothing for this site. Still, it did make me feel like I was finally getting a handle on the insane pace and even more insane learning curve of this place.

On the hike back up, one of my fellow gunners told me that this field school is known for being one of the most intensive in the world. Had I known, I would have probably prepared myself mentally a little better. But it’s okay, because I think I can keep up, and I know I’m learning non-stop. Tomorrow is Friday and then I have all weekend to recover before more non-stop learning occurs. I plan on being ready for it this time.

Load shedding tonight...

...so no blog update today. Check back tomorrow.

Cape Town Numero Uno

First and foremost, I am sorry this post has taken so long. Cape Town, and much of South Africa, seems to feel that Wi-Fi is not a life necessity. This has proven both kind of nice, and kind of infuriating. Luckily we got to Mossel Bay yesterday and the hostel we’re at for the next six weeks has free interwebs. While slow, it seems to be getting the job done which means I can actually start updating you people. Huzzah! I’m going to split my first week in South Africa into two posts, the first of which you are reading and the second of which I will get up tomorrow.

Africa is also experiencing something called load shedding, which I will get to in a moment and which did not help the situation.

So I’ll keep this as short as I can for almost a week’s worth of experiences. I flew for nine hours from Denver to Heathrow, London overnight and got about five hours of sleep. Followed by a nine hour layover, and then an eleven hour flight from Heathrow to Cape Town overnight and got about four hours of sleep. I arrived at 10:00 am on Thursday morning pretty wrecked. I was debating renting a car to drive around, but when I found out that Cape Town has Uber (what!?), I decided not to bother.

My Uber driver on the way over started chatting me up a bit on touristy type information, but when I began asking his more personal questions he launched into a tirade about how his father had left fourteen children behind for another woman, how his oldest of four was the first in the family to go to college, and how easy South African women were. He expounded over and over about how I was not raised in this culture so I would never understand. Fair enough, but by the end of the ride I was still pretty unsure as to what kind of point he was trying to impart on me.

He drove away and ten minutes later I was greeted by this absolute goddess of a woman- tall and statuesque with a punky short haircut and a cultivated South African accent. Her apartment was located in a part of town called Sea Point, right next to the ocean. She had decorated in bright colors, with portraits of Frida on the walls, glass jars filled with sharpened pencils, and books by Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut. She handed me the keys and I immediately passed out.

Four hours later, I woke to a daytime blackout. This is load shedding. When Nelson Mandela was appointed president of South Africa, he made and kept a lot of promises to the poor population of SA, including access to electricity for everyone. Infrastructure was put in place that allowed even SA’s most poverty stricken people a pay-as-you-go system for electricity. They were given cards with which to charge, say, $.50 of electricity on to run a single bulb, or heat a single pot of water. Unfortunately, South Africa’s main power company Eskom did not anticipate keeping up with the growing demand for power. Now, many years and millions of dollars of development later, they are completely ill-equipped to supply the power all of South Africa needs at any given moment.

Rather than overload the system and plunge the country into total darkness for weeks on end the solution they have evolved is to section off the country and assign each section a “scheduled” blackout period of anywhere from 2-4 ½ hours. The schedule is loose and changes at a moments notice. Locals seem to begrudgingly accept these blackouts (what else can they do?), but many businesses have resorted to running on generators rather than rely on the country’s failing power grid. This is a growing and problematic trend that is already taking environmental tolls.

I ventured out for some dinner when the blackout ended a few hours later. Back in the apartment, I tried charging my phone and only then realized that the power adaptors I have bought were completely wrong. Exhausted and a little beat down, I went back to bed around 8:00 pm. I woke at 3:00 am and made myself a cup of French press coffee, which seems to be the main form of coffee consumption here. I am not complaining. I sat in bed and finished my plane book (David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell), and spent a few precious percentages of my phone battery to look up the nearest travel store three miles away.

The sun didn’t rise until 7:30, which seemed unfathomable to me until I realized it’s fall and almost winter here. The weather had been in the 60’s and it completely slipped my mind. I took a brilliant walk along the Cape, lost and enjoying the hell out of it, until I reached the travel store. Which ended up being in a MASSIVE mall that looked like it belonged in London rather than Cape Town, with upscale stores and well dressed people.

I found the charger and walked my sore-ass hips back three miles, packed my things, and called another Uber to get to my second AirBnB to share with my professor, her husband, and the other two students who were flying in that night. Little did I know that the place I had chosen was on the other end of the Cape. Lucky for me, the African rand is about $.08 to the US dollar. It cost me roughly $40 for an hour of driving.

The place was amazing a beautiful and peaceful and far enough outside of Cape Town that you felt like you were alone. I took another nap, and then another Uber to the airport to collect my crew. The rest I will write about later, because we are leaving for dinner. And I cannot miss dinner, as it’s into the caves tomorrow. More on that soon…

Veilige reis!

When I was much younger than I am today, my grandmother and I would sit around and daydream about all the places we wanted to travel. I most assuredly inherited my wanderlust from her (my grandfather, while lovely, is not a traveling man).

The place we talked about most often was Africa. We would go together when I was an adult, and we would safari to see lions and giraffes and elephants. We would stay in a grass hut and eat local foods and wear traditional saris. We spent what felt like hours talking about all the things we would do and see together. This was before I really knew anything about Africa beyond what I had seen in The Lion King, but it was enough to plant the seed of a dream. While my grandmother made it all across the globe in her long and fulfilling life, she did not make it to Africa before she passed away in 2010.

In a few hours I am stepping on a plane that will drop me off on a continent I have dreamed of going to my entire life, a place generations before me dreamed of going their entire lives, somewhere most people will never see in the entirety of their lives. I am overwhelmed.

And terrified, and excited, and humbled, and thrilled, and every other dot on the spectrum of human emotion, it seems. Not only is this a trip I have had in my back pocket since I was 6 years old, but adulthood, luck, and fate have conspired to wrap it together with my first foray into what I believe to be my dream career. This trip has all the makings of a defining life experience for me. I will not come back the same woman who left Colorado.

And you know, I think I'm okay with that. With less than half a year left in my 20's I have plenty of time left on earth (I hope),  but it no longer feels unlimited. I am no longer the invincable 17 year old who moved to an island by herself because, well, why not? It's time to start investing in something I can be proud of when I'm old. This is a bright and shiny beginning to something I want to cultivate.

I want to be proud of me.

All that to say this: I'm going to Africa today. And I'll be back in the span of a summer with a new perspective, new stories, and a new Mary forged in the heat of change. I do well in the heat. I look forward to seeing what comes out the other side.

I love you guys, and I'll see you soon.