Field School Diaries

As a start and a heads up, we're busy... We're making a, together with the Liki Foundation, we're making a podcast about life on excavations. And if it's okay with everyone, I'm just going to leave our voice recorder on. It doesn't mean that you have to be shy or not. say anything, it's just to capture the really cool and interesting stories that everyone brings to the dig. So I'm just going to pop this over here. Hopefully we'll get some of the sound. Welcome to Origin Stories Podcast.

This is Bukhara. This is Christine. And I am Monique. I'm Ray Payne, a producer here at the show. This month, we're doing something a little different. We're going to turn the microphone over to the Boon Place Field School. Bonplas Cave is located in South Africa, about a five and a half hour drive from Cape Town. Last year, there were 30 students who passed through the field school, and many of them generously agreed to record their lives over a six-week period.

This way, we could share the experience of how many young archaeologists are trained at field schools. They're led by Leakey Foundation grantee and Baldwin Fellow, Justin Pargeter. Morning everyone. It's quarter past seven. This is Justin Pargetter here. I am a paleoanthropologist. with an interest in human origins in southern Africa and understanding our species evolution in context of rapid climate change.

I'm standing at the base of the hill that leads up to Bornpas Cave, which is one of Africa's flagship Paleolithic sites. the sound that you hear in the background here this sort of high pitched bird calls are the sounds of swifts that travel at high speeds in and out of

these caustic openings with a roost and nest. They were also very special creatures to the prehistoric inhabitants of the valley. We have rock paintings in the area that depict humans transforming into swifts performing incredible feats of acrobatics and just illustrating how the ancient inhabitants of the valley revered these tiny creatures and their amazing ability

to co-inhabit caves and it's just quite a special thing to think of being able to watch a creature today doing these incredible maneuvers. and just imagining ancient inhabitants seeing exactly the same thing and sharing in that special connection with them. He wants to introduce himself. Is everyone okay with dogs? More is the dog okay with everyone?

To put things into perspective for you, this is one of the very few African-led and largely African-run projects on the continent. So you're part of history. Just soak it up. It's not easy to take six weeks out of your life and put everything on hold, but we'll make it worth your while. With that, we have supper at 6.30. Tomorrow, on site, I'll focus more on your site-specific jobs.

and we'll have a little session tomorrow explaining our excavation methodology, the million and one jargon terms that you've read. in the handbook that we have like no clue about right now but will become very familiar to you as well as some history and background to the site and our research questions. We have a happy birthday amongst us so could we all engage in a chorus of happy birthday Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday.

This is as Tendlin's Ondra, but I prefer being called Asi. Currently, I am walking up a hill and... climbing to where the cave was located. I'll be telling you about that, my roles and responsibilities I've been and how I've gone through my day and what experience have I had. So, yes, I'm a bit out of breath now, but it's the joys of this project.

My name is Bacara Sprayt and I am a PhD student at the University of the Witzvatersrand. Day two was the first day that we went into Buenplatz I couldn't wait to see this historical legend of a site so we arrived and got ready at about 6.45. I think we were a bit taken back by how steep the climb was up to the side but it was really beautiful.

once we got up there we kind of looked around and took in the greatness of the site which has been dug down to six meters you just see poles and sandbags everywhere across the entire site i was feeling a little bit nervous arriving here because you always nervous meeting new people But I was really happy that everybody was so welcoming and friendly.

It's been a great experience. It was also really great to see how many South Africans and other African nationals were participating in this field work because it's often unusual in South African archaeology to have so many African nationals on a team. I was quite anxious walking up to a site yesterday but today was a lot better.

even though i walked with two heavy backpacks i was a lot less shaky walking up to side today which is a very good sign for the rest of the month i hope it just keeps improving

My name is Monique Nickerk and I am an honor student at the University of South Africa. My current project focuses on shipwrecks and how archaeologists and treasure hunters have worked together in past or have not worked together in past Today was the first time I worked on the total station well the first time in two years I was a little anxious to get started Since it's been so long

Total Station, just as a recap, is capturing your points in a 3D space, your depth, your horizontal, and basically you're recording everything in 3D so that you can capture it in GIS. and you can find out where all your plotted finds are in space. It's quite fascinating to see how one layer would have.

like hundreds of pieces of material scattered on its surface while another layer just a few centimeters down has almost no materials only few micro faunal bones it can tell us a lot about when the site was occupied and possibly what the fires were used for because we have found lots of large very very large fires at the site as well as a few fires that could not have been more than three or four centimeters wide

Those were obviously fires that were only for two or three people, whereas one of the bigger fires that spans metres across the side floor must have been for quite a big... a group of people which is very uncommon for hunter-gatherers so it will be very interesting to see what comes of the micromorphic sampling to tell us a little bit more about the environment conditions at that time that would have pushed

hunter-gatherer communities to live in such confined spaces. One of the main research aims of the Boomplus excavation is to try and test whether major periods of cultural change in the archaeological record occur alongside shifts in paleo environments. So that's basically to answer the question, was a change in the things that people were eating and how they were moving the cause of changes in material culture? It's an age-old question in archaeology.

But it's a really complex one to answer, and it requires very special kinds of archaeological sites to address, and Bornplus Cave is one of those. Describing change on a... Paleolithic excavation like this where we're digging into a deep part of the human story is really challenging because it happens in such minute micro steps. I've been wanting to do this for a long time.

and everyone is getting along so well everyone is making jokes all the time it's always a blast i'd say my biggest challenge at the moment is probably still um to do with walking up and down to the side i did actually sleep today and scratch my back up a little, but I'll be good in a few days. And so eager for tomorrow to get back on the total station.

Hey everyone, it's quarter past eight in the evening at the end of a day of fieldwork. My body is quite sore and tired. It's a long day on site. exciting day had many really inspiring people come and visit us lots of really great finds in the dig and Now it's time to do the paperwork and make sure that all the data that we've collected is good. Try and correct any errors coming from our total stations.

and all the other data that we collect through our paperwork on a daily basis you know it all gets done at night when all you feel like doing is crashing and heading to bed and that's you know that warm shower is waiting for you but these things you don't have to be done on a regular basis and kept in check so you know we're we're staying positive we're keeping it going keeping the energy levels as high as we can and looking forward to another day tomorrow

Welcome back to the Origin Stories podcast. This is Bukhara and I am doing my daily check-in. So... before I arrived at Buenplatz I wasn't feeling very good and I recently did field work in Malawi so I decided I'd get tested for Bulhazia and Surprise, I had picked up Belazio while I was in Malawi. This didn't leave me feeling too great, but I didn't think it would affect me badly.

So I decided to go to the site and it was a bit rough. My body felt extremely sore and I had headaches throughout the day. I didn't feel very good. I wasn't focused. And I have been put on recorder duty. Which includes all the admin at the site opening closing stretch units and Making sure that all the photographs are taken and accounted for and just basically keeping everything in order and it was quite challenging to do with the way that I was feeling.

I'm so excited to be exploring South Africa one more day or many more days to come. And today it was a chilly morning or a chilly day in the cave. It was very, very interesting to see as one of our excavators, Nkosi, he just lightly brushed the wall to clean off any of the dust that may have fallen onto it while we were moving the bags around.

And as we brushed, we literally exposed the layers, which was so, so fascinating to see. I was almost mesmerized. And so yeah, right now, currently everyone is... very quiet and very focused on their jobs if you can hear the background in the background the generator is running um and basically

the reason why we need to have a generator on site is to have the lights on so the excavators can see clearly what they're excavating see all the color changes and everything and it's also to power the electronics um like uh the tablets for the gunners the tablet for the recorder the computer for the site tech aka the director and also the computer for the person that sorts out the material that has been collected.

This is Bakara and I'm going to talk about my daily check-in. I managed to take my medication last night and I feel a thousand times better. And this makes me extremely excited to be getting back into the field next week, Monday. I am so excited to not sit behind a computer and to actually get my hands dirty. Today I learned about how oily some of the layers are. This is something I've never really considered when we think about butchering on the ground or at different archaeological sites.

Obviously the animal's fat drips into the soil. When they put the soil samples into the water to be floated and sieved, a fat layer actually sat on top of the sample of the water. And this was present throughout the site for some of the layers. So a consistent line of a very oily layer when people or hunter-gatherers were using the site for butchering. making fires. This is very interesting because I never thought about how the soil can actually hold on to so much information.

Welcome back to the Origin Stories podcast. This is Parra and this is my weekend check-in. So I'm going to start with our Saturday. We woke up relatively early because I think our bodies have adjusted to the schedule that we've been keeping.

um we got up early and we got a message from justin saying that he had arranged for us to go into town which we were all super excited about it's about 28 kilometers away so a 20 to 30 minute drive so it's not too bad so of course we had to find south african foods that we could give to them We bought an ostrich egg and we walked around the shop cradling this ostrich egg and made some scrambled eggs and an entire loaf of french toast.

It was very exciting for the team to do this together. We had a lot of fun and made some great food with it. difficult it actually is to open one of these eggs especially compared to a chicken egg so we we found our knife and our rock and We then had to work out how to open this egg. So this is a chicken egg. And this is an ostrich egg. So when the bird team recently passed this on to us, that got our curiosity going and we began to think, just how do you crack an ostrich egg?

So we'd watched a few YouTube videos because we didn't want to mess it up or take off our fingers. And we managed to get the egg open eventually. and yeah we poured it out only to realize that one ostrich egg is equivalent to 24 chicken eggs so we were really hoping that everyone would be very hungry this morning because everyone was going to be eating ostrich egg.

Now we just have to figure out what we're going to do with the eggshell because there's a lot of contention over the fact that Grace wants to keep it as a container and we all want to see if we can make eggshell beads. from the egg and then this morning we started our day with check-ins Justin I think this really helped everyone just get pond a little bit more by sharing where they're struggling, where they're succeeding. So I'm glad that we had this.

this morning after this weekend i feel a lot more refreshed than i did on monday and i'm excited to see what this week holds

Morning everyone. It's 6.20am. It's a beautiful morning. Crisp, cool, but we can feel the comings of spring in the air. Seasons are changing and we're done with hopefully our frosty mornings for a little bit. Every little breakfast we have, every morning we rise, every bag we pack. Every water container we fill up for the site is a step towards our eventual goal of completing a successful field season.

You know, we get to site, we dig through tiny little layers of sediment, recover thousands of individual artifacts and each one of them is just a slow steady bit of progress. towards our goals. I really love field work for that.

It's been a little bit overwhelming remembering all the details and all the forms that we have to fill in, but we've tried to kind of... make notes for ourselves and streamline the system which I think is always so important when you are working on these things is finding ways to make it more efficient. Okay, so one of the joys of fieldwork is performing the million and one maintenance duties that's required to keep a dig running.

and especially in our modern age with all of our equipment that needs to be charged and running on electricity up at sites where there's often no electricity available. Archaeologists need to double up as mechanics and repair people. Life on a dig is about repairing things constantly and keeping them alive.

So that we can start another day tomorrow with a lovely functioning generator. This is Assi's diary. So this is... the evening reflection of my day and also my part of the past four weeks at Bon Plus. so first of all i'm just going to tell you how evenings are here so evenings we usually eat around half past six uh depending on whether the food is ready and

The food is always amazing, which is lovely. It's something I did not expect for a full trip. I thought, you know, would be like drying every night and sleeping in tents or all those in tents.

um fold works but um the nice thing about um excavating for this project is we have been living in a very lovely area with nice warm running water and good food so evenings are basically everyone gathering up together have some delicious nice food ketchup on the day and just everyone getting to know each other and later on we will be having a nice

sit around the fire session and everyone will introduce themselves and we'll talk about their experience, how their day was, how they are coping with the conditions and also how their jobs have been. I did not know what to expect besides what I read and so I was very pumped to see what was going to happen. So what is the best part of your job? That I can see where things are coming out and how they are situated with each other.

you get a sense of the excavation as it's evolving yes what's the worst part of your job my feet hurt so much so we haven't actually taken a look at the occupational and safety hazards of this workplace but the sandbags are a bit softer than concrete Yeah, definitely. I think so, yes. How can we improve your job experience? I don't know. I don't think I can sit and do this. It's just part of the job. Part of the job. Maybe frequent breaks and rests. I think so. Okay. All right.

um you're doing a fantastic job money thank you thank you you're the best thank you It's just been go go go a hundred percent of the time and it's been really tiring. I don't think my brain has been this sore in a long time.

here welcome to the final week everyone we made it how you're feeling yeah wow the resounding silence okay that probably just means that there's such an built up, pent up excitement inside of you that you just have no words for it, right? So Roundup this week is really just to make sure that we're touching base on a few key changes that are going to happen in the week.

For those of you who have not been through the final week of an excavation before, this is a critical week that includes closing the site. conducting photography of what we have dug already using specialist techniques that include our photogrammetry. Samples all need to be prepped.

and sent off to various labs either in south africa or around the world okay so this is a complicated process it involves a lot of cataloguing i know we're all tired and and thinking of home and thinking of something other than oatmeal and peanut butter but this is the final stretch okay so i need all of you all hands on deck all right And for your hard labor, you will be rewarded with a delicious pizza, pasta, wine, fruit juice meal in Odsodan on Wednesday night.

okay so can i hear a collective woohoo it's okay it's okay we could do better but we'll get there on wednesday Asi's diary two days before we leave for home and two days before the end of the season.

So, mornings at Bonplace, at least for the first full dexcation, are usually... chaotic in a good way because everyone is running around to get their breakfast ready, to get their lunch ready and to pack up everything they need for the day and to be mentally prepared. Fieldwork always just takes a lot out of you. But just a few points to look back on for this trip. I think that...

This was a really great experience. It was a fantastic team. It was well organized. You feel sad to be leaving such a great team. Everyone worked together, everyone made sure that things were smooth and happy and positive and I'm really happy to have met everyone on this team. I think that we proved just how capable an African team is, bringing people together, reaching these high standards that have been set for. And I think that's quite special. And it will be part of our lives forever.

So, taking the last walk down the mountain as this is the end of my time. This has been a really nice experience. And I've learned a lot from just from the side, from the people. It has been worth sweating and heavy breathing in the morning. going up the mountain, you know, and being dehydrated. You know, it's been worth the little arguments with the excavators when they all want to open and close straight units at the same time.

and it's been worth it. It has been an amazing experience. And yeah, that's it for me. This is closing day at Bohmplass cave. After 10 weeks of excavation, I stand in a closed up empty cave. with a huge season of work behind us and everyone ready to head on home. So it's been a blast sharing. this journey with you i hope that it's given you some insight into what fieldwork is about how teams come together to conquer the daily weekly

monthly goals of science in the field. And if you're a young paleo-scientist out there, you can do this. And I really hope that sites like Bornplatz become part of your journey in some way or another. Thank you. Thanks to Justin Pargeter and everyone at the Buenplace Field School for letting us be a part of their lives for six weeks. You can learn more about Justin, the Homer Project, and the Buenplace Field School in the show notes.

Keep an eye out for a bonus origin stories episode with Justin that will come out in a few weeks. And if you're a student interested in attending a field school like Buenplace, You may be eligible for the Leakey Foundation's Joan Cogswell Donner Field School Scholarship. Follow the link in your show notes for more information. Origin Stories is a project of the Leakey Foundation.

a nonprofit dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. Support this show and the science we talk about by going to leakyfoundation.org slash donate and make a donation of any amount. Origin Stories is audience-supported and is made possible by listeners like you, with additional funding from the Anne and Gordon Getty Foundation, Jeanne Newman, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund. This episode was produced by Meredith Johnson.

Taylor Cook, and myself. And sound designed by me, Ray Pang. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Theme music by Henry Nagel. And additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Rosevear. Thanks for listening.