Training day

 "It's not what you know; it's what you can prove." 
- the movie Training Day

Calvin gave me this reference guide - useful! 

Just before Christmas, I had a training day with two collaborators. We have a project coming up that combines biology and archaeology, so we needed to make sure everyone was on the same page. Obviously, I represented the biology side, but my colleagues, Calvin and Evan, have much more experience with underwater archaeology. 

I started out the day thinking that I was going to primarily teaching. Calvin and Evan have not collected biological samples before, so I figured we'd spend most of the day going over how to take sediment cores, filter water, and avoid contamination. Not so. We spent the first part of the day outlining my plan, but as soon as I pulled out the samplers, Evan jumped in. 

"I could rig these together, you know," he informed me, holding one of the water samplers, "stack them two-by-two, hang five off of each side..."

The scheme he was describing was incredibly ambitious, but if anyone could make it work, it was Evan. I let him take home a few of the tanks to play with rigging them together. We'll see what he comes up with. 

Next up was the sediment sampling. I tried to explain my ecology-based method for picking sample collection locations, but Calvin cut me off. 

"There are established ways to do this in archaeology," he said, "here." He handed me a spiral-bound manual on archaeological survey methods. I flipped through a few pages, and it looked incredibly useful. We'll end up pulling much of our methodology from the manual.

In the end, the day was one of mutual training. I'm grateful to have collaborators with expertise that's different from mine so we can teach each other and come up with the best plan. It's going to be a good project!