The Study of Dead Things

I can be indecisive to the point of making other people help me pick what to order from menus or throwing my hands up and pleading ignorance when it comes time to choose a restaurant. But when I know what I want, I really know. I’ve known since I was eight or so that I wanted to become and archaeologist. In spite of my family’s best efforts and their many sleepless nights that’s still my intended career.

Originally I didn’t want to do an honors thesis. Senior year is supposed to be fun and less stressful, right? But then I saw the dog burial. I was working on my internship, analyzing ceramics and pulling together information from different sources for a report. I noticed that there was a dog burial on the site I was dealing with and asked my advisor. He told me that there were a bunch of them in the area, that no one had really worked with them and that he had no idea what it meant. I wanted to learn more, so I did some background research and had trouble finding anything relevant. I realized it would take a lot more work to figure out what was going on and that a thesis would be the perfect excuse for doing all that research.

I went to my advisor and asked him about honors theses. He’s the kind of person who always had a thousand things on his mind at the same time. Right there he spouted off a bunch of outlines of possible theses. I have a feeling that most professors have some secret file ferreted away that’s filled with their ideas for different research topics they would like to see some unwitting undergrad slave away at for a few months. I smiled and nodded, looked thoughtful and said ‘uh-huh’ a lot. Then I told him what I wanted to do. That’s not to say I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying, I was. And I could see the value in that course of research. I just wanted to do something else.

He seemed a bit surprised, but thought it over and said that there was probably enough for me to do a thesis on. So I had a topic and my professor’s support, the next step was doing more background research and writing a proposal to convince the Anthropology department that I had enough to write a worthwhile paper.