Quite a bit of it, in fact. Also for breakfast. I was planning on spending the weekend reading a pile of articles, but life intervened. Since I’m going to be traveling so much, there were a bunch of things I just had to get taken care of before Tuesday morning. And I did need a little down time.
For one thing, I had a thawed goose I had to deal with. The meat became a very nice stew with apples & gooseberries ( and a bit of apple brandy) and the carcase made some nice goose stock. The bones are now reposing in the qanitchaq (arctic entryway) to become a lab exercise.
Then we had to put the slipcover back on the sofa. What a job! But it does look a lot nicer after being washed. Got caught up with the laundry, figured out what I need to pack for the next trip, started some no-knead bread, watered the flowers (the big ones need it several times a day) and then got started on the reading.
This morning I was contacted by folks from Ilisaġvik who were trying to finalize the catalog for spring. Assuming there are enough students (courses taught by adjuncts don’t go unless there are at least 5), I’ll be doing a Fundamentals of Archaeology and a Lab Methods course. The idea is to do them as distance-delivered, with a lab that is in-person for the lab course. People in Barrow can take the lab during the semester, and it can also be offered as a summer camp for those who are outside of Barrow. Today it became clear the lab needed to be a separate course to fit into the catalog format, so I had to hurry up and do a course description for the lab and a new one for the course leaving out the lab components. Then the bread had to be baked & now back to reading articles.
And it’s been great so far! The weather has been gorgeous, not too cold or windy. The light this morning was amazing, golden reflecting off the clouds & snow. Unfortunately no pictures from when it was best because I was trying to get stuff done before I start a series of back-to-back trips, although I did look out the window a lot when I was making phone calls. I did get some a bit later, and it is still pretty great.
View out my office windowLooking south around 3 PM (local noon).Clouds over Barrow & the Chukchi
Last year I got to finish unwrapping the child on my birthday. This year was not nearly as exciting, but then archaeology really isn’t like Indiana Jones… much. I finished and sent the quarterly report to the client on our activities supporting the ARM site. It is good to look back and see what has been done, and I’m using a format that asks for lessons learned, so it forces one to think and track, which is not a bad thing and easy to skip when things get busy.
I made the final corrections on the encyclopedia entry on frozen sites, and am just waiting for one image to upload it to the publisher. The Point Hope chapter is being read (quickly, I hope) by a couple of friends, and then will get sent to the editors for review. I still need to recalibrate C14 dates for Northern Archaic and Palearctic, but that can get added to the final.
One of the things I’m involved in as part of the GHEA/Long-Term Sustainability RCN is a workshop on the Kurils & Aleutian Islands. I’m a participant, not a discussant, which is a bit odd since I’ve never stepped foot in either one of them, or even worked on a collection from either area. The workshop involves putting up some articles and a conference paper ahead of time, and some on-line discussion, in hopes that we will all be up to speed by the time we get to Seattle, and can hit the ground running. I got put in a group looking at Ecological Dynamics and Paleoecological Histories, which is very cool. I definitely have some catching up in the literature to do here, so I spent a chunk of the afternoon downloading the various papers & such folks in my group (and others) had put up. I have put them into my Dropbox and synced my iPad, so I can read them while traveling. It turns out I am not the only one who doesn’t have a conference paper done, and some of those that are there are not that formal :-).
I also need to find a way to get a paper I wrote on bearded seals in Greenland up. I don’t have an electronic copy, but it seems pertinent. One topic that seems to be coming up is possible sea ice extension into the region and folks seem to be making a few unwarranted assumptions about how species that are not now present in the area behave. That would of course skew any climatic interpretations one might be trying to derive from faunal data. I think the bearded seal paper covers that and provides a good example of some issues that are counter-intuitive.
And Barrow caught their final whale of the 2012 season! Hey hey hey Anagi Crew!
View leaving the office.
Shortly after I got home there was a know at the door & flowers & balloons arrived! That was quite the surprise, since Glenn had already bought me a huge arrangement of flowers (and a Kindle Paperwhite, which is supposedly in transit). I unwrapped them, and they turned out to be from the entire staff at UICS (arranged in secret by Tammy). The flower arrangement is gargantuan!
Flowers & Balloons, with me for scale.The flowers in close-up.
I got back to Barrow to find snow on the ground. It hasn’t been that stormy here, but we had a coastal flood warning over the weekend, with part of the road to Nuvuk getting washed out, and waves getting over many of the berms. I am afraid that there may have been significant damage to the site beyond the 20 m we already lost in September. I would like to get out and take a look, maybe even shoot in the bluff, before I go to Valdez & Seattle, but that is not looking too likely.
Apparently, there is a likelihood of a storm surge from the Chukchi and flooding over the next few days, maybe until the 22nd or so. The North Slope Borough is quite worried, and sending out info on emergency kits & so forth. Not a great situation. The house I live in floated in the last really big storm surge event in 1963, and if it does it again, it could wind up in the NARL sewage lagoon. Yuck.
We’ll be prepared, but I don’t think it is that likely to get that bad. However, it most certainly is already damaging Nuvuk more. It has been blowing from the north and winds are picking up. It is a bit depressing given that erosion must nearly have reached the GPR returns that we think are Ipiutak features.
Not much to be done about it, so I just push on with writing proposals & papers. I’m going to a workshop on the Kurils & Aleutians, and am slightly belated working on the conference paper. Just as I got ready to really check out the other papers prior to doing the serious writing (the outline is done), it was discovered the website had lost the last 3 weeks of updates (explains where my stuff went–I thought they were just being slow getting it up), so I couldn’t get into it. I hope we don’t lose Internet later this week, and that I have decent connectivity in Valdez.
I’m almost done with the last of the papers I (over)committed to. I am waiting for one reference and the encyclopedia entry on frozen sites will be done. I’ve got a few more references to add and a few more C14 dates to calibrate and the chapter on North Slope archaeology for a Point Hope bioarcheology volume will be ready to go off for review. I have a general NS archeology document that I wrote and update on a regular basis that I use when people ask for background. Because the available information about the published C14 dates from some of the earlier sites is not really sufficient to calibrate them (and the archaeologists haven’t published calibrated dates) I had been using BP (before present–present being 1950) dates in this, but decided that I needed to bite the bullet and get some calibrated dates. Some more recent work has resulted in calibrated dates being available, so I can at least give date ranges for the various cultures in cal years, which should be an improvement.
I started to work on the two NSF proposals that are up next. I am working on both a RAPID and a regular proposal for work on the Ipiutak component at Nuvuk. Unfortunately the NSF Fastlane web site wouldn’t let me see any of the PDFs that it converts things to. I’ll have to take this up with their tech support in the morning.
Out of Ice and Time 