Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Another one!?!

I know what you're thinking, "do I really need to waste more of my precious time reading another archaeology related blog?". My honest answer to you is, no, you don't. But let me qualify the purpose of this blog before you get all hasty with that little X icon in the top right/left corner of your browser window.

The purpose of this blog is to comment or give my opinions on current events, issues, recent papers, my experiences, etc., in archaeology and other branches of archaeology related science. The big difference here is that this blog is being written from an archaeology student's perspective...ie. mine. Hmmm...that seemed like a much stronger argument in my head. Well let's look into this a little bit further, what can a student's perspective on archaeology provide? First, endless ideas and such for you, the reader (who in some instances may be further along in the field, or have ideas and opinions that are maybe a little less nascent than some of mine), to criticize (constructively please?). Second, an idea of what it's like to be a student of archaeology in this day and age, especially since I am currently finishing my undergrad at McGill University, which has a very good archaeology program despite having quite a small archaeology devoted faculty within anthropology (the key to McGill's successful archaeology program is the way it treats it's undergrads, like junior colleagues, instead of intellectual inferiors), and will be heading off to Grad school in the fall...exactly where I'm going has yet to be determined though. I know a lot of you reading this were probably students very recently as well, but things change pretty damn fast, and really, can you ever really have too many opinions? (the obvious answer to that is yes, you can have too many opinions, but let's just pretend the answer is no). It will also give you the chance to see how blogging increases one's tendency to use run on sentences (or discuss entirely different subjects in parentheses), especially those of us who are already prone to do so when writing...*whistles and looks around inconspicuously*.

Anyway, so this blog will give you the (unique?...maybe?) perspective of an archaeology student who's interests are largely North American Hunter-Gatherer archaeology, GIS, spatial analysis, quantitative methods, simulation and modelling, evolutionary ecology, and human behavioural (yes spelled with an 'ou', my spelling will always remain Canadian) ecology. Read it. You won't be disappointed. Well, at least I don't think you will.

The first real post will be up in a few weeks though...seeing as it is exam/final paper season, and those grad school applications aren't going to write themselves.