Yes. I am a nerd. You've been warned.

Ken is a 31 year old man with a barely discernable pot belly, a fondness for survival gear, and an uncontainable love for all things old. In short, he is an archaeologist.

He also calls me Super Bess whenever I don a tank top for work.

Ken happens to be a fervent Celt and is keenly aware of his ancestry. He is the first son of the first son going back hundreds of years to a Welsh lord who was thrown off his land by the English. His family believes that all Celts will someday return to the homeland and drive the English into the sea. This will in turn create paradise on earth and trigger the Second Coming.

Ken insists that he doesn't entirely buy into all that. Nevertheless, ever since he found out I was Scots-Irish, he's encouraged me to join him on countless renditions of "Scots Wha Hae," "Danny Boy," and "The Foggy Dew." When the kids aren't around, he calls me Boudicca.

But never mind that.

Since Ken discovered that it only takes me ten minutes (as opposed to the usual hour) to balance a transit, I've been co-opted to work with him on laying in the new grid for our site. I've spent at least nine hours in the squatting position in the last week. Consequently I now have a tendancy to walk like John Wayne. I was on my eighth hour of squatting when Ken revealed to me his definition of culture.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

"Oh. My. God. You're a Functionalist!" And then, then my friends, he freely admitted he was a Positivist. I spent the rest of our time in the field shaking my head and tutting at him, fighting the urge to scream "I thought you guys were extinct!" at the top of my lungs.

Later that same day, my boss was giving our high school students a pep talk. He told them the ultimate reason why we do archaeology is so that the people in present and future don't make the same mistakes people and cultures did in the past.

Gobsmacked. I took an entire class -- devoted fourteen weeks of my life, mind you -- on why this statement is wrong.

History, at its worst, takes no account of culture. I was taught from day one of my very first anthropology class that we, being situated and shaped by our own culture, will never truly understand another culture. We're wearing green glasses and their world is purple. We're just never going to see it properly. You can't "know" another culture. Maybe they didn't get the memo: the past is another culture. You're never going to understand it well enough to understand its mistakes, and for the most part, you're in no positioin to judge what their "mistakes" were. Never mind that you can't know the present well enough to prevent "us" from doing the same things.

I told my boss this. "I get what you're saying," he said, humoring me, the wayward child, "but I'm not entirely on the same boat."

Ken steps in. "Yeah, Bess and I had some theoretical differences out in the field today. I think she's something of a Post Modernist."

"I think you're right. I'm just a good old Marxist." And my boss looks at me in a way that suggests that mine is not the first good mind he's seen go to waste.

In sum: Any day I'm accused of being a Post Modernist is a good day, and I work with the anthropological equivalents of brontosauri.