Last day in Mossel Bay.

Today is our last full day here at Mossel Bay. I’m awake here on my own at 4 am because I couldn’t sleep thinking about how much I’ll miss this place. I feel like I’ve been here forever, and for no time at all.

They’ve had me on recorder for these past few weeks, which is basically the person who opens and closes the strat units, takes all the photographs, does all the paperwork, and keeps everything in order. It’s not excavating, but I do enjoy it because you get to see what everyone is working on and you get to make it around the site instead of just hanging out in one place.

Last weekend I was pretty sick, but I knew it would be my last opportunity, so I came to site alone. I’ve wanted to do so much exploring and, when you are working all day, it doesn’t leave much time for that. Being completely and totally alone after spending the past 6 weeks surrounded by 20 people all day every day felt very strange. I’ve never been unable to be happily alone, but I’ll admit that it was vaguely creepy and I was a little afraid.

Still, it was also totally magical. I clambered over rocks and managed to get myself onto a beach where no one had been all day. It was completely free of footprints, like stepping onto pristine snow. I could just imagine what it must have been like for some early human to step onto that same beach, see the same things I was seeing, and hopefully feel the same sense of overwhelming awe.

The main reason I wanted to explore was because there is a cave, visible from site, called PP 1. It is just across the bay and has been taunting me all season to come and explore. 

Cavernous and huge in the front, it narrows in the back to, what I am told, are passages to other chambers. Alas, while I did go inside, I didn't have a headlamp with me and I didn't feel safe exploring any further on my own. Besides, someone had built a fire at the mouth of the cave, so someone had been living in or hanging around it recently and I didn't want to be caught in a bad situation.

On my way back I was looking for pretty shells when something caught my eye. It looked like a piece of plastic or trash, but when I got closer I could see a swirl that looked pretty shell-like. When I picked it up it was crazy thin and obviously organic, but I was stumped. I decided to bring it back and when I showed Jamie her eyes lit up. Apparently what I found is a rare shell from a Paper Nautilus.

They're so frail that they mostly break apart before reaching the shore, so it's hard to find one intact. I have no idea how I'm going to get it home without breaking the hell out of it, but I'm sure going to try. I'm also told they're good luck.

This event, of course, sparked in me an obsessive need to hunt shells, and I've been doing it ever since on my half hour lunch breaks. I have found some pretty amazing stuff! Some of the things that the ocean produces every day are just breathtaking.

On Wednesday night a few of us stayed behind with Erich, who co-runs the site with Curtis, to do night photography. This means we got to be in the cave at night. With no lights on. While Erich told us true-life ghost stories from when he used to hunt ghosts. It was freaking awesome. When we were leaving, we looked back to see the waves rolling in and glowing green. Bioluminescent waves. Seriously, how could this part of the world get any more beautiful?

I'm exhausted, and I'm ready to be home sleeping in my own bed, petting my own cat, hanging out with my friends and parents and fella, but I sure am going to miss this place. Legitimately, this has been the hardest and most demanding thing I have ever done and I am so glad I did. I'll try to update once more before I head home, but it won't be from here and that makes me sad. I'll just have to try and appreciate every moment of today and start planning for the next big thing.

See you all soon. 

Bones, teeth, and nerves.

Last week I finally, FINALLY, got to excavate. It was thrilling (for me, anyway). The way the system is set up, each excavator is assigned a quad, which is a half meter by half meter square of earth you are meant to dig. This site is very hit or miss in terms of artifacts because it has periods of intensive occupation, where you get a lot of artifacts and cool stuff, punctuated by periods of low to no occupation, where the layer is pretty sterile. I happened to be assigned a quad with a ton of fire modified rocks, a ton of burned bone, some lithics, some shell, some charcoal, ect. Basically it was a 60,000 year old trash pile where they threw everything they wanted to get rid of into the fire.

The coolest thing I had a chance to pull from the ground so far was a whole vertebra from some large animal. The guess was zebra, but honestly it looked a little big for modern zebras to me. However, there was a now extinct species of cape zebra that used to roam the cliffs and I have no idea how big they were. Last Thursday there was quite a commotion because Nkosi, one of the local fellas who work on the project, found a bunch of huge animal teeth and one incredibly well preserved tooth that looked like it could have been human. They took soil samples from all around where it was found along with detailed pictures, and immediately sent the photos to Jamie. She told us that it was, sadly, not human at all, but wildebeest. Still awesome. Honestly, excavating is amazing. When they call tea time or lunch, I didn't want to go. I just wanted to dig and dig.

On Friday last week I found a giant piece of burned bone from some giant animal, but could not excavate it because, while I had exposed the top, the bottom sat in the sediment layer underneath the one I was excavating. This meant I needed to clear out all of the top sediment and close out the strat unit before I could open another one for the layer below.

I was determined to get this bone, and I let everyone know it. Diligently I dug away more rock, more dirt, more bone shards, all the while staring at the top of this bone with an indescribable itch.

Action shot!

Everything changed Wednesday morning when I woke up to a spasm in my neck. As some of you may know, the last few months I have been dealing with a pinched nerve at the top of my spine. The first time it happened was completely incapacitating and it took about three months for me to be able to function normally again. Naturally this scared me, so I told Jamie my neck was acting up and she decided to take me to work with her in the lab rather than having me go to site. Lab day was fun! I washed the dirt from everyone's finds so Jamie could analyze them, which meant that I got to see the best of what everyone was finding.

Alas, I went back to site the next day because I am completely incapable of self-care, it would seem. I cried all the way back up the hill at the end of the day and laid in bed that night just trying not to aggravate the electric shocks my nerves were shooting down my neck and back. It was probably as pathetic looking as it sounds. I text my wonderful boyfriend Will back in Colorado, and he encouraged me to try and find someone with muscle relaxers or pain meds, but the only person who I knew had any had given them to Bill, my BBF and fellow Coloradian who, as fate would have it, had thrown his back out that morning.

The next day found us both crippled and unable to do much of anything. Jamie gathered the two of us in the living room after everyone had left and told us we had to move forward with some kind of therapy, be it doctor visit or just heating pads. We agreed a doctor might be in order. I was hoping to get some muscle relaxers because at this point I was just in constant, low-grade pain and it was really wearing on me. Jamie walked us to the nearest clinic, where we came into a small waiting area with about six people already sitting there, headed by a desk overflowing with scatters of paper and free condoms. The only thing behind it was a television playing truly terrible South African soap operas. Jamie asked one of the people sitting down if this was a clinic and he told her yes, we just had to wait. A woman came back behind the desk about 15 minutes later and told us to take a number, which was literally just a number sharpied onto a small piece of cardboard. After another 15 minutes Jamie had to leave and go to lab, and she asked us to tell her when we got in to see the doctor.

An hour later only one person had been called to go back, Bill was in a lot of pain from sitting in the chair, and my tolerance for half English/half Afrikaans drama had plummeted. We decided to take a cab to the clinic further away, where I had gotten my antibiotics a few weeks ago. We were seen in less than 20 minutes. Bill's doctor prescribed him an anti-inflammatory, a muscle relaxer, and gave him a shot in the butt. Mine prescribed me a combo med of both, and told me he wanted me to get some x-rays and bring them back to him to look at. I kind of balked, until he told me the x-rays would cost 175 rand. Less than $17 US.

South Africa, people.

So we filled our prescriptions, ate lunch, and off I went to the hospital for my x-rays. When they were done, they handed me a disk instead of any paperwork, and sent me on my way. I stopped into the cafe next door and bought a cookie, already falling asleep because of the meds. I asked the woman behind the counter if she could call me a cab, and she laughed. "A cab? In Mossel Bay?"

I nodded, unsure.

"Where are you trying to go?"

I told her the name of my hostel and she shook her head. "I tell you what, you wait five minutes and my husband will drive you." So I waited five minutes, her husband came to pick her up, and they drove me home. When I got into the room I collapsed into bed and slept the rest of the day. Still need to get the x-rays to the doctor.

The meds are helping, but I'm still pretty messed up and can't really look to the left. Stupid body, getting old and uncooperative. This is my second to last weekend here in Mossel Bay, and we only have two more weeks of field season to go. I'm not sure where or how I'll be able to work at site, and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get my bone out, which breaks my heart. It's kind of crazy how attached you get to one square of dirt and one old bone. But I'll find a way to be useful, and I'll be sad to leave regardless of how physically deteriorated I am.

I do miss home, and I look forward to doing all manner of summer Denver things with my summer Denver people. I spent much of today purchasing gifts, so look forward to that ya'll.

Caves, "wild"life, and antibiotics.

The prevailing theory is that the illness is bacterial. It isn’t getting better and I’m not the only one, so I determined I was going to have to visit a South African doctor. But it was going to have to wait until Sunday, because Saturday was Cango day.

We left at 8 am and drove about two hours to reach the caves, which are a huge tourist attraction. I’m not usually a fan of touristy type landmarks, but this place is truly amazing.

Only about one fourth of the caves are open to the public because they have had major problems with vandalism and mold, and the parts of the caves that are open are no longer forming. Of course, this triggered my selfish need to see things almost no one gets to see, but unfortunately this isn’t a case of bendy rules. Just the carbon dioxide that humans release when they breathe damages the growth of the formations.

But the caves we got to see were spectacular enough. The first chamber used to be used as a concert hall, but they had to cease their events in 1994 because they couldn’t control the crowds. Drunk people kept climbing all over the formations and breaking pieces off to take home as souvenirs. Way to ruin it for the rest of us, guys.

 We spent about an hour and half in the caves, then piled back into our vans and drove to the Cango Wildlife Ranch for lunch. I ate an ostrich burger. Ostrich is an odd meat. You would assume it would taste like our concept of bird meat, but it’s actually more like red meat. It’s often served in steak form and you can choose a temperature. Kinda gamey, really good, and super popular here in South Africa. The entire park was covered in peacocks.

The thing I love most about wildlife ranches in foreign countries is just how close you can actually get to the animals. It’s probably completely irresponsible and not that safe, but it sure does make for some amazing photographs.

At the end of our tour, it was time to visit the big cats. Like this fat ass jaguar.

Or the extinct-in-the-wild white lion. Complete with giant lion testicles.

We had a few “encounter” options where you paid to spend one-on-one time with a selection of animals. It shouldn’t surprise you to know I chose the cheetah. 

They sanitized our hands and took four of us in to a pen with two handlers and two adult cheetahs, but the cats were having none of it. Apparently they had fed the larger one some vitamins that morning, which consisted of forcing them into his mouth, and every time the trainer approached he just trotted away. The second one was lounging on the roof of a shed and had no interest in moving. So they ushered us out and to the enclosure next door. I snapped a few pics in one of their faces as we walked by. No zoom, no filter, all cheetah.

The cats in the next pen were younger, and a little more rowdy. For much of the time, they were playing with the handlers’ fingers or rolling around in the grass. They also LOVED pets. Cheetahs purr, and they do it really loudly, so it was very easy to tell when they were happy. When my turn came up to pet him, my cheetah wouldn’t stop playing with the handler, but when I reached up and scratched his head he immediately went limp and just purred.

It was cool, ya’ll. Really cool. When our time was up, they released us back into the zoo. We wandered into an enclosed exhibit where a lorikeet hopped up onto my shoe and rubbed his face against my leg until I literally had to shoo him off. Then a pigmy marmoset jumped up onto my shoulder and rode around for a while. I don’t have pictures yet because other people took them, but I’ll try to load them up when I do.

It was a long and amazing day, and I slept well (or as well as I can sick). The next day I and two other girls when to a very kind, old doctor who barely looked at us before prescribing us some antibiotics. The visit cost about $55, the antibiotics cost $0.80. You read that right, $0.80. No health insurance. I’m flying to SA the next time I get sick.

Honestly, it’s been well over a week now and I’m starting to get really tired of being sick. I can’t sleep through a night because of the coughing and I have a pretty constant headache. I’ve only been taking the meds for a day and a half, and I think they’re helping, but my cough is still terrible and my voice sounds pretty pathetic. They benched me today at site, just kind of letting me float around and help where I could, so I know they’re a little worried about it as well. Here’s hoping for the best for the next few days.

Update again soon.

Sick day update: The Fynbos.

Welp, I've succumb. Ever since we got here there has been some kind of cold/flu/plague being passed amongst the troops. Living in such close quarters, there is honestly no way of avoiding it. Regardless, I thought I had it beat. I'd gone two weeks being jammed in with sick people and hadn't felt the slightest bit bad. But just as I was patting my immune system on the back, I woke up Friday with a sore throat. I worked that day, it got worse, and I spent a very low key weekend feeling moderately run down, but not terrible. With people felled left and right, and with the limited amount of gunners we have, I decided on Monday that I could just work through. That was the day it moved into my sinuses, and Monday night the pressure was actually making my teeth and jaw ache. Tuesday my occasional dry cough turned into a deep chest hack. This morning Jamie looked at me and said, "So you're staying home, right?" There was nothing I could do but nod.

So while I sit around and expel unpleasant gobs of stuff from my body, I wanted to write a blog about something interesting (if not terribly archaeological) about this part of South Africa that I've had the opportunity to learn. The whole of the planet is classified into six floral kingdoms: Holarktis, which takes up most of North America and Europe. Neotropis, which takes up all of South America. Palaeotropis, which takes up most of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Australis, which takes up Australia and New Zealand. Antarkis, which is Antarctica. And Capensis, or the Cape Floral Region, which is only found on the southern tip of the coast of South Africa.

Known to the locals as the Fynbos, this region of the world houses over 9,000 species of plants, over 6,200 of which are only endemic to this coast of South Africa. The biodiversity here is on par with tropical rain forests or the isolated islands of the Pacific, and is almost unheard of in such a dry and arid climate.

A lot of the locals who work on the project and some of the non locals who have just been living here to work in Pinnacle Point practice a lot of foraging in their free time. We have one University of Cape Town student who's joined us later in the season and seems to be quite the expert in the Fynbos plant life. On our drive in the other day, she pointed out Fynbos rosemary, which is actually a cross between what we know as rosemary and lavender. On the hike up yesterday, she arrived up top with a handful of plants she identified as "bulbs," or small, eatable onions that she is still trying to figure out how to prepare (they are quite bitter, she informed us). Elzanne is from Stellenbosch, just a little ways outside of Cape Town, and I think her studies have something to do with the plant life of the area. So she may be a little more knowledgeable than the average joe, but she isn't the only one to point out this or that species that tastes this or that sort of way.

In fact, foraging seems to be a very popular method of passing the time on the weekends for many of the long time residents of Mossel Bay. You can acquire a permit for something like 50 Rand, or $5, from the post office to forage for mussels on the rocks, which form in giant clusters in the not so hard to reach tide pools. I am actually still playing with this idea, as clam chowder made fresh with mussels I picked off the rocks that morning sounds like an amazing, possibly once-in-a-lifetime sort of meal.

Unfortunately Elzanne informed me yesterday that Pinnacle Point is not the place to find proper Fynbos. Most of the plants that grow there are the ones with costal adaptations, and therefore have things like large, thick, waxy leaves to deal with the ocean spray, which will crystalize acidic salt on anything growing near the coast. But drive an hour in almost any direction, she told me, and you'll hit it. I'm still hoping to get the opportunity to do that.

Elzanne and the other local student we have on the project, Leesha, are in charge of this Friday's braai, which is the large weekly BBQ we do. They are planning a lot, and I am looking forward to some genuinely local Afrikaans cuisine with some maybe collected in the Fynbos herbs to go along with it. Whenever I manage to get back to site, I am due to switch off the gun and onto excavating (yay!), and this weekend is Cango Caves and Wildlife Park. Hectic, yes, but I wouldn't have it any other way (well, maybe not the whole sick and gross bit). Hope your summer is going well, dear reader, and that you are enjoying reading about mine. More to come...

Methods and the sea foam of doom!

Last weekend, Curtis Marean (the archeologist in charge of Mossel Bay and Pinnacle Point) took us on a five hour tour of the caves so we could get the bigger picture and some context for the work we are doing.

Curtis has been working in these caves for over ten years, and he is most famous for the cave labeled PP 13B. This cave shows some of the earliest evidence for humans exploiting shellfish and for the mining of ochre, which is used for making pigments. But Curtis believes that these caves will also have some of the earliest fossils from Homo sapiens dating back to around 191,000 years ago, a period classified in archeology as Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. MIS is a dating technique that uses oxygen levels from core samples to distinguish between different glacial periods in earths’ history.

Along with my general love of caves and spending time in them, the part of the tour I found most interesting was Curtis’ explanation about why he chose these particular sites for excavation. He took us into each one and pointed out the geological features he noticed when he first saw them, and what he deduced from those features about why there may have been valuable archaeology in them.

One of the first things we learned is that during MIS 11, about 424,000  years ago, basically all of the ice on earth had melted and the oceans were about 20 meters (65 ft.!) higher than they are today. This is the highest they have ever been, or ever could be. At MIS 4, or about 71,000 years ago, we had another mini warming event in which the oceans rose about 12-13 meters. This means that any caves lower than 12-13 meters above sea level would have been washed clean of any artifacts dating to before 71,000.

To demonstrate this, Curtis showed us this cave, and asked us what we though the white stuff cemented onto the walls were.

These walls were roughly 30 ft. high, and the white blobs were rock hard with a bumpy, coney texture to them. He told us that when he first saw them, he had no idea what they were either. He asked six of the best geologists he knew and got six completely different answers. So they sent a sample off to a lab and got the results back a few weeks later: it was petrified coral. The entire cave had once been the bottom of the ocean long enough for coral to start forming. On top of that, the coney texture was caused by a particular kind of sea worm the burrows into living coral. Furthermore, this worm only lives in very tropical, temperate waters; much more tropical and mellow than the current sea of Pinnacle Point, which are pretty rough and fairly cold. These gross, white blobs tell us a lot about the life history of this cave.

So the caves had to be high. But they have to have features that made them attractive to hunter-gatherers for shelter, such as availability of food, easy access, and size. The sites also needed a high probability of being preserved and not succumbing to thousands of years of erosion. Curtis pointed out to us a whitish, nearly vertical line near the mouth of the cave and told us that this was actually a cemented sand dune.

They had dated it to 90,000 years old, when the ocean was much farther away than it is right now. Pinnacle Point is a cliff face right now, but when the ocean receded it freed up sediments and sand that are usually on the sea floor to become beach. The wind picked up these sediments and blew them up the cliff face, creating dunes that actually blocked the caves off at the mouths. Over time and with the slow drip of water, these dunes became hard and were cemented to the walls of the caves, and then eroded away. So for a good chunk of time, these caves were completely inaccessible from the outside world.

Combined with the location of these caves on the southern coast of Africa and what Curtis knew of paleoclimate and early, modern man, he decided to ask the National Science Foundation for what is called a High Risk grant. Not only did it pay off, but it became Curtis’ career defining project (I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying that) in which he, in combination with many other skilled people from all different fields, has actually created one of the longest running sequences of geological and archaeological recorded processes in all the world. Right now their timeline runs from around 160,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago, and they are looking to go even older once we are done excavating at PP56.

If you are still with me, congratulations. I recognize that a ton of this stuff will only be interesting to people who are interested in how this work is done, and I hope I didn’t bore you too much. We also got the chance to hike around on the rocks and over the ocean, which was a good time.

This week the Colorado crew was on kitchen duty. This means we got up at 5:30 am to make the group breakfast, cleaned up the breakfast at 6:20, out the door with everyone at 6:45, back home at 5 pm, washed out everyone’s lunch boxes, dinner with everyone at 6:45, back home at 8, and we washed everyone’s dishes at 9. It’s a long ass day that makes for a long ass week, and while I didn’t mind doing it, I’m glad it’s over.

It also rained like crazy all week, to the point that the people at Vleesbaii were actually rained out of the site for two days. They sat in the hostel for 8 hours sticking our plotted finds bags while we trudged around under a tarp in the rain. On Thursday, we kept watching the ocean building up a nice, frothy foam throughout the day. The storm had made the waves big and rough, and they pounded against the rocks pretty hard all afternoon.

Come time to walk back up, I noticed early on that one part of the path that the surf never reaches was wet, and had foam in the cracks of the rocks. The next part of the path had actual foam on the dirt. No big deal, I thought. Just get past this one part and then smooth sailing. I was wrong, as it turns out, because the sea foam was EVERYWHERE. 

It crawled up the beach and over our usual path into the foliage. At first we trudged through the bramble bushes, getting snagged by two inch long spines and trying to keep an eye out for snakes, in order to avoid the foam, but we just ended up tripping and falling into it sideways anyway, so we gave into our fate.

It was difficult because you were taking steps on uneven ground that you couldn’t see, and every time the tide came in or out the foam jiggled and undulated in this really creepy way all around us. It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

When we got up top we found that only about six of us actually went through the foam. Curtis had called everyone else back to take the short cut, determining that it was too dangerous. He told us he had never seen the ocean like that before and that it was a result of the storm, spring tide, and high tide. Whatever it was, it was awesome.

More blog posts possibly in the week, defiantly by next Sunday. We’re doing Cango Caves next weekend and we’ve heard some amazing things, so I should have more amazing things to share. I don’t have time to struggle with homesickness, but I do miss you all terribly and I can’t wait to spend the end of the summer with you.