Kivalicious!

Have I ever mentioned how much I love my job?  Well, I'm going to say it again.  I have the coolest job ever.  It's dirty, and it's exhausting, and it definitely doesn't pay the big bucks... but it makes me super damn happy.

I mean, seriously.  Look what I helped to dig up last week:

This is a keyhole-shaped kiva.  It probably dates to somewhere around A.D. 1000.  (A kiva is a subterranean ceremonial structure- they are still used in modern day Pueblos and exist for more than a thousand years into the archaeological record in this area.)  This is has a 50cm-tall deflector stone still standing in front of the hearth, a completely intact venilator shaft with nice stone-lined walls, and stone pilasters that would have helped to hold up the roof (which was removed when the structure was no longer in use).  Half of a whole pot sat on the floor, along with some metates and a few other small artifacts.  If you're not one of us, then you might not know that this is something that most southwestern archaeologists would love to excavate.  It was beautiful.

Then there was this beauty, which was found while we excavated a late Basketmaker III pithouse:

(It's a huge pipe... or, as I argued, maybe a prehistoric netti pot.)

And this:

And THIS!!:

I have seen uglier sandals than this one in museums displays.

This is not typical, and none of these are probably things that I will encounter on a regular basis in my career.  Then again, I said the same thing back earlier this summer when I was digging up whole pots and burned corn by the bucketful.  Awesome stuff seems to simply be falling out from under my trowel lately.

(Full disclosure here:  I helped to excavate the keyhole-shaped kiva in the first photo, but I was not actually the person who found either the axehead nor the giant ceramic pipe in the second and third photos.  I did, however, excavate the amazing sandal in the fourth photo, and also personally found a couple of smashed pots on the floor of a pithouse and some broken basket fragments.)