1/22/97	What kind of wildlife have you seen in Mali?
1/22/97	What is a traditional Mali meal like?
1/22/97	Do the people of Jenne seem curious about you and Annick?
1/22/97	What does the house you are living in look like?
1/22/97	What have your parents discovered so far?
1/22/97	Is it the rainy season or the dry season right now?
1/24/97	If the floors are as dirty, why don't they use tile?
1/28/97	Do you collect as much data as fast as you can?
1/30/97	Are you concerned about erosion at the dig site?
1/30/97	What kinds of sports are played in Mali?
1/31/97	Why do you leave school during the middle of the day? --What do you do while you are away from school?
1/31/97	How do people in D'Jenne spend their weekends? --What happens if you don't come back to school after the mid-day break? --What is it like to have parents that are archaeologists?

Question:

What kind of wildlife have you seen in Mali?

Answer:

Mali is not at all like East Africa, where we have the typical image of elephants, zebra, and wildebeest by the thousands on the Serengeti plain. Most of the big game in Mali dwindled to almost zero due to overhunting during the colonial period. There are a few game preserves in Mali, but they are further south, where there is more rain. The wildlife we have seen here includes thousands of birds feeding on the lush plants growing in the marshy lands left by the receding floodwaters, vultures feeding on dead animals, and the biggest rat we have ever seen in our lives (almost 2 feet long!). The site of Jenné-jeno has many snake and anteater burrows, but we haven't seen either animal.

Question:

What is a traditional Mali meal like?

Answer:

I hope you got the answer to this question in David's Journal dated Jan. 22nd, but just in case, a typical Malian meal consists of a starch (rice or millet), topped with a sauce (tomato-base with or without peanut butter, or okra-base) with bits of fish or meat and vegetable in it, kind of like our stews. We like rice much better than millet, so we have rice and peanut sauce with meat every day for lunch. We also eat it for dinner sometimes, but have had special meals of brochettes (like a shishkebob, meat on a skewer, grilled) and french fries occasionally. Mostly, however, we eat like the Malian family we live with here.

Question:	Do the people of Jenne seem curious about you and Annick?
Answer:	Yes, but mostly they are curious about how different we look and want to touch our skin and hair to see how it feels! This can get really annoying when we are out walking and groups of small children keep following us, trying to touch us, or asking for candy (bon-bons) and pens (Biki, named after Bic pens).

Question:	What does the house you are living in look like?
Answer:	I hope you saw my journal dated Jan. 17th and got the answer to this question! I tried to get a picture of our 2 story mud house to send you, but the streets are too narrow to get a good view outside, so I sent a picture from our roof, so you could see how the houses look here.

Question:	What have your parents discovered so far?
Answer:	Discovery Journal 1/27 tells you all about it!

Question:

Is it the rainy season or the dry season right now?

Answer:

As you may have guessed from comments in the Discovery Journal, it is the dry season right now, and the fact that it sprinkled a few days ago was regarded as extremely unusual. Normally, Jenné won't have any rain until May or June. The weather these past few days has been really windy, meaning we eat a lot of dust out at the site, and it has turned cool, with temperatures in the 50's at night and in the high 70's, low 80's during the day. That makes it a lot easier on our workmen, who are in the middle of the religious observance of Ramadan, meaning that for a whole month, they don't eat or drink anything between sunrise and sundown. When it's hot at the site, not drinking water becomes a real problem!

Question:

If the floors are as dirty as David indicated in his journal, why don't they use tile?

Answer:

The reason is the cost. Our house was built by a very rich man who put fired brick floors in the courtyard. But most people can't afford the bricks, because they are made with crushed potsherds (like the pottery made by the potter we interviewed),and require firing, all of which takes labor investment, which pushes up the price. Imported tiles are so expensive that almost no one has them. Even with fired brick floors in our house, though, the floors are still always dirty because of the incredible amount of dust in the air here.

Question:

Dr. McIntosh, do you collect as much data as fast as you can while you are at the dig site, and then try to figure out what it means later?

Answer:

Absolutely. There is too much information coming in from too many different sources (pottery, stratigraphy, plant and animal remains, etc.) to be able to put it all together while we are digging. The main challenge for an archaeologist is to record all the different information from the site so thoroughly that even after the excavations have ended and the material we excavated has been completely destroyed by the process of digging, we can reconstruct what we found in each level of the excavation. Imagine if you were an historian who was given a few weeks to study a valuable historical chronicle about a previously unknown kingdom, but there were two problems: the chronicle is in a language you don't know; and the process of looking at a page of the chronicle destroys it so no one can ever study it again. Suppose you are the only person who will ever be given this opportunity. How would you work on this document and what information would you record? This is the challenge we face!

Question:	Are you concerned that the erosion at the dig site has destroyed important sources of information?
Answer:	Yes, there are many concerns about how long the site will last at its current rate of erosion which was speeded up by the '94 floods and rain.

Question:	What kinds of sports are played in Mali?
Answer:	In Mali they play soccer mostly. In Eastern Mali they also have some wrestling.

Question:

Part 1: Why do you leave school during the middle of the day, and then return? Part 2: What do you do while you are away from school?

Answer:

Part 1: The Malians use the french version of the lunch. They have a long lunch with their family and then sometimes take naps. The school hours are 8:00 to 12:00 and then then after a three hour lunch break they go back to school from 3:00 to 5:30. Part 2: If you are talking about school breaks like our summer vacation I don't really know but I think that they may take a Vacation to Mopti. I have reached this conclusion on the basis that one boy I interviewed hinted at it. Otherwise they take their daily break period of three hours to eat lunch.

Question:

Part 1: How do people in D'Jenne spend their weekends? Part 2: What happens if you don't come back to school after the mid-day break? Part 3: What is it like to have parents that are archaeologists?

Answer:

Part 1: The answer to this question is very simple and that is they don't have any weekend. None whatsoever. They work every day of the week except in the afternoon on Friday when all the muslims go and pray in the grand Mosque. Part 2: I haven't stayed that long so I don't know but I could guess that you would get in trouble. Part 3: You get to travel a lot, your parents can help you get information for projects, and my dad can teach me orienteering because orienteering is an important part of surveying so you have to be good at it.