Trip to Canada

We just came back from our super fun trip to Vancouver. We were in town for the Society for American Archaeology's annual meeting. We both had presentations to make on Thursday, and we were also there to hear other sessions and to discuss our work and the new research of other people.
We went to Seattle first and then headed up to Vancouver. The day we got there we got a great northern surprise!



I know, I know. everybody else is used to exciting weather, but it is about 80 degrees here in Tucson - even clouds are unusual.


We also tried Poutine. So. so. so. good. Can an American make this? I don't know, but I sure am going to try. It was little wads of cheese over thick fries with brown gravy over all. Delicious.
We did a lot more eating and a lot more sightseeing that I will have to tell you about in future posts. It's just too much for one day. Anyway, it's good to be back, even though I am officially in love with the northwest.

Happy Easter!

We made some eggs for you from a tie-dye Easter egg kit...
These little suckers are going to be deviled eggs soon, they just don't know it.

New Mexico

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair...


Rob and I took a trip to New Mexico this week to scope out some sites that he will excavate this summer. He's running a field school with five students. They're going to dig and survey for about six weeks, all over southern New Mexico. We talked to some really nice ranchers who will let the students stay on their land.
We also drove around looking for other places he can take the students on weekend trips and for archaeology lectures. Here are the amazing Gila Cliff Dwellings.
You can see the small, shallow caves from a distance in this picture.
Inside are pueblo room blocks. This site was occupied in the 13th century by the Mogollon people. It was dated using tree rings. If I remember right, the last cutting date (outside ring of a tree with bark on it still) was around 1280 or 1290. The families living in this site grew corn along the Gila river and hunted deer and other small animals nearby. They wore cotton clothing and plant fiber sandals. They made corrugated pottery and black on white pottery in which they cooked and stored seeds and water.
This next picture is a close-up of the lintel over the doorway of one of the rooms in the cliff dwelling. It's cool for a couple of reasons. First, it's cool that the wood is still preserved 700 years later. Second, you can see where dendrochronologists came and took a core sample of it for dating (apparently sample #74a). If you look carefully, you can see these bore holes in many archaeological sites around the southwest. Next time you visit one, see if you can spot them.
The other cool thing about this lintel is that in the mortar above the wood, you can see pieces of the matting that would have covered some of the supports for the roof (or ceiling). See? Right above the bore hole and another one a little to the left. This would have been covered with mud plaster when they were building the roof.
It was a great trip and I have many more pictures to share if anybody wants to see them. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of New Mexico as Rob works through the summer.

Fire Spinning

Here are some recent pictures of Rob's cool new hobby. He's learning to spin fire. It's called Poi, and I think it comes from New Zealand. In this picture, he has blue LEDs attached to pieces of fabric that he is spinning in the back yard.
Here he has bits of kevlar soaked in kerosene attached to chains. He lights the little kevlar balls and then spins them in the same patterns and designs as the LEDs. I like the fire ones the best because they make an incredible noise as they swoosh through the air. And aren't they pretty?
In this one, he's letting little sparks fly out while he spins, so it looks like there are little teeny fires all around him. I took these pictures with a long exposure (between 4 and six seconds) so you can see the path the fire takes and you can also catch little glimpses of how Rob moves around too. It's cool to watch in person in real time, but it also looks really cool when you can see it slowed down like this.
Sparky!

How many is too many?

Hummingbird Cake

I made a cake for Whitney's birthday. The beautiful Whitney is turning 28 tomorrow and she deserves a cake. I'm not actually sending her the cake because her birthday is only one day away, she lives far from me, cakes don't do well in the mail, and she eats well and won't appreciate cake in her diet. Still, we will celebrate for her here in Tucson.

I made a hummingbird cake from my new favorite cookbook, Back to the Table.The basic premise of the cookbook is that we should all slow down a little bit and eat together more often. Especially in our little family of two, we sometimes have to remind ourselves that dinner is important time together and we should eat at the table. This cookbook has a slightly southern flair and is full of delicious recipes. I like the hummingbird cake recipe because it makes a kick ass cake, but also because it is sort of rough and simple. You don't use a mixer, so you can really make this one with someone else in the kitchen and still hear eachother's conversation. We haven't tried it yet, but when we do, we will think of Whitney and sing to her birthday.

Karen's trip

My awesome sister came to visit this week. We did so much, I hardly know how to blog about it all. The first day, we mostly hung around in Tucson. We made a big dinner and played at home. The next day, we went to Mexico and walked around. We went to a casino (We lost big). We drove into the desert to Gunsight Pass looking for the ghost town, Helvetia. We never made it to the town, but we did have a lot of fun trying to get there. We drove through huge copper deposits that had chunks of turquoise and collected lots of beautiful pieces. We also think we might have seen a UFO. Well, actually, we definitely did. There was a white, shiny object in the sky. It was flying, and it was unidentified (at least by us). weird, huh? Then I made Karen come to school with me and we walked around my office. It's in the stadium, so we walked out onto the field just for fun. Today we went to a spring training game and watched the Colorado Rockies beat the Angels. The day started out very cloudy, but it was warm (hot) and sunny by the end of the game and now we're all very full of sunshine and very tired. I think tonight we'll have a bonfire, and then we have to say goodbye to Karen. So sad. Maybe we can sabotage her alarm clock so she misses her flight? Maybe she could just stay!
It's hard living so far away from my family, but I love when they come to visit. They remind me that Tucson's not so bad and that no one is really more than a plane ride away from each other.

Archaeology Expo II

That darn video won't load.
Luckily, I have other videos from Sunday at the expo.
These little girls were waiting around to perform their dance. They do ballet folklorico.
They were giggling and gossiping and twirling their skirts around, being cool. I took a bunch of pictures of them, then they agreed to do some spinning for the camera.

Archaeology Expo

I haven't been giving the blog much attention lately. I've mostly been really busy with work. This has been my constant view for the last ten days...

So it was really nice that this weekend we had something fun to do. The weather was really beautiful ('cause this is Arizona in February) and it was nice to be outside and get some sun (you know, with lots of sunscreen and all). This is the lovely Arizona State Museum. This weekend they hosted the Archaeology Expo and R. was a volunteer. Basically it was like a little mini-fair with tents and people selling food and people giving archaeology demonstrations.

Here is R. and our friend Brandon showing people how to make stone tools. It's called flint-knapping. The guys practice making stone tools so that they understand how the tools that we find archaeologically were made. They also really like it. Here they are working with mostly chert and flint.
And, due to popular demand, here is a video! The famous R. is going to show the world how to knap. The video cuts off a little at the end, because I can't figure out how to make videos last longer than 60 seconds.

Coming up this week: a visit from my sister!!