Archaeology Journal - Sebastian Wetherbee

Sebastian Wetherbee

Data Collection in Fairy Cave, CO

2/4/2017

I recently drove up I70 from Boulder to Glenwood Springs, CO to go caving in Fairy Cave. This cave system is one of the largest in the state, and open to the public for guided tours. However, much of the cave is off-limits to tourists. One of the ways for wild cavers to get access to the rest of the cave is to collect data on the health of the cave, including temperature, evapotranspiration, and other indicators that it's structures and formations are healthy. So, some friends and I decided to do exactly that.

The drive itself was a blast, and almost worth the trip alone. Heading over the continental divide and through Summit County, passed Vail gave us sights galore. And when traffic left us stopped for half an hour heading over Vail Pass, we busted out the playing cards on the hood of the car. Around us, other weekend warriors had similar ideas, some of them even hiking up the embankment to get some snowboarding in.

Glenwood Springs is nestled in a small mountain valley. Though covered in snow, the land is clearly dry, with short, gnarled trees and rocky formations covering the landscape.

Once in the cave we had the distinctly satisfying experience of climbing over a safety rail in front of a group of tourists, before flicking on our headlamps and disappearing headfirst down a nearby crevice.

We ended up getting lost for an hour or so, eventually giving up our search for the final data station. We found our way back to the main tourist chambers in defeat, and with only a few minutes left before the gondola down the mountain shut down for the day. If there was any takeaway from the experience for me, it was that being lost underground is not good, though it is a little bit thrilling.

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However many nations live in the world today, however many countless people, they all had but one dawn." ~Anonymous, Popul Vuh

Every step you take has already been taken. Every story has already been told. The land is not newly discovered, so old with legends you might mistake them for rocks." ~Craig Childs

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause." ~Henri Bergson

Archaeologists may not always see the trees, but we capture the forest with great clarity" ~Robert Kelly

The past is never dead; it's not even past." ~William Faulkner

No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.” ~Douglas Preston

If you go into a museum and look at antiquities collected there, you can be sure that the vast bulk of them were found not in buildings but in graves." ~Leonard Woolley

Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” ~Robert Macfarlane

We always stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them." ~David Anthony

That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away." ~Heraclitus

Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society." ~David Lewis-Williams

Opened are the double doors of the horizon. Unlocked are its bolts." ~Utterance 220 of the Pyramid of Unas

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." ~Rudyard Kipling

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains." ~John Muir

The ecological thinker is haunted by the consequences of time." ~Garrett Hardin

Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world." ~Iain McGillchrist

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril." ~Niall Ferguson

Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are." ~Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared." ~Alfred Russel Wallace

Humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences." ~Sebastian Junger

Except in geographical scale, tribal warfare could be and often was total war in every modern sense. Like states and empires, smaller societies can make a desolation and call it peace." ~Lawrence Keeley

The first people were aware of the signs and signals of the natural world. Their artifacts were projectiles, blades, and ivory sewing needles, either used on animal products, or made from them, or used to procure them. The world around them was a cycle of animals of all sizes, from voles and falcons to some of the largest mammals seen in human evolution." ~Craig Childs

The number of herbivores sets a cap on the number of carnivores that can live in a region. Of course, adding an additional predator of fairly large body size, like a modern human, would produce repercussions that would ripple though all the other predators in the area and their prey." ~Pat Shipman

When viewed globally, near-time extinctions took place episodically, in a pattern not correlated with climatic change or any known factor other than the spread of our species." ~Paul S. Martin

However splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature."
~Edward O. Wilson

Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion- and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings."
~Jordan B. Peterson

I have seen yesterday. I know tomorrow."
~ Engraving on
the wall of Tutankhamun's tomb.

We are fire creatures from an ice age." ~Stephen Pyne

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified." ~Edward Abbey

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go." ~H. Rider Haggard

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be- though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain- because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone." ~ Oswald Spengler

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance."
~Edward Gibbon

In the long paleontological perspective, we humans must be considered invasive in any locale except Africa." ~Pat Shipman

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy." ~Richard Francis Burton

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its own lifespan and brings about its corruption." ~Ibn Khaldun

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." ~Gustav Mahler

As for man, his days are numbered. Whatever he might do, it is but wind." ~The Epic of Gilgamesh

There is a cave in the mind."
~David Lewis-Williams

Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come." ~Joseph Campbell

I feel again a spark of that ancient flame." ~ Virgil

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it therefore not to be an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning." ~Clifford Geertz

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." ~Carl Jung

Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids." ~Arab proverb

Few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca Land." ~Hiram Bingham

You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things- to compete. You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals." ~Edmund Hillary

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going into the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity." ~John Muir

To speak of truth sounds too grand, too filled with the promise of certainty, and we are rightly suspicious of it. But truth will not go away that easily. The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’." ~Lain McGillchrist

The Sphinx will always have to be looked after."
~Zahi Hawass

Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and 30 years I could build a bigger one."
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Civilizations exist by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
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When at last we anchored in the harbor, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless"
~T.E. Lawrence

The best prophet of the future is the past."
~Lord Byron

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can get. The older she gets the more interested he is in her."
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Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been."
~Jim Bishop

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain."
~Victor Hugo

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist."
~Thor Heyerdahl

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. "~Joseph Campbell

In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds."
~Thor Heyerdahl

Always my soul hungered for less than it had"
~ T.E. Lawrence

History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs, and wooden shoes coming up."
~Voltaire

Back home, I'm always focusing on something happening in the future. On expeditions, time stops, and you become like a stone age man, acting on instincts and knowing you are part of the universe."
~Borge Ousland

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies." ~Robert Sapolsky

The Land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle, and end."
~Craig Childs

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."
~C.S. Lewis

The only thing that belongs to us is the time."
~Seneca

To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way." ~Steven Rinella