More on Archaeology!

Well, I should be putting last minute touches on my paper right now, but I think I've earned a break. I left off talking about my trip by saying that we had to leave our site and search for a new one. We were camping in a national park and our professor found a area near by that looked promising. The new site was still in the national park, but our professor works in the office that issues permits to archaeologists. Essentially this meant we could work where ever we wanted and he would issue his own permit. Suddenly the the fact that it was a national park didn't matter! the next day we were digging away at these large piles of rocks. The Professor didn't know what group of people made these and he didn't know roughly when they were made. Our goal was to find any artifact that we could so that it could be taken to a lab for dating.
At first the digging only turned up more rocks. Yes, they were most definitely positioned by humans so they weren't just some random rocks. Still rocks got boring after a few days. We thought that these formations were burial sites, but even after we moved the rocks and kept digging we didn't find any skeletons. The sites could very well be grave markers to honor the war dead that died far from home, but that still only left us with rocks to uncover...tedious! When our professor decided to stop working on these units, we started working on a new unit that formed a small mound in the landscape. A pedestrian survey (very technical...involves people walking around) turned up a few pottery sherds. We started getting excited!!! Working on the new sites came just in time to keep everyone enthusiastic about the dig. We found lots of potsherds, some that were bigger than your hand. And we even found a whole pot!! Well, it was broken but all the pieces were still there and in its original shape. Another interesting aspect of this unit was that we found some kind of foundation. Yes, it was still made out of rocks, but suddenly these were much more interesting! Mongolia is historically a culture of nomads, so a piece of a building is a pretty big deal.
All in all, this trip was a lot of fun. Even with its ups and downs we found quite a few artifacts and I know I learned a lot. I had had the opportunity to try to work with an American dig, if I didn't go on this one. I'm so glad that I decided to go with the Mongolian dig. The language barrier gave me a whole lot of time to think. Going off by myself, allowed me to learn not only about archaeology, but I learned a lot about myself and what I am capable of doing. I'm proud of myself!