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.