Johannesburg

After a few days in Pretoria, I traveled south to Johannesburg to work at the University of Witswaters- rand. Luckily, I took the advise of fellow UI grad student Dan Proctor and stayed with Alison Groves and her family in the suburb of Melville. While Johannesburg is generally widely recognized as one of the less safe places in the world, Melville is really nice with tons of bars and restaurants to choose from, and I never once felt uncomfortable while there. While at Wits I split time working in the P.V. Tobias Fossil Lab and the Raymond Dart Collection. Wits curates some of the most famous fossils in the world, including the Taung child, which I was allowed to see (albeit under constant surveillance). The Dart collection is one of the most extensive collections of African skeletal remains in the world, and the new curator, Brandon Billings, is steadily turning the collection to a first-class research facility (he is also one of the coolest people I've ever met). Wits also turned out to be a great place to meet fellow anthropologists from around the world. While working with the Dart collection I met fellow researchers from Scotland and Croatia, and even had the opportunity to meet Dr. Liu Wu, with whom I had previously made all my arrangements to visit IVPP in Beijing, China (scheduled for December). Over the weekend Alison was nice enough to take me out to Sterkfontein so that I could see the caves, it was an absolutely unreal experience to be somewhere I had read so much about! I had a great time in Johannesburg, and hope I can return again in the future.

Pretoria

After an incredibly long 30 hour journey, including a 16.5 hour flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg (I watched 5 movies in a row) I arrived in South Africa on the night of November 15th. I began work at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria on the 16th, where I had the opportunity to work with the 1.5 million year old SK847 Homo erectus cranium. While I was there I also had the opportunity to study the famous Sts 5 (Mrs Ples) australopithicine dated to about 2.5 million years ago and Sk 48, one of the most complete specimens of Paranthropus robustus. A real perk to working at the Transvaal is the on-site dormitories the museum provides for a tiny fee, which allows researchers to work late even after the staff have gone home for the night. The museum's reverence for the illustrious Robert Broom is fairly obvious, especially when you work in a room full of Broom memorabilia and retrieve specimens from a large walk-in safe filled with fossils affectionately known as the "Broom Room." The displays in the museum were also lots of fun, I couldn't help but laugh at finally getting to see the display of the Australopithecine being drug away by a leopard, something that I will forever associate with Russ Ciochon. Everyone at the museum was incredibly nice, from the curator Stephany Potze to the lady in the cafeteria that served me lunch everyday (which was probably the best I've ever eaten for less than $5).

New York City

I arrived in New York in mid-October to begin work at the American Museum of Natural History where I studied the museum's cranial collection looking at European, Eskimo, and Australian skulls. The curator, Gisselle Garcia-Pack, was incredibly helpful and I had a lot of fun overhearing some of the ridiculous phone calls she had to deal with. My personal favorite was lady who wanted to know if Gisselle (a skeletal biologist) could tell her if the pot she just found was Native American over the phone (only slightly better than the guy who called saying he had figured out the "secret" behind racial skin color). My very humble Upper West Side lodgings on 94th and Broadway provided me with a really enjoyable walk everyday to the museum on 77th and Columbus, and the weather cooperated most of the time too. As with D.C., Tressa was able to spend a weekend visiting and we managed to see most of the major sites such as Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ground Zero, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Statue of Liberty.