Zany Education.

Bones smell icky.

I've spent the last few days working with the famed Dr. Salima Ikram to learn the tricks of the zooarchaeological trade.

This means that I've been elbow deep in plastic bags full of dirt, dirt, dirt, and random chips of bone that may or may not be from one animal, that may or may not be from the same species, may or may not be from the same millenium, and may or may not actually be yet more dirt.

My job consists basically of figuring out which amorphous blobs are dirt, and which are bone, then sorting them into piles based on... well, the way Dr. Ikram describes it is "It's just like Sesame Street: which of these things is like the others, or not?"

Furthermore, the bones may or may not be from Sais, a delta village that served as the (non-Nubian) capital of Egypt in the 26th dynasty. And the bones' presence in Cairo may or may not be with the approval of the SCA (Supreme Council of Antiquities). Ahem. Surely a mere minion such as I am not privy to such details.

I'm supposed to be working my way up to actually identifying what animals each bone is from (in the cases that such an identification is possible), and which particular bone each fragment is from. The only thing I've had much success with so far is teeth--of course, as anyone who dinks with dead bits can tell you, those are the only particularly readily identifiable...anything.

It's been really interesting working with Dr. Ikram. She's--an intimidating lady, to say the least, but as one might not know from watching her on Nova or the Discovery Channel she has a very intense personality... she swears a lot, and has a real flair for the dramatic.

Some typical quotes:
"*muttered under breath* Oh, holy fuck. That's disgusting. ew. ew. ew. ew." (in reference to the really tiny, hideously unidentifiable bone bits)

"First, we need to let this girl [me] into my office. She's going to play with corpses." (addressing the guest speaker for our class)

"Don't touch that. Stop stroking it. ...Sex fiend!"(addressing a wayward tourist at the Egyptian Museum who couldn't keep his hands off a sarcophagus)

Anyway, so far we mostly have bits of cow. Bos taurus. I'm seriously evaluating my desire to be a zooarchaeologist. Such a thing was never particularly high on my list of life goals, and now, hm.

Uf, the smell. x(