As some of you may be aware, yes I’m in school. I’m hoping to finish soon, but we’ll see. Right now it’s not looking till next fall (fall of 2006). Life keeps throwing me curve balls lately. Currently I’m in a PhD program for anthropology/archaeology.

Those who have followed my soap page may know that over the past year or two I did a lot of traveling for school. I was visiting museums around the northeast to collect my data. I am almost finished with that. I have one more museum to hit and basically finish up some paper work, but I’ve been having problems getting them to commit to when I can come in :(. Until then I’m dedicating myself to analyzing and writting what I can, but lately finding that time has been hard.

As for what I’m doing in school? I’m studying the burial rituals of a select group of Native Americans. No, I’m not excavating graves. In fact that is no longer done. What I am doing is examining artifacts from older graves that are currently in museums and awaiting return to the tribes. Before I’m criticized by anyone, yes I have the tribes permissions to do this and they are interested in the results of my study.

What am I looking for? In a nutshell things that archaeology is sometimes unable to tell us about a group of people such as information on their religious beliefs, their beliefs about gender, about coming of age, about status and about group affiliation (ie clans or family organization).

It’s a complicated project involving a whole lot of statistical programs, which is the part I’m currently working on. Anyone who has done statistics knows how fun they can be!

Dustin