FREE ADVICE: THINGS TO AVOID SAYING TO YOUR PROFESSOR ON THE DAY OF THE FINAL EXAM…

And other stories from the trenches….


O.K., so admittedly, I was, am, will forever be, a neurotic, compulsive nerd. Still, I find myself completely speechless at the “excuses” and “solutions” I hear from students around exam time. I refuse to believe that I ever sat in a classroom with people who came up with stories like I’ve been fielding this week, but perhaps I’m just in denial? The department chair at the University here claims it is a generational thing. She says that nobody over thirty can relate to the students we have now. I really don’t want this to be true. I want to believe it is this bunch, or me, or the class, or the culture, or something. Or maybe just that I’m not over thirty…

Down here in Mexico, we’re finishing up our semester. (I taught a course in historical archaeology this semester for the anthropology department…) My class had their final exams last week, and the excuses started at 9.30 the morning of the exam. For those of you reading this who are still students, or will be students again, I thought I’d give a rundown of things not to say to your professors before, during or after an exam. For the rest of you? Think of it as encouragement to increase your contributions to your retirement funds! Because if this is truly generational, the social security system is doomed!

Also, there are more updates below… I just need to get this off my chest first!

So here it goes…

BEFORE EXAM

In an email…

“Dear Professor, I’ve just discovered that the project I’ve been working on for another professor isn’t good enough. I’m going to skip the final exam tonight so that I can work on that instead. I’m busy tomorrow, but I’m free Friday morning. Let me know what time Friday morning between 9 and 12 is good for you, and where I should meet you. I will take the exam then…”

Silly me… I was operating under this ridiculous delusion that universities and professors set the time and date of exams! I guess this really is a learning process! Thank god my student clued me in to this early, or I might have spent my whole career trying to make students take exams at hours that were inconvenient to them!

For those still in school… This email will not win you points. Especially if you send it at an hour that means it will be the first thing your professor sees in the morning when she wakes up before she has had her coffee. I promise you, this isn’t a pretty time of day for anybody involved. You might want to moderate your tone a bit. If you don’t, you will receive a response that sums up as:

“You are welcome to miss the exam tonight and take a zero. Have a nice day and good luck with that other project.”

My day went rapidly downhill from there…

I have/had this student who stopped coming to class eight weeks ago, give or take a month. I wasn’t particularly worried about it because I’ve seen him around campus, most notably sitting in the courtyard in front of the classroom half an hour before class time and directly in front of my office. I figured, “Well, he dropped the class. No biggie. I mean he is here and he could come to class, or tell me if there is a problem, right?”

Wrong.

Beauty tip, guys… If you are going to skip class, don’t sit on the bench located halfway between the professor’s office and her classroom. She actually does notice!

This student, who I hadn’t spoken with in eight weeks and who’d missed not only eight weeks of classes but three class assignments in the interim, comes to my office 30 minutes before exam time. He sits down in the chair across from my desk and proceeds to launch into a series of vague excuses. Evidently, he had “some things to take care of” that had prevented him from coming to class “a couple times,” and “maybe missing an assignment or two?” And he knew the exam was that day and clearly “didn’t feel prepared to take it.”

Clearly.

Luckily, he had a solution!

They always have solutions…

Since grades weren’t due for two weeks, he cheerfully explained to me, he thought that what we could do is have private classes in the meantime. He’d come to my office, and I would summarize eight weeks of exams for him and when we were finished, he’d take the exam then!

And the assignments he’d missed! Well, obviously, he couldn’t be expected to DO them, but he was pretty sure we could “work something out that would be agreeable to both of us…”

Uh huh…

Oh where to start!?!?!?!?

O.K., so here is the thing. What I do, IT IS WORK. Like real work. I actually spend time preparing lectures and putting together slides. The assignments I give you? They are actually also work for me, and so I give them sparingly and for a reason. Going to class? I don’t always want to go either. Sometimes, it is really, really inconvenient. And when I’m not in class? I’m actually doing other work, work that is more important than your hangover last week.

I promise you. You will NEVER win points with your professor by suggesting that instead of holding you accountable for the work you should have done and the classes you should have gone to, she instead shows up and spends time giving you lectures one on one. This isn’t a good deal for anybody but you. This is just extra work that she has to do to make your life easier. She never asked for it.

Remember, please, that you are trying to make the life of the person who gives you your grades more difficult. Is this EVER a winning strategy?

After staring in disbelief over the audacity of the whole thing, I finally just smiled and said, “As I see it, you have two options at the moment. 1. you can drop the class. 2. you can take the test or not, but fail the class regardless. It is your call.”

He tried to argue the point, telling me that he couldn’t drop any more classes (has already dropped the max limited allowed by the university before they kick you out) and that he couldn’t afford to fail my class either. I told him this wasn’t my problem to fix, it was his, and I wished him the best of luck resolving the issue.

DURING EXAM

Walking into the exam, I foolishly thought that I was done with the “drama,” and that we would be able to settle down to business. With this level of naiveté, you’d never know I’ve either been taking or giving exams for ten years straight now!

I hand out the exam, the students settle in to take it after the usual expressions of dismay over the difficulty of the test. Halfway through the test, somebody’s phone rings. My cross to bear yells, “S**T!” and leaps out of his chair while frantically digging through his bag. Instead of just turning off the phone, as I was expecting him to do, he announces to the class, “I’ve got to take this…” and, before I can say anything, runs, at top speed, out of the room.

The students and I look at each other in disbelief while he stands right outside the door of the classroom and has a loud and completely audible conversation with one of his buddies about how the test is going and what time he thinks he’ll make it to the bar.

Then, evidently not realizing that his conversation had been overheard by all, he comes back into the room and says, “Sorry, it was really important, but it won’t happen again.”

“No,” I reply, holding out my hand for his phone, “It won’t.” But at this point in the day, I’m feeling impatient, intolerant, and even a teeny bit vicious. So, with a straight face, I add, “In revenge for the interruption, I passed your test around to the rest of the class and allowed them each to change one answer. You might want to take the time to review their answers…”

I hadn’t, of course, but the two minutes of panic it caused him made me feel a bit better.

On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself mystified by student behavior during exams. I mean, who actually thinks it is o.k. to take a phone call, any phone call but especially a social call, during an exam?!?!?!

Once, a few years back, I was giving a three hour final exam. During the exam, I had to step out of the classroom and have a conversation with a student who had finished their test about some work they needed to do. When I had finished, I stepped back into the classroom to find the six people still working on their exams deep in conversation with each other.

One of the students looks up at me and says, “Oh, we’re just taking a chat break! We’ll get back to work in a few more minutes.”

A “chat break”??????????????????????????????????? You don’t get to stop and exam and have a cocktail party! But there they were, sitting around, ostensibly discussing motorcycles…

AFTER THE EXAM

O.K., I’m going to cut this short, having relieved my feelings, with one final story. This is my all time favorite post-exam email.

Upon receiving a grade that she didn’t find agreeable, one of my students emailed me and said:

“Dear Elizabeth, When I got my exam back, I was shocked to discover how low my grade was! I really enjoy this class and I feel my grade should reflect that. I would like to meet with you to discuss how we could raise my grade to better reflect the enjoyment I have for the class.”

So, first of all, a bit of context. I was just a lowly teaching assistant for the class in question, and so spent most of my time in the back of the classroom keeping an eye on the students from behind.

Tip—For those of you who are/will be teaching assistants, you may look like you are setting a good example by sitting in the front row, but if you sit in the back behind all your students, you’ll learn a great deal more about them. For those of you who are still students, if your TA is sitting in the back row, watch what you have on your computer screen. She CAN see it!

So there I was in the back of the classroom. The student in question rarely came to class, and when she did, she sat in the back row, hooked her computer into the wireless internet, and spent her time surfing the web. Her exam grade was the lowest in the class, and I wasn’t surprised by this at all.

I simply emailed her back and said that I really didn’t have the “power” to change her grade and suggested she speak with the professor, but what I REALLY wanted to write back was something along the lines of:

Dear Student, I really enjoy baseball, but the Red Sox won’t be calling me to pitch any time soon. Enjoyment does not equal skill, ability, or hard work.”

I enjoy the class so therefore I should get an A???? Is that really how this generation works????

Sigh….

O.K., done venting about students…

In other news, I’m frantically getting ready to leave Mexico. I’ve got 13 days before I head out for a four night/five day vacation on the Pacific Coast beaches (Merry Christmas to me!!!). From there, I start the drive home, or to Long Island anyway. Things have been very, VERY busy here because I have to get all the things I need to study into some sort of digital format. I’ve done pretty well, though I’m still trying to finish up a few things.

But so far, I’ve catalogued nearly 20,000 artifacts and written the first chapter of my dissertation. There are another 35,000 or so, but I’ve hired somebody to finish those for me and send the data in the coming months. I’m trying to learn and internalize the idea that I can’t actually do everything completely by myself. It has been rough going at times, but I’m getting better about it!

That is pretty much it (or all and more than I have time for…). At the moment, I have no life. Other than leaving once a week for exams, I sit at home and count artifacts...

Speaking of, I should get back to work counting and photographing tiny bits of things. If you have time for a vacation this spring, come for a visit in the Hamptons. I’ve found a beautiful house to live in on the water in Sag Harbor. And if you were sad to miss out on a chance for a vacation in Mexico, come stay with me here next summer! I’ll be teaching an interdisciplinary course on the Mexican Hacienda next June, and then using July and August to put the finishing touches on the final draft of my dissertation (I hope….).

Below is the draft of the brochure for the course I'm going to teach. If you know anybody who is interested, send them to me for more info on how to sign up! (That part hasn't been written on the brochure yet, hence the "blah, blah, blah...") It'll be a six credit course transferable to the states. Taught in English, but the fieldwork will be in Spanish...

Check out my Slide Show!

16th Century Monastery at Tecalli

COW LEGS AND
CULTURE SHOCK
Or
"Why you probably shouldn't trust me with your children...."


I survived my month of teaching in the Anthropology Lab, had a few blessed days off with Carol (who made a scenic detour on the Road to Rev via Puebla, Veracruz, and Mexico City with me), and then plunged into a new hell. In a moment of weakness and, to be perfectly honest, greed, I agreed to teach for an American program (which shall remain nameless to protect the marginally innocent) that was bringing 180 gifted adolescents to Mexico (for the program's first time). Enter the Culture Shock (cow legs follow shortly...).

I realize that, as an American, I shouldn't experience culture shock when faced with Americans. But I did. Oh and how I did! The program descended, with 180 students and 40-some staff members and brought with it a tidal wave of American culture. And it wasn't the usual American culture you encounter at Mexican universities, the sort that comes with a sort of unwashed backpacker, laid back, take the experience as it comes flavor. Rather, it was more the panicked "The meeting began at 9:00 and it is 9:03, where is everybody!?!?!?!?!?!?!" kind, with a strong seasoning of ice-breakers, role-playing and team-building.

Shudder... I'd forgotten what that can be like here in Mexico!

The first full day of the program was the first of three days of "staff orientation" leading up to the arrival of our students. We spent that first day, eight hours of it, locked in a room "building team spirit" while being lectured on sexual harassment and cultural sensitivity. About 15 of the employees were Mexicans, and the saving grace of the day was the (empathetic) entertainment of watching these poor young Mexicans trying to understand what was going on. At one point, we got a thirty minute lecture (for the benefit of the Mexicans, I imagine) on not using the word "gringo" because it can be offensive.

At the end of this thirty minutes, we were invited to ask questions. One of the Mexicans raised his hand and said, "I don't understand why you have to be offended by everything! I mean, sometimes when somebody says "gringo" they mean it as an insult, but most of the time, we just say it descriptively. All it means is "American." Why can't you just assume we mean it kindly because most of the time we do!"

I sympathized with the young man, but this question got us a 45 minute review of the cultural sensitivity policy followed by another hour of examples of just how hurtful words can be....

At the end of this first day, I came home, crawled into bed, and lay awake all night wondering if it was too late to quit... I decided I couldn't bring myself to walk out on them at this point (and probably I had signed something that wouldn't allow me to do so anyway....). So I stuck it out.

On the second day, we went back for a "nuts and bolts" day of figuring out how things were actually going to run. It was at this point that we were informed that none of us were going to have textbooks for our students. There was mass panic among the instructors. Everybody had planned their classes around having their textbooks and here they were, the day before the students arrived, finding out that the textbooks hadn't arrived and nobody knew when they were going to show up.

I, however, was feeling secretly and insufferably (I'm sure) smug about the entire thing. I wasn't in the least bit surprised the textbooks hadn't shown up, and had planned my class so I could go ahead without them. You see, while I was in the "hiring process," somebody had mentioned to me that they were mailing all the textbooks to Mexico.

Appalled, I said, "You're doing what?"

They explained that they were mailing all the textbooks (about $8000 worth as near as I can calculate) via DHL and, "it'll be fine because DHL is reliable."

I suggested gently that this might not be the most reliable mode of transport for such a vital aspect of the program and explained that, while there is no tax on books imported for personal use, when the large boxes with the high monetary value appeared in customs, somebody there would surely hold onto them and refuse to allow them to pass on. I told them that it was likely that the only way they would actually get the textbooks is if somebody drove to Mexico City with a whole lot of money for bribes.

In horror struck tones, they told me that I was being "overly-judgemental" and "unrealistic" about life in Mexico. After all, how could I possibly know! I just dropped it.

But just amongst us friends and family, I have to say that really, I find it much more culturally offensive to pick up and go off to a foreign country and just assume that everything will run EXACTLY as it does at home. Which brings me back to our first day of orientation. The intriguing thing about our "cultural sensitivity" training was that it was directed entirely at how the Mexicans should make the Americans feel more at home. Nobody, for example, mentioned that it might be polite and prudent for the Americans to dress conservatively when visiting the churches of Puebla. I guess being sensitive to other cultures doesn't extend outside US borders and is, perhaps, less about diversity and more about assimilation.

So, the news about the textbooks made me smile. Petty as it was, I enjoyed the moment.

The textbooks, incidentally, were released from customs on the final day of the program...

Leaving the program aside, the kids were fabulous, and I had a great time working with them. We had a crazy intense schedule of 12-14 hour days in the classroom and on field trips, so we got to spend a lot of time together. Happily, they were a great, enthusiastic group. And even more happily, archaeology lends itself to all sorts of weird, hands on, time consuming activities.

Enter the cow legs! (as well as the part about maybe not wanting to trust me with your children...)

Just before the program started, I was talking to the department chair in Anthropology about it all, and giving her a run down on what the program was about. I told her about the schedule and she said, "Oh, so you need activities that take lots of time!"

And I said, "Yep! Sure do! Any suggestions you have on that front would be most welcome!"

She sat back and thought for a moment. "Well.... I used to do this one activity with the students... For their homework, they'd need to go out and find some broken glass and some river cobbles and a cow leg. Then, they'd come to class, and I'd give them an hour to skin the cow leg with the glass and extract the marrow with the river cobble.... You know, to give them a feel for how hard such things are with primitive tools...."

I was delighted. I loved the idea. Like really LOVED it! My mind started running through the plans I had. We were doing stone tool making in week two... So maybe I'd have the kids make stone tools and then use them to butcher the cow legs?

I ran with it. Much to the horror of the program administration.

Luckily, my cleaning lady's brother works at a slaughter house. So the week before I needed the cow legs, I came home to find my cleaning lady and said, "Uhm, I have a somewhat odd request."

She looked at me expectantly, wondering what the crazy gringa was going to do now!

I explained I needed 6 cow legs.

And she looked relieved and said, "Oh yeah, sure, the plastic ones, right?"

I said, "What? Plastic ones? No, I need cow legs!"

Plastic Cow legs? I was envisioning some strange new lawn ornament in the tradition of the pink flamingo, but weirder....

"Yes, yes," she said patiently, "The plastic ones, the buckets, do you want a red one?"

To this day, I have no idea what we were talking about...

"No, no!" I insisted, "I need the legs of a cow!!! Six of them! Not six cows, but six legs."

"Wait," she said, "You want cow's legs?"

"Yes!" I exclaimed, relieved that communication was reestablished.

She looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. She pantomimed a cow walking "So like the cow walks in, moo moo, and then" she pantomimes cutting her own legs off, "they cut. And you want this part?" pointing to her feet.

"Yes!" I exclaim happily. "That is exactly what I need!"

She laughed, harder, I think, than I've ever seen her laugh before and, shaking her head, said, "O.K."

And she came through! The following week, the cow legs were delivered to my house the night before I needed them.

So the next day, I loaded them into the back of my pickup (thanking the heavens that I don't drive something little, sporty, and enclosed--cow legs stink!) and drove to the campus. They sat in the back of the truck all morning in the sun getting good and smelly, and after lunch, I took the kids out to the parking lot and let them choose their cow legs out of a bag.

As you can imagine, with 12 kids between the ages of 14 and 16, there was much screaming, squirming, horror, drama, etc. My teaching assistant and I were laughing so hard, we were doubled over with tears running down our faces. The kids, working in groups of two, took their cow legs over to a grassy area and set to work. Once they discovered just how hard a task this was, overachievers that they all are, they stopped the drama and settled in with serious concentration. They got completely into it and, I think, actually enjoyed the challenge! By the end of their allotted hour, they were joking about how they now understood the attraction of the cult of Xipe Totec (for those not up on Aztec Iconography, he's "Our Lord the Flayed One" and his priests spent their time flaying humans for rituals).

I sent the students back to the classroom, walking across campus with the TA, and drove my truck, the bed of which was full of cow gore, to the nearest dumpster, and then headed back to meet them myself. As I walked up to the classroom, I ran into the academic dean (my boss), who looked at me nervously and said, "All done with the cow legs?"

"Yep!" I said, "They are in the dumpster! Nothing to worry about!"

She smiled and shook her head. I laughed and said, "Really, I'm just trying to make sure you never offer me a job again."

She laughed, hard.

Just then, the kids arrived. Very hyped up. One of them ran up to the dean and I and, vibrating with enthusiasm, said, "Elizabeth! That was the coolest lab EVER!" And went racing into the classroom.

The dean grinned at me and said, "You might want to consider changing your strategy...."

So that was my July. Or most of it anyway. At the end of the month, I waved the kids off with much sadness and waved the program off with feelings of relief and joy! The next day, I hopped on a plane and made a whirlwind tour of the Northeast US. I'm now back in Mexico preparing to teach my fall course (which begins tomorrow). I should get back to my syllabus, but I'll write more soon! (ha!)

Mexico: The Fifty-First State (And Other Inanities)

This week, for reasons way too long and uninteresting to explain here, I had to transfer money from a bank account in Mexico into my US bank account. To do this, I needed both a wire transfer number and an international wire routing number, or some such thing. I thought, “Oh, this shouldn’t be such a big deal, I’ll just call my bank and ask!”

After about thirty minutes of “pressing or saying one”, I was finally released from voice automated purgatory and put through to an operator. I explained the situation to the operator and asked if she could give me the two numbers I needed.

“Well,” she responded oh so helpfully, “I’d be happy to give you the wire transfer number, but you don’t need the international wire routing number. That is only for international transfers!”

Momentarily confused and then assuming she’d missed that part of the explanation, I responded, “Oh, uhm, yes, but I’m in Mexico, so I’ll need both the numbers….”

She responded with a condescending chuckle, saying, “Well now, history may not be my strongest suit, but I’m pretty sure that Mexico is part of the United States, honey….”

I was speechless. After a moment of gasping and stuttering, I finally managed, “Uhm, well, I’m here IN MEXICO (articulating carefully so as to be certain she didn’t think I was saying NEW Mexico), and it is definitely a foreign country.”

“Well,” she responded complacently, “It may seem that way, but I assure you that you don’t need any foreign authorization numbers from within US borders….”

Big sigh on this end. “Well, the bank seems to think I need the number. Will it do any harm if we just give it to them anyway?”

“Wellll nooooooo,” she responded.

“Good, then why don’t we just give it to them, even if it is (silent wincing) unnecessary.”

She agreed to this, and we both went on our merry ways. I imagine she went back to doing her nails, or some equally complicated task. I went back to the bank and spent the rest of my day wondering about how it was she missed the whole “foreign country” part of Mexico. It raised so many disturbing questions…. Leaving aside the fact that the people in charge of handling my money are unaware of Mexico’s status as a sovereign nation, I wondered exactly what she thought all that fuss over immigration reform reported so frequently in the papers was about. Does she, I found myself wondering, think you need a visa and passport to cross state lines?

I may have been a bit impatient with her. It has been a long and busy couple of weeks here! I’m teaching a course for the Anthropology Department that runs from 8 in the morning until 5 at night Monday through Friday. In the middle of my day, I get to set the students up with projects and take off for two hours lecturing on the Politics and Economics of Modern Mexico. After five, I get to write my lectures and brush up on assassinations, economic collapses, uprisings, and general bad PRI (Mexico’s ruling party until 1997/2000….) behavior. Somewhere in all of it I squeeze in about four hours of sleep. I’m looking forward to the end of all this very much!

It has been an interesting couple of weeks. For example, I discovered that none of my ten students, Americans and French, had ever heard of the 1968 student massacres in Mexico City, the Zapatista Uprising of 1994, or, more recently, last years drama in Oaxaca and/or the drama surrounding the presidential elections. I was shocked and depressed by the lack of current events knowledge until the Bank lady gave me a realistic measure of my student’s awareness. I’m heading into class tomorrow grateful that my students are at least conscious of the fact that they are currently in a foreign country!

My other class in the Anthropology department has mostly been lots of fun. I’m training five archaeology majors in the identification and analysis of animal bones. We are using the collections from my digs, and so I’m getting my dissertation data processed in return for many, many hours in the lab. For the most part, the students are doing a great job, and I expect to have all 4,000 or so bones identified, analyzed, and entered into my database by the end of this week. (Hooray!)

The only fly in all of this ointment is that my cross to bear has returned from last year. Those of you who have been following this blog since the beginning made his acquaintance last year when I was frantically trying to think of something that would minimize his interaction with other human beings.

This year, I figured it would be easier because we’d be in the lab…

HA!

So, for those of you who don’t know how the animal bone thing works, basically, what you do is:
1. You clean the bones with old toothbrushes and write teeny tiny numbers on all the little bits of bone. This takes days, weeks, or months, involves the use of foul smelling chemicals which get you high, and is very important. It means when you dump all the bones out of the bags into big piles, you know where the bone was originally taken from. (i.e. everything with number 134 on it was taken from the southeast quadrant of the 10 cms of earth above the floor in Room number 21.) My students were total rock stars and got this nasty job done in four days!

2. You then take all the bones and divide them into boxes by body part (so all the femurs, regardless of what they are from, end up in a box together). This is easy with complete or mostly complete bones. It gets trickier as the pieces get smaller. Once they are no longer “easily” identifiable, you pull out the comparative bones (complete skeletons of recently dead animals) and try and match the bits and pieces to the whole based on things like the line or curve of the bone, the interior structure, the placement of foramen, and the patterns of muscle attachments. This gets easier as you spend more time doing it and you build a mental image database of lots of minute markers.

3. You take a box of body parts (gruesome, isn’t it…), and figure out species of what you’ve got using comparative specimens when available and books when not.

4. You record everything on a data sheet. In my case, I record: species (or as close as I can get to species), body part, symmetry (right or left side of the body), if the bone ends have fused yet, if it is weathered, burned, butchered (and if so how is it butchered, what kind of marks, and how many of them), or marked by rodents and/or carnivores, and the weight of the bones.

5. Then you put all that into a database and the fun of playing with data begins.

The students are currently on step two. When you are new to the process, this takes a ton of time because you have to compare every fragment with every possible bone in a skeleton, and then check for variation between species. With the exception of my cross to bear, the students have been patient, thoughtful, and hardworking.

To ensure accuracy in the final analysis that goes into my dissertation, I’ve been checking every ID the students make. So they take a bone fragment, compare it with everything, bring it to me with the “match” from the complete skeleton and give me a justification of why it is that bone, why it isn’t any others, etc. Sometimes they are right and sometimes I send them back with a few suggestions of things to look at. Four of the students are doing just this and working hard at it. My best bud, however, has a different method. It goes like this.

He picks up a bone fragment. He looks at it. He sighs heavily. He wanders aimlessly around the lab for a few minutes staring into space. He puts the bone down, goes outside, and has a cigarette. He comes back in, picks up the bone, and resumes his wandering. After about half an hour, he comes to me and presents me with what is clearly a femur. “This is a rib!” he says proudly.

I say, “Uhm, o.k., well, why do you think it is a rib?”

“Because it looks just like a rib,” he says proudly.

“Well, can you show me a comparative specimen that looks just like it?” I ask.

“I don’t need to do that. I know it is a rib.”

“Well, uhm, I’m not sure that it is a rib, so how about you look at the comparative materials.”

He looks at me with pity. “Elizabeth, clearly this is a rib. There is no need to look at the comparative materials.”

My patience thins. “Why don’t you try checking the femur and the Humerus and see if it is one of those.”

“That would be a waste of my time, Elizabeth! I know it is a rib.”

“It is NOT a rib and you need to check the comparative materials to see what it is,” I say firmly.

He blows out an exasperated sigh. “I’m trying to avoid doing that Elizabeth. Besides, you are wrong, it is clearly a rib. I know it is because that is what it looks like!”

We go back and forth for a few more minutes until he finally admits defeat and goes to compare things. Eventually one of the other students takes pity on him and helps him with the id. He then moves for a new bone fragment and the entire process starts all over again.

He has been subjecting me to this round of “negotiating” for a week now, ever since the students finished numbering the bones. Miraculously, I haven’t given in to any impulses to do physical damage, but I have been getting shorter and shorter in my responses.

This past Thursday after lunch, we were sitting around the lab working. All was quiet except for a very enthusiastic peacock outside the window calling loudly (there are peacocks everywhere on the grounds of the university… part of the landscaping… the library hasn’t been given funds to buy a book in three years now, but you can have your pick of any number of breeds of peacock…). My cross to bear sighed loudly and said, “Elizabeth, may I have permission to take a break and go out and kill the peacock.”

“No,” I said, “We have enough dead things already, there will be no killing.” (Not entirely certain that if I accepted this as a joke he wouldn’t get up and go outside to kill the peacock.”

“But it is annoying me and deserves to die,” he said.

I looked at him hard and said, “I don’t think it is in your best interest to set the precedent of killing things that annoy us!”

We passed the rest of the afternoon in blessed silence while he pondered that!

Well, I should probably stop procrastinating and write a lecture on the 1994 Zapatista uprising and ethnic politics in Mexico!

On a final note, I’ll be making a flying trip through the Northeast this summer (New York to Maine) in late July and early August. If you are in the Northeast, will be around, and want to see me, send a note and we’ll work on a schedule!

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES ON LIFE IN MEXICO

I know last time I wrote, I promised stories of artifact analysis and pictures of broken bits of stuff…. This was yet another empty promise (in the tradition of “really, I’m gonna update my blog more often!”). But, also as usual, I do have good excuses!

Most of my time of late has been spent pursuing funding for this summer and/or next year and applying for jobs in case the funding doesn’t work out. Summer funding was successful (big sigh of relief). In addition, it looks very, VERY likely that funding for next year is also set. A very good friend in NYC made finding money for me her full time job. She beat the funding trees with a large stick until money rained down. She is still beating, but things look very, very good!

As a result, I’m officially announcing that I’ll be in Mexico for one more year. All of you who haven’t yet found time to visit now have a whole year extra to buy tickets and come on down. (Just let me know ahead of time, Casa Elizabeth fills up quickly!) I’m currently accepting reservations through New Years...

In addition to the fun money tasks, I’ve been teaching, grading, and preparing to teach some more. This past spring, I accepted a part time teaching position at the University of the Americas here in Cholula (largely to get a work visa through the university so I don’t have to drive across the border every 90-180 days to renew my tourist papers…). So, along with everything else, I’ve been teaching “Cross Cultural Communication for International Business” at the business school. No, really, I’m not kidding. It seemed, at the beginning of the semester, like something of a cruel joke. I mean, I’ve spent my whole life doing everything I could to avoid ending up in business school, and here I was, teaching in one!

Surprisingly, my students and I had a good time with the class! The course was basically an introduction to “culture” (subtitled: uhm, no, not everybody is just like you!), and we spent a lot of time discussing things like, “When going to a meeting with business people from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, you should be on time.”

The topics of class ranged far and wide within the framework of “cross cultural communication.” One day, one of my students raised his hand during lecture. I called on the student.

“Uhm, Miss, may I ask a question?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Uhm, well, I was watching on tv this show from the U.S., and in it, they made it seem like in the U.S., people trust police officers. They even told kids in this show that if they have a problem, they should go to a police officer for help! That isn’t really true, is it?”

There were looks of wide-eyed bewilderment and disbelief from the students.

“Well, actually,” I replied, “it is true. And yes, we do teach children that police officers will protect them and help them if they need it.”

More looks of disbelief and protest from the students….

So I told them about Constable Knight, who had the job back of going around to all the elementary schools in Victoria, BC and talking to school children. I told them about how he taught us that jay walking is the worst possible thing you could do. I told them how he would take the bullets out of his gun and pass it around for all of us to handle (so we wouldn’t be afraid if we had to go up to a policeman for help), how we got to watch cartoon movies of a talking car teaching us how to cross the street safely, and how we all got stickers for our lunch boxes at the end of the annual visit (“Walk wise with your eyes!”).

The students were totally appalled.

“So, Miss,” asked another, “are police officers different in the U.S. than they are here?”

“Uh, well, yeah,” I said. “And actually, this raises an important travel point. When you are in the U.S., if you have an encounter with a policeman for any reason, you shouldn’t try to bribe him!”

“What!” one of the students burst out, “What are you supposed to do then?”

This led into a discussion of bribery, and I explained that in the States, it isn’t really common practice to bribe anybody ever. I told them that this made it very difficult for me in Mexico because I had no understanding of when it is appropriate to bribe someone and when it isn’t, that I never knew if I was expected to offer a bribe, or if I would be offending someone by doing so.

One of my students leaned back in his chair and said, “Miss, don’t worry. In one month when I graduate, I will be a lawyer, and I know this system very well. I will explain to you how it is you know when you need to bribe someone.”

I waited expectantly.

He said, “Any time anyone gives you two options for something, one good and one bad, you must bribe them.”

The rest of the class nodded happily. And as you see, the class was educational for me as much as for my students!

That class is now finished with (as of this past Friday when I turned in my grades), and I am preparing for two more in June. I am going to be teaching an intensive lab course (eight hours a day five days a week) in Animal Bone Analysis (in Spanish!) for the Anthropology Department. I’m looking forward to that, and we will be using the materials I excavated this past winter, so I get a lot out of the deal!

In addition, I’ve been asked to teach a special two week course (two hours a day five days a week) in Mexican politics and economics for six MBA students coming from a Business School in France for the summer. It turns out that the University here hires and fires based on course reviews (imagine that!). Mine are always very good (thank god for years spent learning how to teach!!!), and so suddenly I’m in much demand around the university. I’m actually finding myself in the unusual position of turning work down (paid work!!!!) just so that I can have some time to do my own research! A novel position for an archaeologist! At least in my experience…..

Outside of all this work stuff, I’ve also taken some time off and had some fun! My friend Lee flew down from Virginia for ten days and we had a great time escaping real life and responsibilities. Lee and I drove to Oaxaca for a few days, which was really lovely. We spent a few days at my house (and toured the Hacienda Acocotla so Lee can see where I dig), and then popped down for a few days in Mexico City. If you scroll to the bottom of this blog, you should see a slideshow with TONS of pictures of our adventures.

On a daily basis, I escape work by spending a bit of time training up my two foster puppies (for cute doggie pics, see the slideshow below the pics of Lee’s vacation!). When I returned from my travels at Christmas last January, I was greeted by a little black cocker-mix doggie who was being attacked by the dogs who live in our street. I took her in, temporarily, until Zee and I could get her to the dog asylum near here. She had a broken hip (and mange, but that is another story), and so couldn’t get away from the street dogs, who were intent on making her leave.

Before she (who was subsequently christened Lily) could be taken off to the dog asylum, my friend Kim decided this was just the dog she was looking for. So, I am taking care of Lily and training her up until I can get her to Kim. Lily has recovered from the broken hip and the mange nicely (after baths in special shampoo three times a week….), and is now a happy, healthy and fiercely protective pup.

Word of my success with Lily must have spread. On Easter Sunday, I took Lily downstairs to let her outside for a bit, and discovered that the World’s Cutest Puppy had been abandoned on my doorstep.

I had actually encountered, from a distance, the W.C.P. earlier in the day. While sipping my coffee and checking my email earlier in the morning, I heard a noise outside. I peeked out the window into the driveway and saw two pick-ups parked in the street in front of the house. Apparently, some people from one of the local churches were delivering palm leaves to all the “observant” households in the neighborhood. In the bed of the second truck was a little boy, maybe about four, and the W.C.P. I looked out the window and thought, “Wow, that sure is a cute little dog,” and, not thinking any more about it, went back to work.

Apparently, unwilling to make me feel left out, and unable to leave me the palm leaves due to lack of church attendance, they decided to deposit the puppy on my doorstep. There she patiently waited until Lily and I emerged about three hours later. She took one look at a well fed Lily and me, and all eight pounds of her promptly decided she was staying.

Zee later christened her Chula (which means “pretty”). Chula is as sweet as Lily, and is possibly going to go live with Kim, as well. (Kim is trying to decide if she really wants two Mexican street dogs). In the meantime, Lily and Chula are having a wonderful time playing together and chasing the groundhogs around and around the yard.

Me? I’m just thankful they left the puppy instead of the four year old…..

Vacation with Lee!

The Puppies

FOR THOSE OF YOU....

Some of you have expressed a desire to know more about exactly what it is my work is about. Those of you who know or couldn't care less should ignore this post.... Those of you who are interested, read on! Below, I've pasted an informal introduction to my studies that I wrote as part of one of my current attempts to get some money. It is a VERY non-academic introduction to how I think about things. Those who want to know more about the pure archaeology of it all, just skip to the post below. I'm trying to wrestle some pictures into a posting I've already written about more "daily life" fieldwork stuff, but for now you can get the text under the heading "La Patrona".

In 1529, Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain, one of 19 Franciscan missionaries. During the following sixty years, he learned Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, he taught indigenous men Spanish and Latin. He taught them to read and write, he taught catechism, he trained them to be priests, and all around, he saw what he believed to be the complete destruction of the pre-Hispanic world. This was not an unreasonable assumption. Modern estimates place the indigenous death toll at 90% of the population in the first 100 years after the arrival of Cortes (Knight 2002). This was devastation on an unimaginable level for both the indigenous population and Europeans[1]. How could any culture survive such ruin?

Sahagún was an unusual man. He was not only a missionary, he was a humanist, a scholar, and he was, many argue, the first anthropologist to set foot in the New World. The destruction he witnessed seems to have worried him. He was, of course, in favor of converting the Indians to Christianity, but he wanted to document the world that had existed prior to the Spanish arrival before it completely and irrevocably disappeared. He did so in the form of a twelve volume encyclopedia known today as the Florentine Codex. The Codex contains descriptions of everything in the Aztec world: history; a complete sketch of their deities; Aztec social structure; their catalogue of the natural world. He wrote his encyclopedia in both Spanish and Nahuatl with the help of native informants who had lived in pre-conquest times. His informants most likely created the lavish illustrations accompanying the text. It is an incredible piece of scholarship, by any standard, and today it provides us with our most reliable glimpse of pre-conquest Mexico.

Early in the summer of 2004, I was in Central Mexico visiting a project I had no intention of becoming a part of. I spent the first two years of my graduate education determined to study the archaeology of ethnic identity in Oaxaca. On my way to Oaxaca and the project I thought I was to spend the next few years with, I stopped in Puebla to introduce myself to the then-director of a new project studying the history, archaeology, and anthropology of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. Dr. Harold Juli was leading a field school of students from the University of the Americas in Cholula, Mexico. Their subject was ethnoarchaeology and ethnology, in preparation for excavations of the Hacienda that Dr. Juli had scheduled for the following summer. I sat down and spoke with Dr. Juli and his students, largely with the intention of making connections in the small but burgeoning field of Mexican historical archaeology.

The students had been collecting oral histories and conducting basic interviews in the descendant community of La Soledad Morelos. Out of curiosity, I asked them what the people of La Soledad Morelos had to say about animals. My specialty is the analysis of animal bones, and, regardless of my interest in a project, this is a question I always ask. The students started giving me the expected list of animals that the people of La Soledad Morelos recognize as part of their world, ranging from European-introduced domesticates such as cow and goat to the native domesticates of turkey and dog. One of the students laughed and said, “Oh, and then there are the animals that don’t really exist!” The rest of the students laughed dismissively, but my curiosity was piqued.

“Animals that don’t exist?” I asked. The student nodded and proceeded to offer a description of a two-headed snake, completely unknown to modern science. The other students laughed and supported her with their own accounts of this mysterious two-headed snake. I was fascinated. The description could have been taken, word for word, from Sahagún’s volume on natural history in which he describes an Aztec “two-headed snake.”

I had a new dissertation project. Since 2004, I have assumed directorship of The Acocotla Project with the assistance and support of the faculty and students of the University of the Americas. My dissertation examines the maintenance of pre-Columbian identities through foodways (the practices surrounding the acquisition, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food). Foodways is not just about food, but about all the “stuff” that comes with it. Imagine any festive, celebratory meal. You have to plan a menu appropriate to the occasion, you have to get the food, you have to prepare it (for which you need equipment), you have to serve it (which requires more equipment). Serving food requires deciding who among your guests receives what portion. After you’ve decided on the food but before your guest arrive, you have to decide what to wear and how to set the table (and the tone) for the meal to come. Every single step in this unconsciously complex process is culturally-loaded. Decisions made are based on social identity. Standing at the head of the Thanksgiving table, you have to decide who will receive white meat and who gets dark. The answer to this dilemma isn’t obvious to those outside your cultural parameters. The material manifestations of this process are the basis for my study.

My excavations at the Hacienda Acocotla are producing large quantities of food remains in the form of bones and charred plant remains, as well as the vessels used to prepare and serve the meals. As recently as the end of the 19th century, women prepared food using traditional, pre-Columbian stone tools. The material remains indicate that the pre-conquest corn tortilla accompanied meat from European-introduced domesticates. Families sat down in front of the calpanaria to share a meal served on ceramics painted brightly in the Spanish tradition but produced locally. The women of the family made themselves pretty with brightly colored glass beads and brass and copper jewelry. The men proudly wore pre-Columbian-style ear spools that they had made themselves out of a reworked piece of brick. The undoubtedly lively conversation that passed among the diners was in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.

The grandchildren and great grandchildren of those diners sit down to similar meals today. Superficial things have changed. Spanish is the only language spoken, and the ear spools are absent. In spite of this disconnect, much is still the same. Today, it is Gaudencio’s birthday, and everyone in the village is invited to eat. The women of his family spend two days preparing a delicious mole using exclusively pre-Columbian ingredients. I ask them about the ingredients. They turn their noses up when I ask if they use the European-introduced chicken. Laughing, they gently explain to the ignorant gringa that chicken is awful in mole; the only meat ingredient for a good mole is turkey. We sit in the courtyard together around a modern “reproduction” of the ceramic vats (or cazuelas) that I have excavated at more than one pre-conquest site. While we sip our beer, we toss chopped chiles and turkey into the mole simmering over an open fire. We watch while the most accomplished cooks prepare an indigo-colored tortilla out of blue corn. Though many Mexicans claim that tortilla machines liberated the woman of Mexico, the women of La Soledad Morelos are rightly proud of their hand-made tortillas.

Eventually, after hours of preparation, the mole is ready and the party begins. The women’s jewelry is indistinguishable from what we find archaeologically. The dishes we eat off of, while clearly modern versions, owe their design to those I find in my excavations at the Hacienda. The food we are served owes nothing to European heritage and is drawn exclusively from pre-Columbian ingredients. When it comes time for me to take my leave, there is a rush. The hostess must prepare the ētecate, a Nahuatl “doggie bag.” No guest may leave without a portion of the food from any party in La Soledad Morelos, and though nobody speaks Nahuatl, there is no known Spanish translation of this word.

This is the basis of my dissertation. These unspoken continuities intrigue me. Today, the people of La Soledad Morelos identify as mestizo rather than indigenous because it is fashionable. To be indigenous in Mexico today is to belong to the lowest class. Yet, with the exception of the most blatant material items, they maintain indigenous practices, identifiable in the archaeological and ethnohistoric records, from times pre-dating the Spanish Conquest. The label they apply to themselves is important, but so is the material reality upon which they construct the label. That material foundation is what I study, from the founding of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in 1577 through the present day.

[1] For comparison, the highest estimates for death due to the infamous European Black Plague are, at their highest, 30% Ziegler, P. 1970. The black death. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books..

LA PATRONA
March 13, 2007

In memoriam….

O.K., so clearly, I am not good at this whole “regular updates” thing. Those of you who feel miffed because I don’t write more often can feel good about the fact that it clearly isn’t personal!

But this time, I have REALLY good excuses! The happy news from Mexico at the moment is that I have just finished eight weeks of excavations (and turned up lots of cool stuff!). More on that soon….

The not happy news is that my project director passed away a few weeks ago rather suddenly. He was diagnosed with cancer last summer, but seemed to be responding well to treatment. He and his family, and the doctors for that matter, were feeling positive and cheerful. He decided that he was well enough to teach a few courses at Connecticut College this spring, and he even gave the first day of lectures. Unfortunately, it turned out that his radiation treatments were just making the spread of his tumors undetectable. While he was undergoing treatment, they ran rampant and spread throughout his body. Two days after giving his first lecture, he was admitted to the hospital. Twenty-four hours after that, I got the message from his son that he wasn’t expected to survive the weekend. He hung on for a week, and he got to spend a little more time with his family and his new grandson and to say goodbye.

Leaving aside the whole personal grieving from a distance, worrying about his wife, not being there to support the family or say goodbye awfulness of it all, it has made for a sad and lonely time here in the field. I’ve been on my own here for quite awhile, but I always knew I could pick up the phone and discuss the project with Harold and ask his advice. All of the sudden, it’s all me. Every decision about the excavations is mine and mine alone. In archaeology, there is rarely a right or wrong answer to any decision. Mostly, we just have to weigh all the options and try and decide what fits best within time and money constraints. In my experience, the best way to do this is to kick around ideas with lots of people and get everybody’s view on what will or won’t work.

Even though I had ten employees, Mexico is a very hierarchical kind of place, and nobody really wanted to leap in and discuss options. It didn’t matter how much I encouraged group input, asking them what they thought just caused a whole lot of discomfort. Everybody would look at each other and shift from one foot to the other. Finally, someone in the group would say, “Oh, whatever you think is best, patrona.”

So here I am. La Patrona.

Somehow, I muddled through. If I made any wrong decisions (which I won’t know until I’ve finished the artifact analysis), it is probably for the best. Any decision that would have resulted in more artifacts would have been an issue. As it currently stands, I can’t get to my couch due to the few hundred 5 gallon bags full of artifacts and soil samples in my living room. They are full of lots of fun stuff. Ceramics and bones and stone tools and little figurines. I’m certain that Harold is happy we managed to keep digging and is as excited as I am by all the interesting things we found!

So, to recap….

Eight weeks ago, after returning from Christmas in the states, I began excavations. I hired a field assistant, Su Lin, after my original field assistant, Adriana, quit the night before we were supposed to start digging. Some might view this as another negative chapter in the drama that has plagued this project for the last year, but I didn’t find it to be a problem at all. In fact, I think it was rather a blessing! Last summer, my friend Kim, who has a way with words, nicknamed her “Twisty Knickers.” I remain uncertain if this was due to the fact that after meeting with my “assistant” I would come home with my knickers in a twist, or due to the fact that my assistant’s general attitude was indicative of a certain level of knotting in her undergarments. Regardless, the change in personnel made for a much smoother couple of months!

We began excavations with only six workers rather than a full complement of eight as we intended, but we were happy to take what we could get and finally start! Once word spread in the village, our numbers slowly increased. After telling our workers that we needed more people to help, they showed up at the beginning of the second week with a half dozen children between the ages of 8 and 13. The youngest of the children were actually the local animal herders, and so brought with them approximately 6 cows, 15 goats, a dozen sheep, a donkey and assorted dogs. To keep things exciting in the dog department, one of my workers also arrived daily with all 10 of his dogs.

My days in early childhood education came flooding back as I spent the first few days of that week trying to deal with the fact that I was now not just the patrona of The Acocotla Project but also, apparently, the patrona of The Acocotla Day Care and Petting Zoo (Central Mexican’s first Hacienda Day Care!). After breaking up the umpteenth doggie battle and shooing the donkey out of one of the excavation units (again!), I decided enough was enough. I took the spokesman of the workers aside and explained that if the Mexican Government or funding agencies found out I was employing children, I was going to have a problem, and that my patron could visit at any time and there would be trouble!

Making yourself the subject of somebody else’s authority is always a good negotiating tactic in rural Mexico. Everybody understands having to answer to SOMEBODY in a village like the one I work in, and NOBODY wants to come to the notice of the government for any reason at all! My problem with our demographics was immediately understood on these terms, and my foreman apologized and promised to find some older workers for the next day.

Slowly our workforce built up, bit by bit, as word made its way around the adult population of the village that there was a cash salary to be made out at the Hacienda. I had soon exceeded my complement of workers (all adults this time), and things were truly under way!

Over the course of the eight weeks, we excavated five rooms in the workers quarters and an enormous midden (archaeology speak for a pile of trash!). In the summer of 2005, we excavated a small test unit, just a one meter by one meter, and found what we thought must be a midden. This year, our plan was to expand that area and get as much as we could out of it. For a historical archaeologist, the only thing better than a midden is an outhouse (awesome preservation due to moisture and the place where people hid all the trash they didn’t want anybody to know about!). When planning it this year, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll just go ahead and dig a HUGE area to make sure we get the whole midden,” and I figured it would be quick work. HA HA. Famous last archaeological words!

We opened up what I thought was a big area, 5 meters by 2 meters, with last year’s little test pit right in the center. When we were down below the surface by about a meter, I realized that we were still smack in the center of what was turning out to be a VERY BIG midden. We dug and dug and dug and dug for weeks and weeks and weeks. Literally. I put trenches off it in all directions trying to find the edge. After a week of trenches, I still didn’t have the edge of the midden, but I did have a building we didn’t know existed. To be accurate, I had approximately 12 inches by 12 inches of collapsed wall in the very end and very bottom of a trench. Peeking out from underneath it was the tiniest bit of plaster floor.

So again we dug and dug and dug and dug… We reached the end of the collapsed wall, feeling very good about things, the week before we had to start filling the excavations up again. As we cleaned the edge, one of the workers said, “How come there are some bricks here?”

I looked down into the pit, and sure enough, there at the bottom, was the edge of a beautifully laid brick floor. I took a deep breath.

And we dug and dug and dug some more….

By the end of the excavations, we had uncovered everything. But don’t ask me what it is just yet! I’m not prepared to guess until I’ve had some time in the lab with the artifacts.

Over the last week, as I’ve talked to a few people over the phone, a number of people have said to me, “You’re done? But what are you going to do now!?!? I thought you were there to dig!”

Very simply, the bulk of my work is only now just beginning. Digging is the quick, easy part of things. As a general rule, for every one day we spend digging in the field, an archaeologist needs 6 days in the laboratory to process and analyze the artifacts. Since Mexico prohibits my bringing artifacts back to the States, all that work has to be done here. I have a lab set up in my house, I’ve programmed a database, and now I’m beginning the “important” work. When you are out in the field digging, all sorts of wild interpretations run wild through your head. You are out in the sun in a high altitude desert, where you spend eight hours a day five days a week doing heavy physical labor. There is no shade, you’ve run out of water, it is 95 degrees, and you haven’t had time to sleep more than four hours a night since excavations began. Your brain starts writing all sorts of stories. It is the really fun part of archaeological fieldwork (and no, I’m not being sarcastic! It really is a blast!). But the truth is, until you get back to the lab, plug all the info into a database, and run a bunch of statistical analyses, those stories are nothing but semi-delusional, water-deprived fantasies.

So, keep tuning in to find out what it was I dug! I’ll let y’all know as soon as I decide myself!

And that is it for now. I think it is time for bed here. Next time, check in for pics of my favorite artifacts (like this one!)!