Summer diggin'... Part 2

So, one day back home to wash and re-pack my case, and I was on my plane to Spain...

I stayed for 3 weeks in total around Catalonia, originally to dig on a site with the University of Barcelona. This was also part of the fieldwork requirements for my course.  First day, I travelled to Sants Station and found the hostel where I spent the night.  However, I ran into a bit of a pickle on my second day in Barcelona; as soon as I met the dig supervisor, he told me as we drove north that due to the Spain's current economy and the knock-on effects, the Uni had run out of money for the site funding and the dig was cut to 1 and a half weeks. Oops. Bad for my requirements, and also meant I had nowhere to stay for a week and a half.  But I was in a Zen mood and decided that stuff would figure itself out.

Montlleó (France in the background)

The site is thought to have been a key crossing point in the Pyrenees 15,000 years ago in the early and middle Upper Paleolithic, here called the Magdalenian. In fact, the site was initially dated by the Oxford Radiocarbon Lab. What really attracted me to this site was the prospect of finding such old evidence of human occupation in this area, like the perforated shells that they've previously found here. So I was very happy when a perforated shell was found when we were excavating.  We also found a cut straight snail shell (caracol, en español), animal bone and worked flint, and what may be evidence of a hearth.  However, we'll have to wait til the results are published to find what it all means (and I'm not allowed to say too much here!).  What I can say is that the site is a very curious mixture; it is 1130m above sea level but an open site - extremely hot but with a breeze; it's also on a slope, making it hard to excavate evenly!

Team photo

Ger, Cerdanya, where our hotel was near the excavation

The site!

Eve with one of the shells

Unfortunately, I felt ill after about a week, collapsed on the lobby floor and was in bed for a day and a half. By this time, the dig finished and I found myself by the grace of the wonderful students there being put up by Silvia, a lovely student who lives in an apartment in Badalona. Thank goodness they're so nice! The original plan was that I was going to work in the Uni labs for the next week and a half doing post-excavation work, but this was abandoned since a) they'd finished all the work there and b) it was closed. El problema segunda. Nevermind - instead, I hung out with Silvia and her boyfriend and we went sight-seeing and shopping (perhaps a kind of cultural anthropological study, no?) in Barcelona and Badalona.
Olé olé olé!

Chillin' with Silvia and Marta at Badalona beach

La Sagrada Familia

Parc Guell

Oh, and we visited Port Aventura. What can I say? I like to make the best of a bad situation...!

Us at Shambala!

I also met up with my godparents who happen to live close to Barcelona. They showed me the botanic gardens and the Olympic Stadium for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, all this while the Olympics were going on back in England.

Part of the Olympic park

Silvia took me clubbing in Barcelona too - different, but amazingly fun! I could say it was an anthropological experience too, but I had probably drunk enough calimocho that my amount of dancing far outweighed any critical observations I could have made. However, there is apparently (I say this because I googled it) an anthropologist at the New University of Lisbon whose post-Ph.d work explores "seduction techniques" in nightclubs. And you thought I made up these things. You can read one of her papers here: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/lamygpaper.pdf 

At the end of my trip, I was very reluctant to leave Spain, its glorious sunniness and its wonderful people and its interesting past, but I was glad to stop living out of a suitcase... well, for a little while anyway!

You can read about the site of Montlleó here: http://www20.gencat.cat/docs/CulturaDepartament/DGPC/Documents/Arxiu/Trib03-04.pdf p.23-44 (It's in Catalan so copy and paste it into an internet translator if you can't understand it!)

I'm going to dig in Spain! (Plus questions on hominins)

As you can see from the title, I'm been confirmed a place at a dig in Montlleó open-air site in the summer.  The site is about 2 hours from Barcelona.  It's Magdalenian - about 15,000 years old - and I'll be excavating and digging at the site and analysing lithic remains in the lab for three weeks, all with SERP (http://www.ub.edu/SERP/index.htm). All in all I'm very excited, and even better I'll only be paying for the flight and hopefully the sun will come out! A dig and a tan. What could be better for an Arch and Anth student?

I finished my first piece of work of this term yesterday (excluding my collections and their anxiously-anticipated results) on African Plio-Pleistocene hominins and their characteristics.  We complied a fact-file of hominins from Ardipithecus ramidus (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene - about 5.7 mya (million years ago) to Homo ergaster (African erectus) which is thought to have lived 1.9 million mya.  We also had to draw a lineage of these species and multiple genus, so I got to use my colouring pencils...at last!  I used this phylogeny as my basis, which I first saw from Mike Petraglia's lectures on human evolution.

So I was reassured by my tutor today he uses the same one too (I think it's from the Smithsonian Institute).  So many changes have occurred morphologically in such a 'small' amount of time.  At first I questioned the amount of catergories paleoarchaeologists had 'split' the fossils into; however, this approach is opposed to 'lumping', where you bung a lot of similar-featured fossils together in one group.  There's a lot of debate as to which group some fossils belong to, as you can imagine.  I'm really enjoying learning about my very, very old roots, and still have a lot of questions to ask; what behavioural changes have happened apart from physical ones? Which species did we descend from? Why do I feel so old right now? But questions are good. A recent article in Nature argues against the assumption that Homo habilis was the first to use tools; instead, it might have been Australopithecus afarensis, a gracile Australopithecus found in sites in East Africa.  You can read it here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7308/full/nature09248.html

It just shows there are many questions about out evolutionary past that are still unanswered. I'd like to answer some of these one day.