Briana's Travels

One of our favorite things to do is sit around in camp, while having a meal or tea, and tell what I call "war stories". Most of these stories involve close encounters of the animal or insect kind. For instance: the time someone only realized they were being stalked by lions when they walked back to their research camp in the Serengeti (Tanzania) one night when they woke up the next morning and found lion footprints all around their tent. The time a hippo charged a car in the Semliki Valley (Zaire), knocking it clear into the air and leaving tusk marks. The time an elephant crashed through the bush in Tsavo National Park (Kenya) to charge a car, whose driver immediately started going backwards to avoid being 'tusked', inconveniently went through a big puddle which splashed onto the engine, which made the engine die - so the two people in the now-stalled car were faced with an ear-flapping, trumpeting, pretty pissed off elephant. Thankfully, the car started again, and t

So why am I in Kenya? To dig! So here are some photos and notes about digging. First, here are some tools of the trade. In this pile are brushes; hammers; chisels; dustpans; karais (the Swahili name for the metal basins we use to transport the sediment to piles to be screened, which I'll talk about in another post); plastic bags; toilet paper (no, not for *that*, for wrapping delicate specimens in!); gardening pads for kneeling or sitting on; and in the top left hand part of the photo, there is bone glue and bone hardener. The flip-flops are not excavation tools -- they're there because we have a no-shoes-in-the-excavation rule, so someone doesn't accidentally step on something and break it! Sometimes we dig with picks, especially at the start of an excavation to quickly get down to the layer where fossils or bones are coming from, and then we dig more carefully, with chisels, hammers, brushes, and even dental picks. What do we find? Fossils and stone tools! Here's one