Lick It
June 26, 2013
In the basement of the excavation's study center sits a small group of highly educated individuals everyday from 2-5pm… licking rocks. I recently was drafted into the flotation sorting team for the excavation and there are some interesting ways to distinguish materials. First of all, flotation is an archaeological technique that separates dirt from rocks and organic materials and allows archaeologists to examine the organic materials and leftover rocks. My group is examining the leftover rocks. Some of these rocks are charcoal, others are bone, shell, semi-precious stones, and even gold! One of my fellow bone-lickers found a tiny fleck of gold today buried in a piece of mud brick. But for the most part the leftover rocks are just rocks, or rather, sand and pebble sized rocks.
By now you’re probably wondering why I keep bringing up licking things. Why should this group of educated archaeology nerds sit around licking things? Sounds like something an idiot would do! Well, as I learned this week, bone sticks to your tongue and the lick test is an easy way to tell if something is or is not bone. One of the most common answers to “Is this bone?” is “Did you lick it?” Sounds gross, but I ingest so much dirt during the day while excavating that a little more doesn’t really make a difference. At this point I’m just wondering how many ancient animals I’ve licked and thinking about the other ancient Greeks licked them before me. Talk about getting up close and personal with the ancients!
Not only is the bone licking quite ridiculous, but watching us sort through our “clean” dirt is even more insane. Each of us has a large pile of dirt (well, really small rocks and other junk – i.e. clean dirt that has been floated/flotted… I’m not really sure what the past tense of the verb “flot” is – I should inquire) on a lunch tray. The seven of us are crowded around a small table as we sift through our piles with a paintbrush and occasionally pluck out interesting pieces with a tweezers to save and catalog. To an outside observer, I’m sure we look absolutely nuts.
After three hours of sifting through piles of microscopic objects and licking various rocks we all get a bit loopy. When 5 o’clock hits it’s time to pack up our dirt, random licked finds, and head down to the beach for another kind of floating. Whatever weird tasks you have to do at work, remember me licking rocks for three hours a day as you perform your own ridiculous task and have a good laugh.
