The Paella Incident

Hola from Madrid!
After three weeks near Murcia on the Neanderthal dig, I’m back in the big city and trying to regroup to start Part II of my adventure.

Part I in the tiny town of Dolores de Pacheco probably yielded the most fodder for fun. The last three nights, we finally all broke loose, along with the Perseid Meteor Shower. The night the meteors started falling, we all headed back to the cave at Cabezo Gordo, to listen to a local orchestra performing the music from E.T. It really was surreal. There, under the stars, not 100 feet from the cave where we spent our days excavating where the Neanderthals lived, was an orchestra of beautiful music! We knew the locals understood the significance of the location, when after the E.T. theme music finished, suddenly another tune began: the theme music for Indiana Jones, followed, amazingly, by the theme from the Flintstones! That modern stone age family could somehow be seen as the descendants of our Neanderthals, after all, and Indiana Jones, well, that’s what we were on, an archaeological adventure.

It turns out, an imprpomptu poll had been taken among the young women at one point: who was more handsome: Ryan Gosling or Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones IV. You guessed it: HF won.

That face could only beat Ryan Gosling in a group of wanna-be archaeologists.

The meteor shower was followed by a night of heavy drinking, which, you kind of need when you have 15 people crammed into a grammar school, living, eating and working together. The drinking actually spurred a great idea by me, one of the Spaniards and our lone Italian paleoanthropologist: we needed a party with a lot of sangria and some really good Spanish food, so, the planning began…and was then soon stalled by what will forever be remembered as the paella incident.

The core of our party was to be a traditional paella cooked by our Spanish planner. Things started to go awry when he found out we couldn’t have the party during the day when the comida or main meal is eaten. As for me, I always assumed the party would be at night. Who drinks during the day? Well, the Spaniards for one, but a party is a night-time thing in my book. Once he realized that we couldn’t have a party in the day, he told me he wouldn’t cook a paella. The only reason this concerned me is that I put my marketing chops to good use and completely sold everyone on paying a few euros to go toward food, including an authentic paella by an authentic Spaniard.

Then, things got out of hand. This Spaniard (who shall remain nameless) explained that he would NOT cook a paella at night, since it just. wasn’t. done. I argued that we were with a bunch of foreigners who didn’t care what was supposedly correct in Spain, that they just wanted his damn good paella. We argued, back and forth. Me being minimally persuasive due to the language barrier (trust me, it’ll take time before I can again argue in another language) and him insisting that paella was just not eaten at night. The rice is too heavy, and there is no WAY he was going to cook a paella at the wrong time of day.

No se come una paella por la noche!

To my utter surprise, he was so adamant about this, that he stormed out the room, slamming tables and doors as he went!

Paella was not had by all in the end, but I started drinking soon after the argument: 4 glasses of beer at dinner, a gin & tonic out later, followed by crema de orujo, a concoction similar to Bailey’s that’s from Galicia, where my grandfather is from.

The drink of the gods, from Galicia

I don’t know what’s in this stuff, but it is now a staple to my diet! Ahhh, forgetfulness and the ability to laugh followed soon thereafter.

How low can you go?

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The old man and the teeth

Greetings again from Dolores de Pacheco. We are in our final week of the three week dig at the cave in the Cabezo Gordo (which means small, fat mountain). Although we have not found any Neanderthal bones, we have come across some other interesting finds.

All along, we’ve been finding flakes. These are the rejects of rock that have been chipped away to make points, scrapers and spears. Imagine a handsized rock in one hand, called the core. It’s worked at with a rock in another hand by your neighborhood Neanderthal rock worker. One rock is hit against another until slices of rock chip away…flakes. Yeah, I guess that’s cool, but I’m thinking “flakes? big deal”. One day, as I was digging onsite, I found nothing and was so discouraged. One of the others told me I was probably sitting exactly where a Neanderthal sat to work some of the flake points and I thought “yeah, right”

But then…we found the core and we started finding horse mandible and teeth and more flakes. I came across a horse tooth, and as we all brushed, more and more small, bits of bone started to appear “in situ” around the teeth. It makes sense that this was the horse’s head!

Not quite the horsehead we found

Now, it gets interesting when things are put in context. Lots of flakes, a horse’s head, teeth and other bones, near the opening of a cave. And then I found a scraper. That’s what’s used to scrape flesh from hide. So, when you put all of the pieces together, what it appears we’ve found is a 40,000 year old mini-horse (a relative of present day horses) who was butchered by Neanderthals at our site.

This is a decently big deal, because I’ve also come to discover that the Neanderthal bones at this site are an unusual discovery…some sites find, say one femur and it’s international news. At this site, the heads of a woman and child have been found, along with mandibles and a hand and teeth. And now, we’ve found actual proof that this was probably a Neanderthal butchering site, so, it turns out, I really WAS sitting where a Neanderthal sat 40,000 years ago.

In the meantime, I’m making connections and plans for future trips and business deals. So far, I may have found a travel partner in crime. A wonderful new friend from England who wants to come and do a dino dig in the States and who I now am invited to visit in the UK. She just told me about a cool Iron Age site in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland. I’ve also met someone new from Venice, which suddenly gives me a tour guides for there, in addition to the person I already know in Genoa. I’m in! Some of you already know that I’ve also been considering looking for products to export from Spain to the US. It turns out the father of one of the Spanish guys on the dig may have some contacts for me. So, dinner with Dad is on the books.

As for the old man I reference in my post title, that’s my one amusing story to tell. It’s hard to be highly entertained when we’re pretty much confined to a tiny town of 2,000 people. Anyway, after having a big glass of beer one evening, I started noticing details in this small town as we walked to dinner (a liter of beer will do that to a girl). A clump of beautiful flowers growing wild in a crack in the pavement and a beautiful weathered blue doorway,

The door

which I stopped to take a picture of. As I turned from taking the photo, an old man was walking toward me and invited me inside his house. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. The rest of the group walked on, but I was invited to be shown a collection of hand-made models of the town church, the house this 83 year old man grew up in, the Eiffel Tower and the Plaza de Toros in Madrid. This seemed to be his life’s work, since he told me he’d been working on them since 1965 and they literally took up half of his tiny living room. Needless to say, I’ve been invited back for another visit.

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