Off to Flag Fen Again!

I’m off to Flag Fen again in the next half an hour! I’m so looking forward to going back. I had an awesome time last September; the people are amazing as is the archaeology. Sarah and I are camping out in her luxurious two bedroom tent.

I’ll no doubt blog all about it when I get back and upload some pictures.

In other news the Transfer is going. Well or not I can’t really say, but it is going at least! I’m all ready for our conference next week and things are otherwise good and fluffy.

I’m back late on the 21st, but probably won’t have time to blog or sort photo’s out ’till next weekend. PLay nice while I’m away kids,

Neko out!

Yellowmead isn’t exactly Stonehenge….

… but it has a charm all of it’s own, and as I said in comments on a recent post, it’s mine.

It is also one of the reasons I haven’t been keeping my blogging resolution lately. I went up there for fieldwork on the 14th, when everyone was still very excited about Stonehenge. I had a good but frustrating week up there with Sarah, my amazing assistant and very good friend, but we were stymied somewhat by the weather getting all interesting on us, and having to do some running repairs on various bits of kit.

The photo-set on Flickr speaks for itself in terms of the sheer variety of weather we experienced! On the 15th I was running up and down with the radar in my vest and combats, but by the 18th it was wet and very very windy, and was too cold to really get much done, even in decent waterproofs! The 17th was also very windy, but sunny- the above photo is as we were leaving site as we lost the light. Sunset up there is just magical.

Stonehenge was amazing, don’t get me wrong, but I love this bit of the world…. well, at the moment, it’s more love/hate, but that is the nature of doing a PhD, I am reliably informed. The following week I had a sort of week off planned for my birthday, but spent most of it in bed recovering from a horrible cold made worse, no doubt, by the Dartmoor Storm Gods doing their worst to us the preceding week! Sarah and I are agreed that it was actually worse than being up there in January, which is quite some feat!

I did recover enough to have my joint birthday bash with another good friend, Bibby- all and sundry (vampires, fellow phd’ers, assorted geeks and the lovely Cas amongst them) piled to her house for a BBQ which the not-spouse fearlessly did man+fire+meat behaviour at to feed them all. Like all manly men, when confronted with a BBQ and things to burn, he had great fun and didn’t seem to mind all the smoke, which was fine by me! Then we went out dancing and much fun was had by all There are photo’s on Flickr of all of that too!

So the start of last week brought me back to PhD-world with a bump, and I spent two days working on my Transfer document (the word transfer has become even more of a swear-word in our house than Dissertation did in late 2006!). I also got to have lunch with Cas- seeing her twice in a week which is a rare privilege these days! Then Sarah and I headed back to Dartmoor, and it appeared the Gods were again having fun with us: This is the view driving West down the M5 just outside Exeter…

So we got soaked. Again. Sarah is a saint!

I spent the tail end of last week in uni backing up all the data and sorting out a plan for getting another stint in at Flag Fen before all the kit goes off to the summer fieldwork projects. I can’t wait, last time it was amazing. And it has to be better conditions than Dartmoor- it’s flat, and not on Dartmoor! Then Matt came down and we went to see Iron Man, which was simply awesome! I think it’s possibly the best comic to movie transition I’ve ever seen. If you’ve not been yet, stay ’till the very end of the credits- a geeky treat for all fans of Marvels ‘Ultimates’ continuity (which is where the tone of the movie is very much taken from, and is my favourite Marvel continuity).

This weekend I played about with data and played silly roleplaying games too, then I’ve been working on the Yellowmead data some more, and stressing about my Literature Review… early in this process someone warned me that a PhD in the margins between two fields is a tricky thing, and it is!! I’m not sure which areas to focus on- Peat? The chemistry and ecology? Geophysics and data processing? Peatland archaeology and human impacts (past and present) on the Environments? I want to cover all of them, but I can only specialise in so much, and I only have 6,000 words! Furthermore, a ‘Literature Review’ is a very specific act, a way of writing and thinking that I don’t think I have quite mastered yet. Expect a post on how my draft has been received shortly…. I anticipate it to be full of woe!

Oooh, some other things… I’ve been organising our Postgraduate Conference, which I’m really looking forward to. I’ll be presenting results from the fieldwork for the first time at it, and I’m looking forward to catching up on where everyone is at- we’ve all been at various stages of Transfer Hell, and so retreating hermit like into our own work!

I also have a shiny new phone, the LG Viewty. The touchscreen is taking some getting used to, but I like it and the interface is really neat, and slowing down my texting speed is probably a good thing for my bill! I’m having some issues getting used to the media player- the thing only accepts mp3’s and as I use iTunes most of what I have is in mp4 format… I can’t seem to figure out how to rip direct from CD to phone, so I’m stuck with converting my iTunes library and porting the files, which is too big a job, so right now I’m just using my baby iPod (2 gig is enough for me, I just change my playlists often)… The camera is however the reason I got it and it’s pretty meaty- 5 megapixel, decent zoom and proper flash, not an led. It is a vast improvement on my old phone for indoors and nightime shots. So far I like it. Plus it’s shiny and purple and has a cool koi screensaver and I can make the fish follow my finger about the touch screen…

(I might be a geek but cute and shiny sometimes wins the day with me!)

I suppose all that was a very long winded way of saying why I’ve not blogged a lot of late. Stonehenge felt very hard to top, and I suddenly had lots of people I quite admire reading, which was intimidating! I’ve also felt that until I got to a certain point with my Transfer, any ‘writing’ I did needed to be on that; PhD comes first, after all.

I’ve been musing about turning 27, the same age my Mum was when she had me, and thinking about why I don’t want kids. I have too much to do! I want a career, to be able to enjoy my free time (not saying there aren’t enjoyable things about kids, but sleep deprivation, nappies, the changes to our social lives…. I can’t realistically say that I think I’d be so happy to be a Mum that it would make up for it). Cas was talking about the won’t/can’t issue with regards to kids. I’m a won’t. I worry that some people will see me as selfish. I don’t think it’s a selfish decision; I know at the moment that I don’t want to be a parent. I don’t have the patience, the money, or the will to do it. I really respect my friends who are; they are to a man/woman doing an awesome job raising great kids that are a joy to spend time with, but it’s just not for me, and I would never ever want to be in the position of resenting my child. I made a bit of a grumpy comment on a related issue on Cas’s post. The Godhead is right…I can’t really tar all of my male colleagues with the same brush, but an awful lot of them assume I’ll want kids at some point in the next ten years; ten vital, career forming years. I categorically don’t. I accept that this might change- I might change my mind, Matt might, the dreaded biology may indeed kick in, but it has started to make me think. It’s also one of the (many) reasons I don’t want to marry Matt; marriage somehow seems to make others think kids are on the menu. Potentially a career busting assumption.

Maybe my feminist upbringing is making me paranoid?

Being ill kinda stalled the fitness kick, but I’m back on track now and last Thursday swam my kilometre in 29 minutes, a personal best! I can now also do the evil plank for more than a minute!! I’m amazed by how much of a difference it made to fieldwork; not so much to what I was able to do in the field (I’ve always had the stamina to walk all day, if needs be), but in how much less it hurt afterwards!

Neko out

Bluestone roots…

Bluestone roots…

Originally uploaded by lilith_kayt.
I went back Stonehenge today and was lucky enough to get one of the ‘visiting academics’ slots (yup, security etc has been so tight that I had to book to go back on the open day to get a look at the exposed trench).

The radar seems to have worked quite well, and we got the location of the 1964 excavation right, helping Tim place his new trench accurately. We also found some of the bigger bits of loose rock it seems. I’ll need to go over the data again, reprocess it and compare it to the trench plans to fully understand what we got, but I’m really really pleased so far!

The photo above shows one of the bluestones* (in what is likely to be it’s second setting); much of it lies below ground in a very deep stone socket. Excavation has shown that the sarsens, despite their massive size, have comparatively shallow sockets; the bit uprights you can see behind the bluestone have more shallow sockets than the the one you can see in the image. Geoff Wainwright was explaining that he feels this has to do with the bluestones being to do with an earlier tradition of post-built monuments, like Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, as timbers need very deep sockets. The bluestone sockets seem to echo this, but the practice seems to change by the time of the sarsens.

It was an amazing afternoon and I can’t get over how lucky I am! More pictures are up on Flickr, and some of my colleagues from other units and universities have also been on site today, snapping and filming away. Tom Goskar from Wessex Archaeology has photos here, and I’m sure Paul will be adding his at some point.

In other news I’m back at my gorgeous site on Dartmoor next week, hoping to get it all done and finished up, and planning a return to Flag Fen as well, in the imminent future, so it seems to be fieldwork-a-go-go for me at the moment. I somehow have to find time to write up my transfer document before the end of June as well, and I have a birthday to celebrate! The fitness thing still seems to be working though I have been being a little slack of late, I am currently 1 lb shy of having lost 2 stone since new year (and hadn’t actually realised that until I worked it out to type it, WOW! Go me!). Me and the not-spouse are about a million and one times happier and fluffier since this time last year, and I’m not thinking too much about any possible correlation. Though I will say I hadn’t realised how unhappy I was with myself until I felt so good about changing things, if that makes any kind of sense! My other resolutions are also going OK, though I’m aware I’m slipping on the ‘being organised’ front. I’m rapidly concluding that I need to plan and block out my time, break things down into teeny goals and make sure I hit them, or I get a bit overwhelmed. So, I’m off to write a plan of action for the rest of the week so I can turn something in to my supervisor to look at while I’m off playing on Dartmoor…. oh, and I have sit ups to do, but Radio 4 to keep me company for those.

Neko Out

* hop over to the Timewatch webpages about the dig, which will explain why the bluestones are so important and what Geoff and Tim hope they will tell us about Stonehenge.

Oh, I should also add that this little blog got a mention in the Smithsonian magazine… so *waves shyly at new readers*, um, Hi! I guess, hope you like the blog if you found your way here from there! The Smithsonian are helping fund the dig along with Timewatch, and there is some great blogging over there from the production team too!

Stonehenge Excavations

Bluestones and Trilithons

Originally uploaded by lilith_kayt.

I’m in awe… as I type the project I was working on last week is making the national news headlines! It’s been so hard knowing what I was up to, and how amazing it is, and not being able to blog about it ’till today! It’s why I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I didn’t trust myself not to spill the beans early!

I’m not taking part in the actual excavations, and so I’m not going to talk about that part; I will leave that to the experts and to the live feed webcams and updates on the BBC website that has been set up to follow this historical work, here. I strongly urge anyone interested to hop over and have a read- it will be being updated throughout the week. I will be glued to it I expect!

My part was very humble, I was assisting my other supervisor (Tim Darvill being my main one), Paul Cheetham, who is a geophysics expert, in conducting a Ground Penetrating Radar survey ahead of the excavations, to help locate the previous trench and contextualise the excavation in a wider area. I was so excited to be there, I was like a bouncy six year old kid! I’ve visited before, and driven up the A303 past the monument many times, but I have never been in amongst the stones before.

It’s a totally different experience. Walking on the pathway, you know they are big, you hear the measurements in the descriptions, but you aren’t physically co-present with them in the same way, you can’t see all the little differences in texture and colour, or how they sparkle after the rain. You don’t hear so well how the flat panels of the bigger stone settings throw sound around, and you don’t get a sense of how crowded and claustrophobic the centre of the monument feels to stand in. I’m only 27, and really just starting out in my career, so in many ways, I don’t want this to be the ‘peak’ of my career, but what else could compare, really?

I’m very, very lucky-at the right University, and at the right time in my supervisor’s career to be asked to assist on a project like this. Right now I am so glad I took those risks I talked about a while back, and took the plunge into PhD research and walked out of my comfort zone!

There were a family of what I think were Jackdaws living on the stones. They spent all day playing, tumbling of the stones fighting and calling to each other. I also saw starlings getting very well fed by tourists at the cafe, various birds of prey hoping to snack on fat starlings, the evidence of many many voles living in among the stones, wag tails and many sheep helping keep the grass down! It was a magical two days, and I’m wishing Tim, Geoff and the excavation team lots of luck and great weather for the next two weeks. I’m going to be following their progress with interest on the web, and really hope the survey results prove useful and accurate!

I have more photo’s to put up, taken with a better camera, but I need to wait ’till all the technical ones of the survey in progress have been downloaded first!

Ooh, I should also link to a photoset of mine on Flickr of some work I did last year that is part of the same project, looking at the area the stones came from in the Preseli Hills!

Edited To Add: There is also a page up on the EH website here with video updates and more information about the site, and visiting Stonehenge.

… and a confession about pens

OK, my previous post had a little fib in it.

I am as weird as my dad about pens.

I sat down to plan my Transfer document (some of you might know this as the ‘Upgrade’- the examination that moves your from MPhil to PhD), and found that I couldn’t because I didn’t have the right kind of pen.

I like to plan with chunky fibre tipped pens. Like nicer versions of the felt-tip-pens we used as kids. It just didn’t feel right sitting down to block out paragraphs, sections and arguments with a normal pen, be it fineliner, rollerball or fountain pen.

So Dad? I’m sorry. You are not alone in your freakish pen obsession.

Cas also has a thing about the perfect pen, but hers is a quest for the perfect writing tool. Mine is specific to the task of planning. It must be with a fibre tipped pen, and not a fine one, no 0.3, which is Dad’s preference, or 0.5 or 0.7 which I like for writing with. Not even 1.0, which I sometimes use. Nope, proper felt tip pen type thickness of nib. Only that will do.

The PhD stress may be getting to me…

Neko out- off to book a week on Dartmoor and hopefully 2 weeks at Flag Fen! Woot!