13th May 2005, 07:52 PM
Cardiff (early-mid 80s); 'Selected' in haste after failing first year in "International Transport and Maritime Studies" at UWIST. Chosen when hungover because the students in the humanities block looked more fun than the grown-ups I was with on my original course. A cry for help really. Discovered some time later at the departmental cheese and wine that they only study British archaeology there, not international stuff as I had imagined. Spose I should have read a prospectus or something. I remember my early lectures looking at site drawings with hachures etc, thinking 'what the hell is going on'. They didn't get round to site drawings until the second year....
The amount of fieldwork on offer was quite good, expecially with certain courses. This was the one thing I was better at than most, but to my chagrin the practical elements receieved NO marks at all towards the final exam.
I do remember digging with some Lampeter students later on, and they were all very poor on general technique (couldn't plan, set out a grid, use a level etc), so we did better than them in that respect.
Mind you, I remember one fellow student several weeks before the exams complaining they still couldn't understand the difference between the Neolithic and Bronze Age!
I also had two brainstorms during my exams, one suggesting beaker markings were brewery logos, the other that cremation and pastoralism go together because people generally died in the winter or away from the burial grounds, so were cremated and popped in a pot to make it easier to carry them around until they could dispose of them properly during the summer tour of the uplands.
But I was a very immature, very drunken student with a bad attitude and a poor attendence rate, so ignor my opinion...........as I always put in my C.V.
The amount of fieldwork on offer was quite good, expecially with certain courses. This was the one thing I was better at than most, but to my chagrin the practical elements receieved NO marks at all towards the final exam.
I do remember digging with some Lampeter students later on, and they were all very poor on general technique (couldn't plan, set out a grid, use a level etc), so we did better than them in that respect.
Mind you, I remember one fellow student several weeks before the exams complaining they still couldn't understand the difference between the Neolithic and Bronze Age!
I also had two brainstorms during my exams, one suggesting beaker markings were brewery logos, the other that cremation and pastoralism go together because people generally died in the winter or away from the burial grounds, so were cremated and popped in a pot to make it easier to carry them around until they could dispose of them properly during the summer tour of the uplands.
But I was a very immature, very drunken student with a bad attitude and a poor attendence rate, so ignor my opinion...........as I always put in my C.V.