Last week I got an email, well a mass email to many people on a list, from a guy who works at one of the museums I did a lot of my field work at. He’s arranging a session at an upcoming archaeology conference to be held in November and was hoping those he emailed would be interested in presenting at it. It deals with re-examining museum collections in order to gain new information on the region we all work in. Well I thought to myself it would give me a great deadline to finish school by the fall (or get really close), so I filed it in my school work email folder to think about it. As usual when I file anything in a folder other than my inbox, I forgot about it.

Yesterday I got an email from the guy asking if I had received his email and asking if I would participate, he thinks my work would add to the session. I agreed, figuring a November deadline for this paper would be what I need to turn the draft of my dissertation into my adviser. Well as it turns out, I may have to have the paper in as early as September. YIKES! That is cutting in close. So now I really have to throw myself into school work. Like I said though, this is just what I need to really get me working. Fortunately I have four straight days of no soaps coming up to do just that.

I don’t talk too much about my dissertation topic here because I don’t know how much is exactly wise to reveal since it’s not done. For the curious, my dissertation topic is the burial rituals of a select group of Native Americans in a certain geographic region in the Northeast. I’m reanalyzing the works of past archaeologist to try and gain new insight into the people I’m studying. My research involved traveling to many museums across the Northeast to examine collections they had, some going back to the 1890s, before they were set to be repatriated to the Native tribes. Right now I’m working on the statistical analysis of all my collected data as well as the writing of the dissertation.

Dustin