Small Creatures, Small Brains

I am a frog, hopping along the jungle floor. From puddle to puddle, I leap, propelling myself ever further with powerful legs, gathering them up beside me before I push off. For a split-second each time, I fly.

A lone fly dozes overhead, catching my attention as the rays of light filtering through the canopy glimmer off its shimmering body. The chase begins, the promise of a meal driving me full speed ahead. I dash across the ground, tongue lashing to try and catch my wayward meal, but to no avail. Still the fly hangs ahead of me, taunting me as it’s translucent wings carry it further and further from my grasp.

Ahead, a black pit engulfs my path causing me to reconsider my pursuit, but the fly suddenly hangs back and my thoughts about the danger of the obscured path drift away to be replaced by ones of a full belly.

I make a sudden, last-gasp leap, pooling all my energy into one more journey through the air. I have him in my sights as my tongue reaches out and quickly grasps the foolish fly who would taunt me. I swallow and am still flying through the air when it dawns on me that I should have landed by now.

Suddenly, I hit the ground with a thud. It’s dark in here, but looking across I see I am in a vast pit, a hole in the ground that would keep me from food until my body began to lazily cannibalize itself. The walls are too steep for me to leap or even climb. I am doomed.

Frogs are silly creatures. You have this big, gaping hole in the ground and they just go ahead and throw themselves in there. By the end of the day last week, there were at least four frogs who had decided suicide was a good option and had thus hopped in to our open units. You would think an animal, any animal, that possesses a brain would think jumping into a pit, the bottom of which cannot be seen from its vantage point, wouldn’t be a good idea. But no, there they go, hurling themselves into the great unknown.

Have you ever seen a frog try to climb a sheer surface? The most haphazard and pathetic thing I’ve seen in a long time. They get part of the way up, grasping stray roots and little rocks to get there, and then fall all the way back down. Then, the guys with the pikes come by to loosen up some more dirt and instead of running away from things that would easily kill them if they happened to get stuck beneath them, the frogs will run towards it.

I saved a couple, as did the workers after seeing Jenn and I try to pull them out, but it quickly became a constant chore. It made me wonder if I was doing natural selection a disservice by helping those frogs stupid enough to get themselves so trapped, saving them to spawn a new generation of idiots.

In non-frog related news, the digging has completed at the site, the big gaping holes that would be the death of many frogs have been closed back up and covered over to wait for another season. The work has shifted to lab work, just artifact washing at this point.

Early in the week, we encountered a small problem with this though. It seems that someone had walked into the screens the pottery was drying on, quickly messing up the tags and the neat little piles that keep an artifact tied to its provenience. Though we were able to figure some of the piles out, others were not so lucky and consequently, some small parts of the site will be missing information now. Jenn is pretty upset about it and I completely empathize.

As archaeologists, we spend so much care pulling artifacts from the ground, making sure to take them in neat little layers, labeling the bags they are deposited into with information that ties every artifact in that bag to a specific location at the site, cleaning them all to remove any debris that would obscure any diagnostic features, just to have it all taken away in a second by someone’s clumsy misstep.

Live and learn though, which means the racks will be finding themselves in a slightly different location in the room, far away from any path people may have to walk through. Hopefully there will be no repeats of the situation on all of the remaining information will be retained.

I’m super itchy, thanks to the never-ending onslaught of bugs, but I will hopefully get over that soon. I’m not sure how much longer I can fight them off. I may just sacrifice myself to them, let them feast on my blood and enjoy an afterlife free of anything that makes me itchy.

Right now though, I’m sitting by the beach, full of tostones con queso, and listening to the rhythmic crash of waves over shore. To quote Jenn, “It’s beautiful. The solitude, the lack of children staring at us like we’re in a zoo…”