An Archaeological Wish List for the New Year

Although there is something to be said for using the trowel-sharpening ritual to rest and ponder the wonders of the world, my trowel never fails to become dull right in the middle of excavating the best feature in the world.

Sadly, no one has invented a trowel that never dulls, so we'll all just have to keep on sharpening them.

Unless you have juggled excavation equipment over a barbed wire fence, across a newly plowed field, over a small muddy creek bed and through a patch of nettles, you haven't really done excavation at all.

Still no hunk of wood and metal that weighs that little; although at least one company promises their version is 'six pounds lighter'

A PC laptop that is sturdy, sealed to the elements, runs Windows 95 without crashing, costs under $1500, and weighs less than 10 pounds.

Who knew? What with Blackberries and i-Phones, even Mr. Spock would be set and at bargain (gulp) prices.

A complete GIS satellite station, with a beacon-correcting element, fits in a backpack and costs under $10,000.

Well, I may have been onto something, but handheld GPS units are becoming commonplace. No backpack necessary, and for far less money.

Wouldn't you just love to spend hours looking at every single one of those individual statues? It would be a perfect web site.

Well, there hasn't been one with the detail I'd like, but I did put my own website on the terracotta soldiers together.

A searchable bibliographic database of all the archaeological books and articles ever published.

It turns out that although searchable databases are rife on the Internet these days, the literature in archaeology is found in numerous places, so what I was really asking for was a database of everything. Today, with a little work you can find articles on just about everything, and if you are willing to pay $25-50, you can even get them downloaded to your own p.c.

You can always pick out the female archaeologist in any crowd of women; she's the one with the horrible skin and the blotchy tan.

There simply isn't a good answer to this, because everything involves slapping chemicals onto your delicate features. The only sane alternative in the field is to wear lightweight clothing, including a long sleeved shirt, long-legged pants, and a hat.

To convince one more archaeologist that putting a site on the web is good for public relations and good for science.

This has succeeded to my wildest dreams; most importantly in the blog-o-sphere, which has just blossomed with project blogs on ongoing archaeological sites.

Far too many of our archaeological sites are being looted by people who don't care about history or prehistory. If we can get those collectors who *do* care to report what they find, we will be better off.

The collecting community is still pretty much at odds with the academic community, although a number of organizations on both sides are attempting to work together.