Don’t Fight To Prove You’re Right- Fight To Become Right. Even- Perhaps Especially- When That Means

“The State of  Archaeology”

Such a scary title right? Well, boy oh boy do I have an adventure for you today.

So, I was at a really bougie historic preservation conference because my bosses were presenting. The last panel I went to was supposed to cover the kinds of issues with Cultural Resource Management (CRM) the state was coming across. 

They ended up talking about how all of this would kind of be fixed if we had more funding from the state and more robust laws surrounding archaeological materials.

But this was a room of basically only archaeologists, and mostly professional archaeologists over the age of 35. We were in such an echo chamber. I was the only “young” student there.

SO. I start getting pissed because the same people just kept practically saying “but HOW do we fix our funding problem, we have such AWESOME sites.” “oh, the public is definitely a vital piece to archaeology” but no one was saying the (what I thought was) obvious.

TL;DR If archaeologists want to fix their problems, they need to DO something about it instead of sitting in an echochamber. WE need to make sure the public knows what we do, and more importantly, WHY it matters. We need to make sure the information we disseminate is not just for ourselves in the present, but for the public, for EVERYONE, and for everyone in perpetuity.

the thing about organic chemistry is that you finally get to use all the aesthetically pleasing mad scientist looking chemistry apperatuses that you’ve been waiting to use for years but when u finally get to use them they all turn out to do surprisingly boring things

Flyover of Jupiters North Pole in Infrared via NASA https://ift.tt/2EM34s1

Something for my dad from the nature trade - a piece of Precambrian-era petrified wood! I thought he would enjoy it and he does, it’s a truly lovely little piece.

Little god raised up in grass, lord of fields and valleys vast

Nine relief printed original art greeting cards, each with a unique set of curios/specimens.

Did you know that Uranus was (accidentally) discovered on this day in 1781, the first planet to be discovered with the aid of a telescope? At first, British astronomer William Herschel thought the object in the sky to be a star or comet, but within two years, other astronomers showed it was a new planet orbiting the Sun. The ice giant is four times wider than the Earth and appears blue due to the methane in its atmosphere. Photo: NASA

honestly people can be so irritating about my collections. “why would you want that, it’s gross.” “why would you keep that, it’s toxic.” “why would you imprison that, it could kill everyone within a mile of here if it escaped.” ugh...

There’s a megalodon tooth in the nature trade right now and my god do I want it