Day 44

Today we stayed back from the field to confront the 9 boxes of unwashed artifacts living Pam and Katie’s closet that seem to be organizing some sort of resistance. We spent all morning washing and cataloguing artifacts in the blazing sun, as is our custom, and then broke for lunch around 1:45 pm. We had intended to go out but then an old Tanzanian friend of Pam’s, Shakila, appeared with her husband Titus and her two kids Neema and Amos. Shakila was the monuments officer for the local area when Pam first saw our site in 2005. The District Cultural Officer, Joyce, took the two of them on a 3 day tour of all the known archaeological pangos in the immediate vicinity. Five years later, Pam, her graduate students, and our collaborators are still researching those sites. And given the rate at which we’re excavating, we’ll be studying them for years to come.

So often we fall into the trap of thinking only about research. The process of washing and sorting rocks in particular provokes tunnel vision. It’s always about the next artifact, the next level, the next category and so on and so forth. Hurry, hurry so we can get back into the field before we run out of time and fail out of grad school! However, playing with kids is an excellent remedy. We gave them pens and highlighters from our cache, with which Jenn diabolically demonstrated the art of drawing on oneself. Pretty soon they were writing each of our names on our arms in yellow highlighter as a darasa ya Kiingerasa (English lesson). We crawled through the hotel gardens, practiced some awesome dance moves, and printed off photos of us together on our portable printer. Neema even braided my hair. Sure we should have spent the afternoon washing and sorting artifacts, but who can fault us for playing with a 4 and 7 year old? Thank you Neema and Amos for reminding us that even though we are here to conduct research in Africa, we’re still in Africa so why not hang out in the bushes every now and again.