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This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Hello, congratulations on starting your studies! I think most of the advice I have for you is about existing in a higher education environment rather than archaeology specific, with the possible exception of keeping your eye out for field schools.

The first and most important piece of advice I have is to communicate with your instructors. Speaking as an instructor, I am much happier to help you if 1) I already know who you are and the first time I am hearing from you is not when you need something, and 2) if you reach out for help before a due date passes or you get too deep in a hole. As long as your email is polite and professional, we are not going to be angry with you for asking for help.

Take advantage of what your school has to offer. Colleges and universities always have all sorts of events going on, and they can be fun, interesting, and good opportunities to meet people professionally and personally. Your school probably has a web page where they list events, and I recommend keeping an eye on it! This also goes for the health clinic and their free vaccinations and testings.

Time management is a learned skill. Start consciously developing it. High school is hyper structured whereas college is almost entirely free reign, and navigating this transition is one of the things I see students struggling with the most. Experiment with different strategies— setting calendar reminders, keeping a planner, turning off your phone, working in public— and figure out what works best for you.

Do not let academics be the only thing in your life. This may seem counterintuitive, but chances are, you're going to have a bad semester. When that happens, having other things that also bring you joy and bolster your self-worth will be incredibly important for your mental health. Likewise, it can be good to have friends in different circles. College friend groups occasionally implode and it can be very lonely if you have no one else.

Sleeping and eating well are so so so important. If you eat like shit and sleep like shit, you are going to feel like shit. This goes back to the fact that in an unstructured environment, it can be both easy and tempting to go off the rails. By all means, have a little fun and take the opportunities that are presented to you, but don't do so at the expense of your health.

I also have an #academic advice tag that has more posts about both college in general and archaeology specifically.

Befriend upperclassmen and grad students in your department. Volunteer in your professors' labs. Learn from their mistakes wisdom. Ask them questions. They might have suggestions for which non-major courses to take, which prerequisites are technically optional, which field schools are worth applying to, any CRM companies in the area that hire summer students.

Archaeology is a fantastic field, but it's not your typical academic field in a lot of ways. It's a study of things, and how people made things, and what people used things for. I might be biased with my 5000 hobbies and background in trades, but personally I believe the best way to understand how and why people make and use things is to also make and use things yourself.

It doesn't have to be huge and complex. You don't need to go out and build a canoe (although if the opportunity presents itself, take advantage; we had a couple canoe building seminar classes at my school), butyou should at least try doing something. You'll look at bone needles completely differently if you've used steel ones; you'll understand the lengths ancient people went to shaping antler and bone if you've tried to do the same with modern tools; you'll be able to look at a ceramic container and picture the steps it took to make it the shape it is now if you've made pottery yourself.

Flowering Garden, July 1888

- Vincent van Gogh

Athena