On the first day at the dig site on Roanoke Island, I’d mostly used the mattock, trowel, and brush. I also realized just how tedious and boring the work of archaeology could be, nothing like the action-packed Indiana Jones movies I had been obsessed with as a child. I’d volunteered for the part time work, partly for the experience, partly to get closer to Alana, the Graduate student supervisor, and partly to impress my professor in hopes for extra credit in the course. We’d heard all the stories in class. In the five years after the Roanoke colony had been established, visitors found it abandoned when they returned from England, its one hundred plus settlers missing, and the word “Croatoan” carved onto the palisade’s wood.
Continue reading “My Imagination by Niles Reddick”
