things I have seen adult, professional archaeologists do, on the clock

archaeologysucks:

kyidyl:

shit-archaeologists-say:

archaeologysucks:

raedusoleil:

archaeologysucks:

• Eat a worm.
• Chant “EAT IT! EAT IT! EAT IT!”
• Launch water balloons across the site at the portable toilet when someone was using it.
• Back the work vehicle up against the door of the portable toilet to trap someone inside.
• “Gently” tap the crew vehicle in front of them with the bumper of their vehicle.
• Discreetly vomit in the bushes due to hangover.
• Intentionally run over roadkill while laughing maniacally.
• “Moon” the work camera.
• Topless Day
• Throw a co-worker into the bog of water-screening run-off sludge.
• Flint-knap right next to a test unit.
• Chase one another around with a dildo they found (and then bag it as an “artifact” and send it back to the lab).
• Draw a smiley face on their hardhat in their own blood.
• Write off a shovel probe because there was a horse standing on the spot that wouldn’t move.
• Yell out, “I peed on a snake! :D”
• Have a shovel fight.

I can’t help but imagine some hapless screenwriter who has been slogging along and hates their script, and reads this, and suddenly trashes the old script and starts working on an archaeology rom-com because what they just read was the written version of an epic trailer for just such a film.

Yes. Good. Go do it.

For the record, I’ve heard second-hand stories about archaeologists doing many much worse and/or more disgusting things than this, and I’ve seen them do way worse things off the clock.

These kinds of shenanigans tend to be symptomatic of larger crews and longer projects. The more archaeologists you put together in one place for the greater span of time, the worse their behavior gets. We are a bad influence on each other.

Can confirm about the “long periods of time” bit. When I started my job everyone was relatively professional, but there was jokes and stuff. 

6 months in to the year and a half project things started to devolve and we’re saying shit like “can we not talk about cannibalism again” and “stop changing the desktops backgrounds to weird Nicolas Cage photoshops”

Every archeologist I’ve ever known has been a bit…off. theres something about the field that makes people weird.

It’s because we are all giant nerds who spend way too much of our time in remote locations, in the company of other archaeologists, and with few responsibilities (if we are living on the road). We tend to forget about social norms. We are a terrible influence on each other.