An Everyday Mormon

If I could describe the work of a field archaeologist, I would have to let a few people down and say that what I’ve been doing hasn’t been like Indiana Jones at all.  No clues leading us to ancient relics or antagonistic forces trying to sabotage our projects or kill us.  Instead, I would use the movie Holes to describe my experience, except for I’d have to add a little bit more of us systematically digging.  I don’t know why they didn’t just use drones and aerial photography to help find out where the buried treasure was instead of having a bunch of delinquent teens dig holes for them but I get the builds character part of it.  We also don’t go and dig five foot wide and five foot deep holes but instead take a sectioned off piece of land and then clear the dirt off layer by layer and then sift through the dirt to see what things we can find.  Then we wash them, whether it is Nabataean pottery or Islamic beads, and then analyze them. The tomb by my new ...

One thing I hate more than anything in the world are the toilets that consist of just a whole in the ground that you have to crouch over to use.  I thought that I would only encounter them during my two year mission in Japan but I have come face to face with one here.  There are traditional Western toilets everywhere but there is one crouhcer in our house.  I tried to avoid it until the other day when I was taking a shower.  I had draped my pants over the wall separating the shower from the crouching toilet and as soon as I had done so I heard a thud.  I go to look at the crouching toilet in the sectional over and find that my pen had fallen from my pants pocket and landed straight into the hole in the ground with fecal matter and urine.  You may have won this one crouching toilet but I will get you next time! Things have been progressing on our site.  We are excavating an ancient Nabataean water collecting pool that would store runoff water near ...

It took only about 24 hours in total to get from the Salt Lake City airport to our beds in the Amman Airport Hotel.  It only took one day to transverse half of the globe, something Magellan would be pretty impressed by.  The thing that I am impressed by about the world I’ve learned through traveling is that every airport looks alike.  The Amman Airport, while no JFK, could definitely pass for a lower end airport somewhere in the middle of nowhere in America, minus all the Arabic written above the English words on signs.  The poster for McDonalds looked pretty much like American advertising and the hotel had the distinct feel of most motels I had stayed in on our family trips, including the inclusion of a continental breakfast. When we woke up the next morning and road in trucks and buses to Petra, the World Heritage Site where we are now digging up, I finally got to find out what the term “Third World Country” meant.  It wasn’t so much the armed military me...

This past semester I haven’t been quite faithful to posting on this blog.   Part of the reason is simple human nature of slacking off after awhile of working on something.  I think the main reason has been this past Winter semester.   What I thought would be a more relaxed semester turned out to be quite a hectic one.   My Basic Media Productions class turned out to be the main time guzzler.   Film projects turned out to be something that took me hours to prepare, shoot, and edit, which I had to do all by myself.   I learned a lot and learned specifically that film is not an easy course or an easy hobby. Lights, camera, action actually has a lot behind it.  Just ask the lighting guy who spends over an hour to get the lighting bouncing off of the actor’s face just right for a 30 second scene.  Just ask any of my fellow students how many problems they had trying to get their camera to co-operate.  Weeks of writing and adapting scripts, get...