It's interesting how history is always changing. You wouldn't think it would either. After all, what happened, happened. There is no changing an event after it has occurred. However, what we know of events changes frequently.
In a previous post I had mentioned Schliemann excavating at Mycenae. He also found and excavated Troy in Turkey. He was obsessed with this idea that Homer's tales weren't just myths and that they were based in fact. Other scientists at the the time, in fact most all of them, ridiculed him. Schliemann did not have the proper scientific training, they said. If anyone knew anything, these scientists decided, it would be them. Meanwhile, Schliemann just got the permission from the Turks and started digging. It took a long time to convince the scientific community, but he did. Minds were blown. Amazingly enough, he was also one of the first to start actually recording his excavations.
See, when you are on a dig, you are removing information from the ground. The process is irreparably destructive. Once done, there's no putting it back the way it was. This is why note-taking and measuring and map-making is so important. It helps you reassemble the big picture. Sure that gold necklace is super cool, and hey so is that pretty statue. Without taking notes you may never realize that the necklace had at one time been on the statue. So it's pretty amazing that someone outside of the so-called brilliant scientific community recognized this, even if he dug through the Bronze Age Homeric Troy.
No, this is not a Schliemann bio either. I've just been studying early Greek and Minoan history all semester and am reading more about it now, especially on Mycenae. He's just a good example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_fertile_cresent.svg
Cyprus is the island to the left

Now, something about history (technically pre-history since it's before written language) that particularly fascinates me is the advent of farming. Bone analysis has shown that people at the start of farming were not as healthy as their foraging counterparts. Low yields, a limited food base, intensive labor, and throw in a bad harvest or two and you've got a situation that quickly leads to malnutrition. It amazes me that people did it anyway. Granted, it was probably gradual, and possibly even accidental at first. But when we first become farmers, boy was it rough. And it spread so quickly. It started in the Levant about 9500 BCE, and spread. According to the latest research (click here for article on the research, it hit Cyprus only a couple hundred years after that. Archaeologically speaking, that's fast. Homo sapiens sapiens had been foraging for thousands of years, and our ancestors for hundreds of thousands (and millions) of years before that. So, thousands to a few hundred is a major change. This is why the introduction of farming is termed the Neolithic Revolution.
Our understanding of the Neolithic Revolution keeps pushing dates further back in history. Once cereals were domesticated, animals soon followed. The major exception to this is that the dog was domesticated beforehand, but that's a different matter entirely. This completely changed how we were living, and directly led to where we are now. It's such an exciting time in humanity's past, and the field is always revealing new information, new understandings of how we became us. Put simply, it's just so freakin' cool.

Living in the modern world, we are forced to look at the here and now. We have instant access to what our friends are thinking and doing, instant replay on the image we just took, instant communications around the globe. We complain when it takes more than ten minutes to get to the store, and have to reign in frustration at shipping delays. It's the bills, what's for supper, who's online and then streaming video on Netflix.
It makes us forget the enormity of time. Stop and watch the clock for five minutes. It feels like forever right? But chatting on the phone for five minutes with a friend feels like nothing.
Well that nothing is really the entirety of human existence in comparison to the rest of the universe. Looking at the few thousand years of civilization is a speck on the billions of years everything else has been around.
But think about the time that civilization has been around. That's what anthropologists do. We look back a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years and more at our history. We analyze, compare, and absorb the enormity of what humans have done in the time we've been on the earth. It's tough. There isn't always a lot of information to go on. In fact, there usually isn't a lot of information to go on. Seriously, we get excited about pottery and bone fragments. Oh yeah, and chipped stone, and that is generally smaller than a quarter.
But when we look at the modern world, with the emphasis on the current and the latest whatever, we have to put it into perspective. It can be really hard too. After all, this is where we live. As absorbed as we can be in other cultures and time periods, we live in the here and now. Bills are important to us, as are our friends. We need to eat too.
Looking at the world and its goings-on, though, and we can lament that taxes are so high, and that governments don't really listen. But we can look back and see that economic crises have occurred before. We can see that there have been revolutions, deaths from war and plague, entire cultures completely wiped out, all in the last hundred years. However, we can say that at least of the last five thousand years. And guess what? We're still around. We'll just be able to write this all down. Now we can think about it, and hopefully learn from it.

Well, now it's down to the nitty gritty of things. I've started my modern Greek lessons (I can say the boy/girl/man/woman is on the horse, beside the dog, inside/on top of the plane- not that I know how that will actually help me...), I've gone through the syllabus, and have started reading the textbooks and the field manuals. It's like I'm back in school, although this feels as if it requires more dedication because there isn't a class schedule. I'm fascinated by it though. In class we learned that this bronze knife found in Mycenae was made out of bronze, and inlaid with gold, silver, and niello. Here's a picture of it.

Here's a zoomed out view with similar styles.

The silver and gold inlay is pretty obvious. The bronze is the corroded outer edge. Since it isn't an element it tends to degrade much more rapidly. The dark smooth backing to the inlay is what we learned as niello. According to either more recent research or not-so-widely known research, it isn't. It is a black bronze alloy with gold and silver (Mycenae: Agamemnon's Capital, by Elizabeth French). Which really just goes to show you that you need to take even what professors say with a grain of salt. Or several. Archaeology is a constantly evolving field, so information (in theory at least) can change, sometimes rather quickly. Schliemann knew when he excavated that Grave Circle A within the citadel at Mycenae was of a time period contemporaneous with Agamemnon, but it's actually a lot earlier. The Treasury of Atreus, that Schliemann knew was not a tomb (it is- it's called a tholos tomb), is far more likely to have housed Agamemnon's bones.

Treasury of Atreus

Ah well, that's enough of a break. Back to studying for this current armchair archaeologist!

Five more weeks and I will be sleeping on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic right now. I'm excited, nervous, scared a bit. It's a lot like working on my wedding. Months of planning, finding money, figuring the details, buying the details and then a day of excitement. Granted, this will be six weeks of work and not a day filled with cake and drinking, but for all the planning that's gone into it on my end, it feels like I should be going overseas for at least a semester or two.
Really, jumping into this was probably one of the scariest things I've ever done. I mean, really, how often do you say, okay, I'll spend over $6,000 and go almost two months without getting paid? That should be fine. It definitely will not wreak havoc on my finances and ensure I lose plenty of sleep leading up to this adventure. (By the way, thanks honey for making me become a penny-pincher.) But somehow it's all worked out. I was accepted into UCARE, an undergraduate research program at UNL, which is covering about a third of the costs. I got a scholarship. My family's pitched in. Then, just today, I found out I'm getting more grant money from the 2011-12 school year. Okay, well that covers the cost of the trip AND what I would have made working over the summer. It seems as if the universe has decided it does not want me in Nebraska for the entirety of the summer. Alright, I'll go with it. This is definitely something I can dig.
Too corny? Okay, you're right. That was definitely a bit much. There have been, however, several glasses of wine already and I like corny. :)