I found something yesterday I didn’t even remember I had lost. I got an email from one of the professors of anthropology at Western, stating that he had been cleaning up the computers in the bioarch student lab, and had found a folder with my name on it. Inside was a bunch of files, so he said I could grab what I wanted via ftp.

I grabbed it all, and wouldn’t you know it, there was all sorts of stuff from when I was doing my thesis. There are photos of some of the bones, there are scans of some of the field notes, and even draft versions of the chapters.

It was kind of fun to go through it all again. This spring, I will be diving back into that project and writing up my thesis research as a journal article, so having these photographs and other materials will be really good.

Here’s a photo of my workspace in the lab downstairs at UWO. This was where I spent most of the summer of 2002.

Those individuals being analysed were two of about 50 in the mound. You can’t see from this photo but every other flat surface in that room was taken up by cardboard trays of bones from the site. Starting from the left you can see:

• A tray containing some upper arm bones and skull fragments.
• Below that is a Tim Hortons cup half filled with water and a toothbrush that I used to clean the bones.
• The glue is for attatching conjoining fragments together.
• The pen is an indelible pen that I used to write the catalogue number on each fragment.
• The bones in the middle have been separated by body part. There are skull fragments, longbone fragments, vertebrae, clavicle, rib, foot and hand bones present. Here I am trying to identify unique individuals where possible.
• The other tray in the middle contains the bones of a distinct individual that I separated out from those other bones. That individual is smaller and more delicate, and is also younger than the individual in the left tray.
• The book is for recording each bone or fragment present, and also my notes on how I have put them together or decided who goes where.
• The masking tape is for holding together fragments while they are drying, or for temporarily attaching fragments together that can’t be glued.
• All the other papers are unit catalogues, notes, and other scribblings.
• The trays on the right edge are other levels from the same excavation square. Those were the ones I analysed next.

I hope you enjoyed this brief visit back to my lab. I will return to this material a couple more times in these entries, so stay tuned.

So yesterday was rather amusing after all, in terms of trying to get around in the ice. I had to walk across campus, about 2 km or so in order to drop off the exams at the print shop for printing. Most of Trent is concrete or brick walkways, and no one had salted or sanded, so imagine everything covered with a greasy feeling film of ice, and then a nice layer of water on top of that. Where I could I walked on the grass, but in several cases, I couldn’t, so I had to cut down my usual determined lope in half.

It was amusing watching how everyone else was coping. There seemed to be three major strategies:

• “Skating” by sliding on the soles of the shoes, similar to what you do when playing curling. This seemed to be the most popular mode by far.
• Tottering on high heeled boots, taking mincing steps of about 6 inches each time. This seemed to be restricted to the fashionistas on campus, which aren’t many. This mode was combined with furry coats and swingy unbalancing totes.
• Determined stumping along. I fell into this category. Walking almost normally, with a bit more contact on the step than usual.

I wish I had a camera yesterday, because the podium had been salted, and the way the salt had melted through the ice made it look like bullet holes in glass. It was quite pretty.

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