Landslide...(Attempts to ruin a young girl's archaeological dreams)

(Pre-script: This post is meant to be viewed as the song "Landslide" by the Dixie Chicks plays...go down to the playlist and click it on, then come back and commence reading...I'll wait...)

(...waiting...)

If you ever wish to destroy a young girls archaeological dreams, here are a few tricks you can try:

1.) Tell her that archaeologists just dig up old bones, so she must really like old bones...Um, yeah, WHAT-EVAH.

2.)When taking elementary age kids on a field trip to see some really old house or building, make sure that the whole thing has been restored and rebuilt to look like how it would have looked back in the day...and then keep the not-yet-restored-still-in-it's-original-state-part off limits. Yeah, that will for sure discourage the archaeologist heart of a young girl. Once, our class was in an old "original" house that had to be rebuilt for structural issues, (again, WHAT-evah.) But the CEILING was still the original ceiling, so what did I do? I just stared at the ceiling the entire time we were there.

3.)When teaching Archaeology at, say, Junior College, make sure to come up with something so dull it might not even be archaeology. Y'all, can you just picture with me for a minute my excitement at the thought of a taking a class on a topic I had been dreaming about my entire life? Of course what I imagined we would study was Ancient Eygpt, Mesopotamia, The Discovery of the Actual Walls of Jericho, The Discovery of Noah's Arc, in other words, actual archaeological things. Instead, this particular class was taught by a woman who thought we should study Californian archaeology. Folks, isn't that an oxymoron? To quote myself from two posts ago, "California isn't exactly known for it's ruins." What we "learned" in her class is that there are rocks that have been found that are shaped in such a way as to indicate that they could have possibly been used as tools by ancient Native Americans. I'm not even talking about arrowheads or spears. I'm talking about common rocks. Y'all, if I had a passion for rocks, I would have signed up for Geology class.

Fortunately this is not the end of the story. Though all of the above cruel tricks were employed on me at some tender young age or other, and though I yes, did, find them discouraging, my love for archaeology will always, shall we say, Stand The Test Of Time. That is my own little archaeology joke. You can rest assured that I will be laughing about it for the rest of the day.

-XOXO,

P.S. If you ever want to become a person who enjoys country music, concider the Dixie Chicks version of "Landslide" as your gateway country song. A lot of artists have covered this particular song, but I find the Dixie Chicks version to be particularly pretty...I don't embrace the entire genre of country music, because some of it is just plain dumb (there, I said it) but there are certain country songs that are jewels, and I will sing them all day long, and very loudly.