Mushy Monday

I'm a bit slow getting into my Monday morning. A number of intellectual pursuits took over my brain. I saw a great video on the weekend - an episode of Time Team, the British archeology show, where they did some rather small scale digging on Bodmin Moor, a place my SO and I visited a couple of years ago and really enjoyed.

Picture a barren landscape strewn with obvious markings of neolithic age all around you. As you walk the land and scale the two tallest 'peaks' in England's southwest, you quickly end up with a huge basket load of questions.

Upon return, I found that there aren't a lot of answers out there. Then layer on top of it all structures you can only see from the air (e.g. Google Earth) and you get a bunch of more q's. Oh yeah, and the whole Arthurian legend is based on the area.

What's more surprising is that the area has been so lightly excavated. I'd have thought that any self respecting University in the neighbourhood (which for Canadians means all of the UK) would be out there digging a spot every semester. I'd have though that every stone bigger than a loaf of bread would be in a computer model somewhere and we'd be running plausable structure probabilities out of them. (Hmmm... has anyone thought of doing that? Maybe a thesis in there for someone).

But the questions persist, and I feel very drawn to the place. As research goes, the concept of archeological exploration is a challenging one for me. I could easily imagine consuming my entire lifetime with it, yet the payoff potential is pretty much zero. I'd have to live in a hovel, blowing my pennies on replacement shovels and canned food, but would be pretty engrossed the whole time.

Oh well, meanwhile my other research interests await. With them there is a possibility of both intellectual accomplishment and big payoff that changes the way people do things on a daily basis. That's pretty rewarding. And who knows, if that were to work out, it might give me the ability to buy a little chunk of land off Bodmin moor and set about digging up my garden.

Researchinator dreams of dirty fingernails, a sore back, and a tray full of pottery shards.