Category: Personal
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Well…I Submitted My PhD Thesis During a Global Pandemic. Now What?
Last Friday, at around 4pm, I officially submitted the final draft of my PhD thesis for my examiners. And I feel…very not excited. Mostly relieved. Definitely anti-climatic, especially as someone who has watched friends in the past joyfully take photos of themselves on campus with their giant volumes of text, all bound and ready to
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Archaeology in a Time of Crisis
“When future archaeologists stumble upon the archaeological record from this period, the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020, what will they find…?” There’s probably dozens of archaeologists out there with something like that sitting in their drafts. Hell, I spent a solid 5 minutes considering it myself before promptly shutting it down. “Not everything has to be
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Recognising that Recognition is Not Enough: Confronting the Worst of Archaeology
A few months ago, I read Angela Saini’s newest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science. It is a really thorough examination of the ways in which race science continues to pervade our politics and research today, and I would recommend it to those (specifically, white scientists) who may not be familiar with its history
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Digging While Depressed: Struggling with Fieldwork and Mental Health
This post will be focused on dealing with mental illness, so if issues related to depression and anxiety are triggering to you, please feel free to skip today’s blog. Take care of yourself. A few weeks ago, I was in Scotland doing fieldwork for the first time in years. Prior to this trip, I was
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When the Stress of the PhD Meet The Anxiety of the Visa: On International Postgraduate Studies, Financial Anxieties, and Everything Else That Scares Me
This week I had scheduled a different blog post to be published, but I felt as though it didn’t seem right to not write about something that has been on my mind lately. And by “lately”, I mean “for the past few years”. As many, if not all, of you know by now due to
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American Stonehenge, or the Time that My Friends Took Me on Holiday to Watch My Head Explode
I’ve lived in England for nearly three years now, and yet I have never been to Stonehenge. I feel like that’s a bit embarrassing as an archaeologist, but I just never made the time for it so far! That said, I have been to American Stonehenge. Yeah, that’s a thing. According to the owners of
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On Imposter Syndrome, or What Are We Even Doing?!
With my transfer report coming up within the next month or so, things have been pretty stressful over here. Unfortunately I find myself not having fun poking around things in the lab, but pouring over drafts and corrections and trying to synthesize my transfer report*. So I figured this might be a good time to
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On Getting Through Bad Days, or How I Almost Set My Flat On Fire
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about mental health in academia. I didn’t really expect to write another post in a similar vein so soon, but I had a bad day today. As always, if this sort of content makes you feel uncomfortable, please skip! I don’t mind. I occasionally get hit
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On Getting Started in the Field: An Origin Story
After getting asked about hidden treasures and dinosaurs, the next most common question is, “So how did you even decide to become an archaeologist?” It’s pretty simple, really. After I first saw the Indiana Jones films as a kid, I immediately went into my backyard and dug a 1 foot deep hole. I then proceeded
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On Zooarchaeology, or Looking at Dead Animals All the Time
When you’re an archaeologist, you become very aware of how little the general public knows about what archaeologists do. Fair enough, of course…most people conjure up the image of Harrison Ford (at his peak handsomeness) when they think of archaeologists. It’s not uncommon to get the same sort of questions at the annual family gathering:
Animal Archaeology 