I have a confession to make – I never dreamed of being a recruiter one day. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an archeologist, and yes, just like Indiana Jones.

I used to imagine myself digging up some incredible find and turning history as we understand it on its head. Instead, the closest I get to archeology now-a-days is watching Time Team America and Bone Detectives on television.

That doesn’t mean I don’t do some amateur-style archeology in my spare time though. My wife thinks I’m pathetic, plodding around our backyard with metal detector and trowel in hand, meticulously unearthing some of the rarest artifacts ever discovered in rural Virginia. Ok, I’m stretching the truth a bit, but those old nails and ancient car parts are really cool, at least to me. I have boxes full of the stuff in my garage. I have found some neat old bottles and other, well, trash, but my wife certainly doesn’t appreciate my finds as much as I do.

Imagine my glee when one day I found something truly remarkable. While I was trimming the grass around our house one fine summer day I saw a perfectly round stone about the size of a small potato partially buried near the foundation of the house right outside our back door. Its near perfect roundness caught my attention as it just didn’t look like any of the “normal” rocks lying around our place.

Intrigued, I grabbed my trowel and started digging, and to my utter astonishment I found another, and then another. All different sizes, but all nearly perfectly round stones in this one spot. I think I found about a half dozen of them altogether. I secretly brought them in the house and cleaned them in the sink, trying desperately to keep my new find from my wife who just wouldn’t understand or appreciate the significance of what I had found.

I quietly retreated to my office with the round rocks where I could take a closer look and see if I could figure out just what I had discovered. My mind raced – Native American maybe? They weren’t buried too deeply, though. Some left over stones from a former occupant? Colonial American maybe? But I couldn’t imagine what they would have been used for. I started Googling. I read books on American Indians in Virginia. I secretly showed my new treasures to visitors and we debated about what they could be. I would need some answers before the Smithsonian accepted them into their collection.

Months later, after the rocks had been stuffed in a drawer and nearly forgotten, my wife started in on me about all this junk I kept dragging into the house. “Junk?” I said in disgust. “I’ll have you know that I’ve found some pretty cool stuff out there. In fact, I’ll bet you can’t tell me what these little gems are.” I ran to my office and brought out my secret stash of round stones.

“Ok, so what do you think about these?” I demanded. I had her on this. She would have to admit once and for all that I had totally missed my calling and should promptly get back to school and start working on my new career in archeology.

“Where did you find these?” she asked with a slightly raised eyebrow.

“Right in the corner by the back door steps,” I huffed.

She just looked at me with a curious look, as though I were four years old and had just pulled a frog out of my pocket.

“Glen,” she said quietly, yet sternly. “Those are river rocks I picked up one day when we were hiking about seven years ago. I never found a use for them so I threw them outside the backdoor. You are an idiot.”

So for now I’m holding off on buying that Fedora and bull whip.

Glen Swain
Click here to read about Glen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.