Blog Bonus

I would have to say that the most important thing we did this semester was our Great Discovery Projects, but in order to fulfill the prompt, I’m going to talk about the Franklin Expedition first.  Now, we did learn about a lot of different cultures – all being very important and what not, but the Franklin Expedition is like a giant science puzzle that happened fairly recently and it’s a mystery.  The fact that the crew died and outside of probable explanations, we will might never actually know.  Like I explained in my blog last week, I find it fascinating that Franklin’s crew had a terrible outcome (turning into mad, freezing cold and sick shells of human life that succumb to cannibalism – someone took that from a page in the book titled my worst nightmares!), when other expeditions around that time period in similar conditions didn’t fair so poorly.  I think this really stuck out to me because we will never exactly know if our ancestors and neanderthals actually got along, or what Stone Henge’s actual purpose was, or even the daily lives of those who built these beautiful archaeological structures.  I know we will never know (until we can go back in time – which probably will never happen), but the Franklin Expedition took place rough 150 years ago, and in the grand scheme of time, that was like yesterday…

But I think the most important topic I learned about was my great discovery project, Alexandria.  I grew casually hearing Alexandria, it was just no big deal to me as a child – some guys somewhere had discovered something.  One thing that I never realized until this project was that Alexandria was JUST discovered.  I’m older than the rediscovery of Alexandria.  That really blew my mind to learn that.  The further my research took me, the more I wanted to know.  I felt like I was rediscovering Alexandria – a place that I had heard about, but didn’t know it’s location.  When I did my research, it was like I was finding Cleopatra’s Palace.  It was like I was getting into legal disputes with Jean Yves Emperuer – it did actually upset me that because of Emperuer’s rivalry with Franck Goddio – they never mention of credit the other person for the hard work they have done to recover parts of Alexandria.  It’s weird that there isn’t any collaboration between the two like there is in science.  And can you image my excitement when I found out that you can go scuba diving to see parts of Ancient Alexandria in the Bay?  Or when I found out that in 2010, Alexandria’s plans for a underwater museum were approved.  I’ve never been so excited to about something that wasn’t science related.  I was fascinating to see Goddio’s struggle with GPS – something that I take for granted everyday.

In the end, the great discovery project not only let me learn about Alexandria, but it made me think about the technological advances that society has made in my short lifetime – how I take it for granted and there is so much more to come within the field of archaeology as our technology advances.