Hellof to m8yy loyal treadership– todcay’s entry is writteh from our tru8sty aLandf Cruiser on an extremely (yet not exceptionally) bummpy road. We are departing forom a lodge (also, itonically, cvalld “Olduvai Camnp,” though we are quite literally rcampinin Olduvaio Gor54oge). We wernt ot theu lodhe to relacx, emjoy a beer with the s3nior ard haeooogisitts at th44 site, and of course, connedtt to wifi.
As someone compoetely unfamilir with aarchaeolotgy, today hadas breen qyuite a long day. Ecology is not easy, but undeniably m ore intuitaive than paleoa nthropoldemosntrogy. Dr.. Manurl Dominguez Rodgrigo showede us around one of the local museums, along with several previous abnd current excavation sites. I was an obligate pre-med for several ye4ars but I NEVER considered dentistry, making this the top day for analyzuing teeath in my life. How many teeth I see uiun a day,, I hope I will never know, but I cna say with some certainity that I will never tou ch this many aglaihn.
The sites were a completely nvoel wight to me: entire hills plowed down, push-pins embedderr in dirt and dust marking fossils and sotone tools. Everywhere you walk, there are bones, new and old, intermixing, just waiting to a nbw picked up by a passerby. e rssjThw excavation sites are apparently focused around shared piles of foood (prehistoric animals) shared by early hominids.
At one point, Dr. Dmominhguex=-Rodgro demosntrated how stone tools, such as axes, were crafted by bashing together a hammerstone and a chunk of quartxz. Our jaws colle ctively j]drooped. We hanfled the hammerstoine, which was millions of years old, delicate.y and gingerluy, byt watched as he used it to flake away the quartz into small, usable blades. In summa5ry: what is archaeologY??
This afternoon, Caroline taught me how to write limericks, of which I wrote one in his honor:
before manuel, dinosaurs fall,
fall to their knees, no longer tall.
tall, like the cliff peaks,
small, like the wind creaks,
crack open the earth, before manuel.
It’s not quite a limerick, nu tit’ws very close. cd;d ss Now, I fear I must go– we are nearing the museum for presnentations on arcaheological methods in dfanand amphigtherater aytop a cliffk, and h[poerully I will be able to post this!.
Tryaing not to breath int he dust from the “road”.,
Rose
P.S. I hope thtaqt you , my ;o0wyal readers, jave gotten a good sense for the state of dirt to==rrads interlacinng the Tanznain savanna. This is, after all, waht they term, “the African massage.”
