What is ARCHAEOLOGY?!?

I'm still not fully online, namely I don't have access to the internet in my flat, but I am online on campus.  It is so amazingly great to be connected again!!!! (SMILE)  Now to the awesome task of updating...  

There is so much to share that its kinda hard to decide where to start.  I think that the question most of you would probably like answered is how my very first field experience went and since I have lots of photos to share of my four day excursion along the coast of Devon, I'll begin there.  In one word my first field experience was "muddy."  As I'm sure anyone who has ever visited or lived in or even just read about the UK can imagine, the weather in Devon was constantly

 changing.  I don't think we saw one day without rain and it was almost laughable how each time our group set foot on a beach a gusty, cold rain began to fall.  And dirt plus rain obviously

 equalled a lot of mud.  I returned to my flat Friday night with jeans literally caked in mud

... which oddly enough really seemed to resemble red Georgia clay.  (A little piece of home in a place so far away.)  

The first day was meticulously (or perhaps maliciously) planned to lull us into a false sense of security and then throwing all the newbies into the field head first.  (SMILE)  Learning how to swim or should I say how to identify the remains of a almost century-deserted village by the 

name of Clicket was absolutely fun!  Although the site had been previously researched by our professors and some of the TAs (who I might add never seemed to get dirty... I need to learn that trick), we were given the task to locate and explain what we found, "like real archaeologists."  To the right is what remains of the separatist church that my group "found."  And to the left is the lime kiln "found" by another group... fully intact, which is a feat because apparently mo

st have blown up.  By the way the first photo is of a pasture we crossed through to get to one of the sites.  Can you see the sheep!?!

Day 1 was by far the most muddy at least for the HistArch group. (Our department includes MAASM aka MA Archaeology and Screen Media, MALA aka MA Landscape Archaeology, MA in Maritime Archaeology- I 

don't think they have a nickname, and the HistArchs aka MA Historical Archaeology in the Modern World.)  Most of the rest of the field trip found us in seaside towns examining the influence of naval trade and conflict on cultural, industrial, economic, and communal development.  Day 2 highlights included climbing aboard the Kathleen and May, a restored 1900 commercial schooner, and getting locked on the wrong side of a private gate leading to a site on the beach in 

Dorset where WWII American soldiers trained for D-Day.

Okay this post has barely scratched the surface of all that I have been up to, but I am a graduate student and I really need to get back to reading for class.  

Just, Margaret