Have you ever been on an archaelogical dig?

Never been on one but thinking about it. Greentext any stories you have.

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youtube.com/watch?v=JU37d8kUebk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mungo_remains
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

been on a paleontological dis with an archaological component, Australian megafauna. No artefacts in the target layer for fossils but there was an aboriginal heritage overlay. Didn't find too much in terms of quantity but there was a greenstone shard found, greenstone axes came from a nearby quarry and were traded huge distances.

Anyway, good experience, would recommend.

Do it! They are a ton of fun!

I dug in the ground when I was much younger. I was probably thinking I'd find something of value too. I don't recall any specifics, so I'm guessing it was quite uneventful.

How could a normal person participate in one? I'm a computer science major that's slightly interested in archaeology and ancient civilizations. Could a pleb like me just observe?

I don't really have anything worth greentexting, but I live in the middle of an ancient burial ground so we have archaeologists crawling around all over the place practically every summer, opening up barrows and disturbing the unquiet dead.

Plus, there are plenty of societies for amateur/semi-amateur archaeologists (i.e. a bunch of retired people with nothing better to do quite often including retired archaeologists with nothing better to do, working under the oversight of a nearby university). They go around digging holes in farmers fields, unearthing roman pottery and medieval barns and whatnot.

Occasionally I'll go along and see if they've dug up anything interesting. My mother once managed to persuade me to come participate and I have to say that it was one of the most intensely boring experiences I've had, not to mention muddy.

>unquiet dead.
>unquiet
Explain

I was on one for a college course. There wasn't much and I didn't really know what I was doing, but it turns out I'm good at spotting little bits of stuff in piles of soil. I think it comes from when I was a little autistic child and used to pick up all the glass and plastic I'd see on sidewalks.

I completely failed that course, but what can you do.

It's nowhere near as exciting as Time Team makes it look.

Yes. As long as you have the money to pay for it and you apply, they are generally more than happy to get people from other fields to diversify.

Not exactly a dig, but I helped out the Air Force open up some missile silos that have been abandoned since the 60s.
It was spoopy as hell and I'm probably gonna die of asbestos poisoning, but it was pretty cool.

>implying anyone here leaves their house

I have seen, as I walked between the barrows one night, when the moon rose high and its scattered light lit silver the freezing mists that curled between those ancient cyclopean structures... absolutely nothing, sadly. I just said it for effect. Well, that's not entirely true - on a night like that I did see a drunk guy pissing against a tree. But then I was drunk as well so I can hardly judge - it's just what happens when you put the pub on one side of the barrows and the houses on the other. It may look as if the barrows are crawling with shambling zombies on a Friday night, but that's just people who've been out for a pint or three.

Although I'd be pretty unquiet if archaeologists insisted on bringing in in mechanical diggers to haul away chunks of my resting place every summer. Frankly I think the ancient wights we have around here could be putting a bit more effort in - this place is littered with graveyards stretching from the neolithic to the present day, and do we ever get a single haunting? Nope.

I'm still holding out hope that I'll see Alec Guinness' ghost one of these days, stumbling towards me in full Obi Wan robes, since he's buried around here as well.

Time Team is comfy viewing though

Sounds fuckin cool user.

May the force be with you

>Sounds fuckin cool user.
It really isn't. A nice place to live, yes, but without my little embellishments cool is stretching it a bit.

This is one of the barrows. Not much to look at really, is it? (It's actually bigger than it looks in this pic though)

It overlooks the town cricket pitch, along with several others. Now, I'm not saying that the Victorian cricketers who chose the site put it there specifically because they thought the sepulchral monuments of ancient warrior chieftains would make a jolly good vantage point to watch the cricket from (although they really do). I'm just saying its hard to use the word cool about anything that has been incorporated into cricket, which has been scientifically proven to be the most uncool of all the sports (apart from maybe badminton).

oh, and May the Force Be With You too, user.

Although given Alec Guinness' attitude towards Star Wars I doubt going to the graveyard at midnight and repeating that three times is likely to improve my chances of seeing him.

>This happens near my parents house youtube.com/watch?v=JU37d8kUebk
>absurdly ancient wooden henge discovered
>went to see it growing up
>dirty hippies turn up
>dirty hippies have to be forcibly restrained as they remove it for preservation
>it was actually way worse than it looks here, there were protests and an attempted sit in (which was called off because dirty hippies don't understand the tide)
>apparently preserving neolithic wood makes trees cry or something
>fucking hippies and their fucking inane pseudobeliefs

this

you seem like an interesting guy

> Australian dig in the middle of the desert
> 40C+ heat every day
> Find some bones
> FUCK YEAH JACKPOT
> Start doing my thing making sure to take great care
> Aboriginals in the area get word and start complaining about "MUH ANCESTORS"
> Dig shut down, bones destroyed, little remains intact
> 30 years manage to get a DNA sample from one of the bones you nicked as a souvenir
> its not even not even Aboriginal

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mungo_remains

A different user

I'm also considering applying to biblical archaeology digs in Israel, I have good grades at university and speak Hebrew (modern) but did very poorly in one archaeology class (C-, it's the only C on my transcript).

How screwed am I?

Is this archaeology at uni level?

Your C I mean