Tlatollotl

I gambled and lost.

I went to UTSA knowing they were only going to provide funding until I completed my coursework. The gamble was that I hoped I could get additional funding when it was clear I had stellar grades, knew what I was doing, and had a slam dunk dissertation already worked out.

They didn't care.

So, I had to find a job after my dissertation proposal defense or be out on the street. And I discovered that with my ADHD and working a regular 40 hour a week job in front of a computer leaves me exhausted and too burned out to do much of anything else.

I thought I could chip away at the dissertation after I somehow managed to get a Wenner-Gren grant and do my fieldwork in 2024. But I don't get paid enough to continue to pay for tuition and Trump's Department of Education put a restriction on financial aid for repeat credits including dissertation writing credits. UTSA is still unwilling to provide support so I can work less and finish the dissertation.

I no longer have access to university resources or software anymore after going on a leave of absence last fall. My advisor has not contacted me since I went on the leave of absence last fall despite a promise of regular updates. I have no family close by. My only friends are the ones I made at work. I am, quite simply, not in a situation to allow me to succeed.

It isn't official yet, but my department said that if I don't register for credits in the fall they will drop me from the program.

The job I have is working for a state archaeology office as a GIS specialist. When I was hired in late 2022, it was to conduct external record search requests for CRM companies, engineering firms, etc (we have an internal process for our own contract work that is handled by the other GIS guy). This was originally a position outsourced through a hiring agency which did not make me a state employee despite working at a state office.

When not doing record search requests, I was tasked with entering a backlog of reports into the geodatabase. The backlog existed because the previous GIS Coordinator killed themself and their position was vacant for awhile.

I began the process of entering the backlog into the geodatabase in December 2022. There were hundreds of reports. I completed the backlog by February 2023. #skillz

Shortly after that, my position was made into a permanent position for our office and I became a state employee.

During that process we noticed that there were some missing reports. These were survey projects that should be in the geodatabase, but were not entered for some reason. So, I volunteered to rectify the situation.

A simple query of the geodatabase against the records database produced a list of every report we had that did not appear in the geodatabase. I began the process of adding all of these. This was a slower process than the backlog because the majority of these reports needed me to georeference the report maps and then trace the survey areas. The backlog, because they were newer reports, had shapefiles submitted with them.

The missing reports took about a year and a half to enter into the geodatabase. But eventually I got it done. Among the list of reports that were not already in the geodatabase were excavation, mitigation, monitoring, geo-arch, etc. reports that were only sometimes entered into the geodatabase. What to do?

I reached out to about 20 other state offices asking them how they had their geodatabases set up to get an idea of what people were and were not doing. None of the offices that responded to me kept track of those reports in their geodatabase. They either were included with the rest of the Class III surveys or were omitted. And none of the offices had a feature class for subsurface testing.

So, I pitched the idea of creating an Investigations feature class to put non-Survey reports into along with a Subsurface Testing feature class for all of the shovel tests, test units, auger tests, etc. to my boss. She was surprised I was volunteering for more work after dealing with the backlog and then adding all those missing reports. But she liked the idea and gave me the go ahead.

After a year or so, we now have hundreds of Investigations in our geodatabase and thousands of subsurface testing points helping us and anyone doing a record search to better understand the historiography of their project area and better plan their fieldwork.

But wait, there's more.

This whole process of entering the backlog, entering missing reports, adding investigations, and doing record searches revealed one undeniable fact about the geodatabase.

It needed to be checked.

All of it.

Site boundaries, too.

My boss was hesitant to let me do this because it is such an undertaking and I would be the only one working on this. But I explained the issues I had come across and the advantages we would have after checking everything. She gave me the go ahead.

Last summer I began the process of starting with the very first report in the very first county and georeferencing each and every map to check the feature class boundaries. I had hoped for an occasional fix, but a relatively accurate geodatabase. What I found was that I needed to fix almost everything and only the most recent reports had boundaries that matched their report maps.

After a year, I have only completed one side of one bookshelf of reports and part of the other side of the bookshelf. It is a slow, meticulous, painstaking process. I have years of work ahead of me even if I did not have record searches to conduct or the occasional fieldwork to help out with.

I gambled and lost.

I went to UTSA knowing they were only going to provide funding until I completed my coursework. The gamble was that I hoped I could get additional funding when it was clear I had stellar grades, knew what I was doing, and had a slam dunk dissertation already worked out.

They didn't care.

So, I had to find a job after my dissertation proposal defense or be out on the street. And I discovered that with my ADHD and working a regular 40 hour a week job in front of a computer leaves me exhausted and too burned out to do much of anything else.

I thought I could chip away at the dissertation after I somehow managed to get a Wenner-Gren grant and do my fieldwork in 2024. But I don't get paid enough to continue to pay for tuition and Trump's Department of Education put a restriction on financial aid for repeat credits including dissertation writing credits. UTSA is still unwilling to provide support so I can work less and finish the dissertation.

I no longer have access to university resources or software anymore after going on a leave of absence last fall. My advisor has not contacted me since I went on the leave of absence last fall despite a promise of regular updates. I have no family close by. My only friends are the ones I made at work. I am, quite simply, not in a situation to allow me to succeed.

It isn't official yet, but my department said that if I don't register for credits in the fall they will drop me from the program.

The job I have is working for a state archaeology office as a GIS specialist. When I was hired in late 2022, it was to conduct external record search requests for CRM companies, engineering firms, etc (we have an internal process for our own contract work that is handled by the other GIS guy). This was originally a position outsourced through a hiring agency which did not make me a state employee despite working at a state office.

When not doing record search requests, I was tasked with entering a backlog of reports into the geodatabase. The backlog existed because the previous GIS Coordinator killed themself and their position was vacant for awhile.

I began the process of entering the backlog into the geodatabase in December 2022. There were hundreds of reports. I completed the backlog by February 2023. #skillz

Shortly after that, my position was made into a permanent position for our office and I became a state employee.

During that process we noticed that there were some missing reports. These were survey projects that should be in the geodatabase, but were not entered for some reason. So, I volunteered to rectify the situation.

A simple query of the geodatabase against the records database produced a list of every report we had that did not appear in the geodatabase. I began the process of adding all of these. This was a slower process than the backlog because the majority of these reports needed me to georeference the report maps and then trace the survey areas. The backlog, because they were newer reports, had shapefiles submitted with them.

The missing reports took about a year and a half to enter into the geodatabase. But eventually I got it done. Among the list of reports that were not already in the geodatabase were excavation, mitigation, monitoring, geo-arch, etc. reports that were only sometimes entered into the geodatabase. What to do?

I reached out to about 20 other state offices asking them how they had their geodatabases set up to get an idea of what people were and were not doing. None of the offices that responded to me kept track of those reports in their geodatabase. They either were included with the rest of the Class III surveys or were omitted. And none of the offices had a feature class for subsurface testing.

So, I pitched the idea of creating an Investigations feature class to put non-Survey reports into along with a Subsurface Testing feature class for all of the shovel tests, test units, auger tests, etc. to my boss. She was surprised I was volunteering for more work after dealing with the backlog and then adding all those missing reports. But she liked the idea and gave me the go ahead.

After a year or so, we now have hundreds of Investigations in our geodatabase and thousands of subsurface testing points helping us and anyone doing a record search to better understand the historiography of their project area and better plan their fieldwork.

But wait, there's more.

This whole process of entering the backlog, entering missing reports, adding investigations, and doing record searches revealed one undeniable fact about the geodatabase.

It needed to be checked.

All of it.

Site boundaries, too.

My boss was hesitant to let me do this because it is such an undertaking and I would be the only one working on this. But I explained the issues I had come across and the advantages we would have after checking everything. She gave me the go ahead.

Last summer I began the process of starting with the very first report in the very first county and georeferencing each and every map to check the feature class boundaries. I had hoped for an occasional fix, but a relatively accurate geodatabase. What I found was that I needed to fix almost everything and only the most recent reports had boundaries that matched their report maps.

After a year, I have only completed one side of one bookshelf of reports and part of the other side of the bookshelf. It is a slow, meticulous, painstaking process. I have years of work ahead of me even if I did not have record searches to conduct or the occasional fieldwork to help out with.

More landscapes & backgrounds 🏞

The Isthmus Zapotec city of Guidxiguie' (today Juchitán).

A slice-of-life river bathing scene, one of my favorite panels from book 2. Back then, they used the "xiuhamolli" plant (Aniseia Martinicensis) to produce foam like soap.