April 2011
2 posts
Dig the Sand, Dig the Sand
Yes, I know…I’m not keeping up with this the way I should. The last few days of archaeology are easy to sum up, though: dig the sand, dig the sand, dig the sand. There you go. From Saturday to Tuesday weren’t very productive in terms of archaeology…actually quite disappointing. Tuesday to yesterday were a bit better, but most of what we found confirmed our findings from last year, so...
In Which Mark Surprises Us All
I’m sure there were a few concerns when a new blog post hadn’t appeared in the last couple of days. I’m afraid it’s because there just wasn’t really anything to report. I woke up bright and early Wednesday morning ready to get started talking to landowners and surveying different areas and then looked out the window to see pouring rain and skies like lead. It was also...
March 2011
2 posts
Back at the Cape
I’ve finally made it to Cape Hatteras and the beginning of this year’s field project. I’ve spent the last hour or so settling into the rental house I’ll be sharing with ten other people, and, since I was the first to arrive, I got first choice of rooms. I’m happy to report that this place has wifi, so no more early mornings at the diner rushing through writing a blog...
Bliss Is a Transatlantic Purple Seat
It may come as a surprise to some of y’all to see a new series of blog posts after such a long silence from the Accidental Archaeologist. It came as a surprise to me, too, when I looked up how long it had been since my last post. This is obviously a situation that needs fixing, and I have the perfect excuse…my next adventure has begun in the form of a three-week expedition back to the Outer...
July 2010
2 posts
The Devil's Own Pan-pipes
I’m afraid this trip has not been as blog-tastic as my last couple. I can only sincerely apologize for this and assure y’all that this has not been due to overwork, merely over-socializing. Let me see if I can sum up the boring parts of the last week-and-a-bit as briefly as possible…drawing. Lots and lots of drawing. I’ve drawn potsherds, I’ve drawn rusty bits of metal,...
France, The Sequel
I assure you, this post is not a case of deja vu…I’m simply back in France on the same project at the same time as last year. Once more, I found myself on the road to the Continent for two weeks of sun, wine, and Iron Age artefacts. Y’all may recall that last year, I had just finished a two-week research trip to Scotland to work on my master’s thesis, and then quickly turned...
April 2010
16 posts
Island Farewell
A very quick blog post while I hastily sip some Dunkin Donuts coffee in Kitty Hawk. Ellie (fellow former MA) and I are on the road for Norfolk. We left at 06:00 this morning (also known as “why the hell am I awake right now?” early), so some major caffeine intake was necessary once we hit civilization. Ellie has a flight out at 11:00, so I had to get her to the airport early for that....
(Almost) Homeward Bound
It’s 07:00am, and I’m once more sitting at the Diamond Shoals restaurant and once more having an argument with the mayor about biscuits vs scones. GET ME OUT OF HERE!!! (The mayor, btw, is enjoying this heartily). Were all getting a little punchy at this point, but spirits are high at the news of all the airports reopening. I leave around noon to take Mark & Andy to the airport for...
Break in the Clouds
Hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s been the same old same old for the last 24 hrs. Lazing about the hotel, drawing artifacts, trying to stave off boredom. There has been one chink in the clouds, though, in that UK airspace was opened once more just last night. We now have high hopes for Mark & Andy departing tomorrow and myself on Friday. The worry now, though, is what to do...
Stuck in Limbo
We’re still patiently waiting for our exile to come to an end. I spent yet another day drawing artifacts, while the rest of the students spent the day digging more test pits. It’s been strange to be in this limbo, not knowing from one day to the next when folks will be allowed to start leaving. We start every day pretty much exactly the same: drag over to the restaurant across the...
Stranded...again
Another day of stranding goes by. More students have had flights cancelled Sunday and Monday, and were rebooked for a week later. Every morning we get more and more dire reports on the news. I hear the Royal Navy is now sending ships to rescue stranded British folks in France. We’re now thinking a flight to Portugal or Spain is looking pretty good. I actually sent out a tweet this morning to...
In Which Mark Gets Pulled Over...Yet Again
I’d like to say the lack of posts the last couple of days was because I was too busy celebrating the end of a successful dig. This is not the case. Well…let me rephrase that. The dig has been pretty successful, with new information found about the last 100 years or so of Indian occupation on the island. Again, I’m afraid I can’t be too specific yet, since none of our finds have...
Nothing Left But A Giant Hole In The Ground
Day Nine started grey and stormy, but the rain had finished by the time I stepped out the door. What was left of the storm was an unbelievable wind. When we got to the site for first breakfast, we were greeted by a bitterly cold windstorm blowing from the north. Thank goodness our site is behind a big sand dune and in the woods, or we would have been miserable all day. I had a particularly...
I IS the Film Crew
Day Eight saw the dawn of another warm, sunny day at way-too-early in the morning. I’m actually getting a decent night’s sleep every night, but it feels like less and less. As usual, I dragged myself out of bed and across the road for coffee and internet. Then it was back to the hotel to start herding the gang into cars. At this point, we’ve got a regular convoy of vehicles going...
Tetris Archaeology
Day Seven was a loooong day. We had some VIPs showing up in the form of two professors from East Carolina University, so we wanted to be on top form. We started by finishing lower levels in the first trench and the “fat boy” trench in advance of laying out a fourth trench which overlapped both by a little. Of course, while shoveling near the water level in fat boy, one of the students...
In Which Mark Gets Pulled Over...Again
Day Six (Sunday) was a sort of day off. By “sort of” I mean no going in the field and digging, but there was still tons of work to do. We now have piles of artifact bags full of grubby potsherds and animal bones and whatnot that all needed washing and sorting. We did let the gang have a lie-in after all the partying Saturday night, but by 09:00, most were spread out on the motel...
Carolina Barbeque
It’s now the morning of Day Six, but it feels like we’ve been at this a lot longer. Most of the students decided to go out to a local bar on Friday night, so yesterday morning’s start was a little rough. Many of them were walking quite gingerly and squinting in the strong Carolina sunshine. I try to to be somewhat sympathetic to that sleep-deprived/hungover slow morning state, as...
Museum Opening and Fat Boy
This will be a short post, since I’m writing from the restaurant again with just a few minutes before I have to leave. The work is starting to catch up with me physically…woke up this morning stiff and sore all over. The weather’s back to being sunny and gorgeous, though, so we’re back at it with everything we’ve got. Yesterday saw the closing of the second trench as we...
Stormy Weather...Again
It’s the morning of Day Four, and I’m writing this at 06:30 as I sit on the porch of the hotel and stare out at the pouring rain. We’ve had three gloriously sunny days, so it can’t be too surprising that the rain eventually found us…but still. Damn. Ordinarly, I’d be waking the campers up at 07:00 and we’d be hitting the road to the site by 07:30, but this...
...And We Dig
Day Two of the dig and work has slowed a little. We started this morning with a new schedule in place. Up just as the sun was rising, off to the site at 7:30 for a light coffee-and-toast breakfast. Shovels were flying by 8:00, which meant we got a couple good hours of work in before the sun really got overhead. By 10:00, we had taken out another level in the first trench and had broken sod on the...
The Big Dig Begins
I should finish today’s blog with how Monday night’s saga ended. You see, it wasn’t quite over with Mark waiting to bring the last students from Norfolk. I knew the last flight had been delayed untill 11:00pm, so I figured they wouldn’t arrive until 02:30am, with a half an hour to clear baggage claim and then a three hour drive down the coast. Many of us stayed up quite...
Beyond Tired
It’s the crack of dawn, I’m already conscious (barely), and sitting in the restaurant across from our hotel wondering how I’m functioning on barely four hours’ sleep. The answer is probably the huge steaming mug of coffee sat next to my computer. It was a LONG trek from the UK yesterday, starting at 08:30 when I got a lift to Bristol airport along with my tutor Mark and the...
November 2009
5 posts
Marooned
We’re reaching the end of our dig now, and the last couple of days have been one helluva ride. Wednesday afternoon was a wash, as I mentioned, and TS Ida blew in Wednesday night with tons of rain and wind. We thought Thursday would be a write-off, too, but we were fortunate to only catch the outer bands of the weather, which meant some downpours, but by mid-morning Thursday we marched back...
Hurricane? What hurricane?
Let me just say, y’all, that I did a lot of thinking about when would be the best time to travel to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the one thing I was concerned about was hurricane season. We talked about traveling over in September, but I said, “No, that’s a risky time of year…plus, it’s HOT.” We couldn’t do October, so November was the only...
Sandy glory
It’s now the end of Day Two of digging. We’ve made some good progress. Haven’t found anything earth-shattering, but a few smatterings of stuff here and there. Day One was still a small crew of just four of us, but we moved pretty quickly through one 2m X 2m trench. We’ve been trying to keep a pretty low profile since we’d rather this effort not become too public too...
Touchdown
Just a brief post to say Howdy. We landed in the US yesterday afternoon, and, by some miracle, made it through US immigration without Mark being detained, despite his passport full of visa stamps in Arabic from places like Iran and the UAE. It was a long drive down the Outer Banks, but we got a sporty little Rav4 4WD (just like my trusty old Queequeg!), and I drove quite happily on the right...
Westward to Glory
I’ve gotten a request by a loyal and extremely persistent friend (yes, John, that would be you) to post an explanation of what the next week has in store for me, so that y’all will be up to speed on the random tweets and status messages you may be seeing in the upcoming days. It has been tough to keep folks updated lately with the podcast temporarily derailed. Oh yeah, guess I should...
October 2009
1 post
July 2009
5 posts
The little red shuttle of Death
I should start this post by telling y’all that I haven’t really driven a manual transmission car in about 17 years. That was back when I was learning to drive, and we lived in a hilly place, and stick shift was terrifying. I’ve never quite gotten over that. Keep that in mind for later… The party Sunday night had been grand. Monday morning was a different story. It was back...
Meat, meat, meat & homemade wine
We’ve been eating a lot of meat on this project. A LOT of meat. Sunday was no exception.
We knew we had to work some, but we had no set start or end time. Most of us tried to sleep in a bit, but it’s hard when you’re on the floor on an air mattress and you’re used to getting up at 7.00. So, we lounged for a couple of hours. Some folks wandered in and out of the kitchen...
AccArch the artist
The rest of the week fell into a bit of a routine. Progress on the dig has been in fits and starts. It seems to take ages to clean the walls and get the trenches ready for photos, and then another age to draw the profiles. Then a bulldozer comes in and scoops out a whole ‘nother section in a matter of an hour, and we start the whole process over again. Because we have a team with a range of...
Je nes comprend pas
When I left y’all in the last story, I was bundled in the Landie heading to the little French town which is our home for this two week project. The accommodations aren’t posh, but relatively comfy and we’re all getting along famously. We’ve been given run of the local school building as our “home,” which means sleeping on the floor (thank goodness for the air...
The next adventure begins
The last two days have left my mind staggering to catch up like a fat man on a pebble beach chasing an ice cream truck. Monday morning, I woke up stiff and sore and cursing the day I thought an all-day horseback trek through the Welsh mountains would be a great idea. Charlotte was making similarly disgruntled noises as we both shuffled about doing some last-minute packing and making breakfast. By...
May 2009
12 posts
Lazy Saturday
It’s Saturday morning.
I’m back in the US.
There’s nothing to do.
In typical Pittman fashion…everyone is quietly reading a book or newspaper. I’ve spent first part of the morning sending emails and chasing leads for my Scotland trip. IronT is off to art school Saturday class.
I’m kinda trapped at the apartment until the luggage guy from the airport shows up...
Maiden Voyage of MIGNONETTE
As an attempt to give Tumblr a test drive, I am posting up a few pictures from the maiden voyage of the yacht Mignonette, a restored 30’ 1946(?) Maurice Griffiths yacht. This epic adventure was undertaken by the yacht owner (and my tutor) Mark along with myself and my Canadian flatmate Allison. The voyage took us from the home dock in Lydney, UK down the Bristol Channel to Cardiff, Wales on...
