Early December

Caving

After our American caving career took off with the trip to the Lava Beds National Monument for Thanksgiving, Will and I went on another trip to a cute, little town surrounded by little lumps of gold and big trees: Volcano. Anyone interested in the trip report can check it out on the Spekul blog; it is written by John Tinsley who was our trip leader (yes, we have official trip leaders in the States!) that day. It was on the 6th of December which is "Sinterklaas" (to be translated by, but not to be confused with "Santa Claus") and one of the caves we visited that day was called - you'll never guess - Santa Claus ... because it happens to have a chimney! We also visited Mushroom Cave and Pearl Cave (very briefly) and had a nice dinner with the other guys @ Giannini's.

Oh and Will and I both got a GPS for Christmas, which arrived a bit earlier on the 5th of December so that we could already start experimenting with it on our Volcano trip ... ;-)

On the 12th (a Friday, so Will couldn't make it ...) Bruce and Pat (aka Pa & Ma Lava Beds) invited me to go sea cave mapping with them, Beej and Rich near the Cliff House and Sutro Baths in Northwestern San Francisco. The tide was extremely low that day, so a good opportunity to map some of the newly discovered sea caves the month before. We mapped one of them, but could not do the other one - baptised Brigadoon, alluding to the story/musical as well as to its sandy nature - due to the high level of sand. Winter storms should have taken the sands from the San Francisco shores to deposit it more to the South before bringing it back over the Summer, but a lack of storms this year (did anyone say something about climate change?) is filling up all the caves rather than freeing them.

The day after, we went to the SFBC Christmas party, which traditionally involves a pot luck dinner, gift exchange and auction and was not any different this time. Needless to say that we had a great meal involving turkey, ham, some great side dishes and home made beer. We had a lot of fun with the gift exchange game and collected loads of money for the grotto's bank account ... Will² graciously had us stay over at his place that night, gave us a tour of the Stanford campus the day after and introduced us to yummy dim sum.


The museum

The second week of December, I started working as a volunteer in the Hearst Museum for Anthropology and Archaeology. I had come across the museum website by chance and found out they were looking for volunteers, so I applied ... I'm working there three days a week now on three different collections. The museum has more than 3 million artefacts in store spread over four buildings and a lot of that material is still terra incognita ...

There's the North American Archaeological and Ethnographic Map Collection with old USGS (i.e. standard topographical maps from the US Geological Survey, with or without archaeological sites from previous surveys marked on them) and non-standard maps in it (i.e. maps that have been made for certain publications). Jonathan is in charge here and I (and other volunteers) help him with the cataloguing and making the inventory of the maps.

Natasha, who is Collections Manager for North America, needs assistance with the physical inventory of the California archaeological collections which means checking the object's name of record with the physical object, as well as verifying the storage location and archaeological site of the object. It's amazing to see how in geographically separated cultures like those of the Middle East and those of North America people came up with such similar tools!

One day a week, I'm also helping Paolo out. He's actually the only archaeologist working for the museum, the others are all anthropologists - although Natasha has worked as an archaeologist for years. He's in charge of the Archaeological Collection which contains material from all over the world. I got to inventory lithic material from some of the famous French Palaeolithic sites and pottery and stone tools from North Africa, but they have stuff from all over the world that has - in the past - somehow ended up at the museum one or the other way ...

Besides this, I've also been to one of their other storage units where I've helped with the relocation of an amazing collection of audio tapes from the early 20th century containing interviews with native Americans in languages that are now extinct and the unpacking, dusting and relocation of an enormous anthropological collection of basketry from the Far East dating to the first half of the 20th century. A lot to do there!

Other stuff

Before going to Philadelphia, we had a Christmas party at home with the house mates. Andy & Steph got us a real Christmas tree, Hilary & Taylor had the decorations, cats and dogs were dressed up properly, Hilary and Steph as well, we had a yummy meal together and a funny gift exchange in which a home made monster was bestowed upon us!

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