dnd inspiration quarantine

Like at a certain point on a dig day you BECOME THE DIRT.

BONUS:

Bard: Put spaghetti in it

Wizard: I’m taking suggestions from literally anyone but you

Rogue: Put spaghetti in it

Wizard: I’m taking suggestions from anyone but you two

Sorcerer: Put spaghetti in it

* big royal jewelry

* ancient temples

* decoding a long lost language

* dinosaurs

What actually gets us excited

* that time we were lucky with the weather

* when the digger knows his job

* lifting skeletal remains and the ribs don’t break

Things that are where they shouldn’t be. Bonus points if it’s obsidian

Hitting virgin sediment before hitting the water table

Conspicuously dense and diverse berry patches

When the temperature is Just Right™ for fieldwork

When the car has really good aircon travelling from site in the afternoon

One of the Indigenous representatives on a fieldsurvey goes “hey i wanna show you something” (it is ALWAYS something worth looking at)

a member of the public shows up to talk and DOESNT say “found any gold????” but actually knows things about the site

Things that are where they shouldn’t be AND that make the senior archaeologists blurt out “well thats weird”

So if you find a piece of obsidian at a site and go “huh, I wonder where that came from?” There’s a solid chance you can send it to someone with an XRF gun and they’ll be able to tell you.

The berry patches thing isn’t as widely recognised or utilised in applied archaeology (although it really, really should be), but Chelsea Armstrong has done some amazing work with descent communities that combines ethnobotany and archaeology, and has found that the density and diversity of food plants, especially trees and shrubs, is higher near old village sites than in “wild” forest.

These forest gardens were cultivated by indigenous communities before contact, and even after the people were removed from their villages they continue be incredibly productive sources of food.

There’s an abandoned village site on crown land near where I grew up that is surrounded by a circle of extremely dense berry bushes. At a site where I worked a few years ago, the area was covered in patches of native wild mint. A site I visited that was home to a very wealthy precontact village there was considerably more Saskatoon berry shrubs than anywhere else in the area.

Washing cannonballs

Comparing human leg bones to my leg

Balancing knee caps to see if they’re left or right

Smashed my head on a drill handle while I tried to look cool dropping 3 meters of stainless steel down a hole

Trying to rescue mice out of the trench using a shovel and screaming how you’re trying to help

Glass still cuts skin, even after 500 years. And me being the dumbass I am to swipe my finger across to clean it

Getting distracted because you’re convinced these two pottery shards match in some place

Pushing my thumb into the decorative indentation a potter has made 300 years ago cuz I’m still a child

Trying to match shoe prints to one of your colleagues