FAQs

So, when people hear that my husband and I have moved to South Africa, they invariably ask 2 questions, in this order:

Why are you guys going over there? 

and

So, what are YOU going to do?

Today, I'll tackle the first and answer the second soon.

As much as I wish I could say that moving to South Africa was a capricious whim brought on by wanderlust and not knowing what to do with our buckets of money, the real reason we are here is because of this dude:

Aaron, testing out his new microscope shortly before leaving Minnesota.

My hubby is an archeologist.  He is working on his PhD at the University of Minnesota, and in order to finish, he needs to collect data for his dissertation. 

Aaron's focus is early human diet -- how what we ate impacted not just our biology and evolution, but also who we were -- the beginnings of culture, etc.  South Africa is a very important place for that kind analysis, and Aaron has been here 3 times already, working at archeological sites at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay, SA. 

His dissertation will focus on (and it's about to get really nerdy here folks) the remains of small prey (less than 20 kg) from Middle Stone Age sites (280,000 to 40,000 years ago) in South Africa.  The bones have already been collected and are housed in the Iziko National Museum (and because of national heritage laws, can't leave the country.)  Aaron is working there, analyzing (and curating -- a huge task) thousands of tiny bones under the microscope to determine whether human beings (vs. other animals, etc.) accumulated the bones.  What it boils down to is the complexity of our diet and how that reflects human adaptation to environment, etc.

It's really fascinating stuff, I can't really do it justice, but it gets down to those basic questions of who we are, and how we got to be this way.

Sometimes when I tell people that I'm a poet and my husband is an archeologist, they'll say something like, "what a weird/unique/strange/unusual/unexpected pairing."  And what I tell people is that we are both very curious people, and to quote one of my own poems (how irritating can I get?), "He looks for meaning among shards, bones./ Me? Between stanzas and refrains."

In any case, I'm terribly proud of the dude for his diligence and patience and I'm very grateful that his work has brought us to South Africa for this once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, near Camps Bay, near Cape Town ...