Abigail shares some of her experiences on the field school in this post. We did mangle quite a few worms this season, I am afraid! — Kate
As the past month of field school comes to a close, I cannot believe all we’ve done and learned within the month yet at the same time it feels as if it’s gone by in two seconds! It’s sad to think I won’t spend my mornings trying to bully as many people as I can into carpooling with me to BcGn-17. It’s been so cool to see as our site grew and theories changed (shoutout to the drain we thought was a wall for so long!) and watching it all get backfilled felt bittersweet.
During the last week on BcGn-17, I focused on exposing the drain structure in a 2×2 unit I had been working on for a while (E7037 N4932) which seemed to be a continuation of the drain we had been following but it had come to a sort of curve and spread outwards, which lead to me begging James to let us open up the unit directly beside to the west (E7035 N4932). I dug the southwestern corner down to about 90cm in E7037 to find the bottom of the drain and then we moved to all hands on deck in our last two days in trying to excavate E7035, which was quite impressive!
In the new 2×2 unit we found probably the highest artifact count of all of the units excavated and found multiple nearly whole bricks smushed between the stone structure as well as some metal which Kate believes was a bucket. As we continued down to 30cm, we discovered by the hidden tarp that the southwest corner of the unit had been previously excavated in 2009 in a 1×1 unit, meaning they couldn’t tell there was an actual structure and tragically removed all the rocks! Very unfortunate that it was our last day as we couldn’t excavate surrounding units to uncover how the structure continues, but I look forward to following this blog to see future discoveries!
Despite the football shaped (and sized) sunburn on my back, many bug bites, and dirt I will never remove from my car seats, I will never ever forget this experience and the people that I met. Everyone was so beyond kind, and I hope to see you all in the future in some capacity! Thank you thank you thank you 😊
DISCLAIMER: Quite a few worms were harmed in the excavation of this site. Sorry worms.
— Abigail Davies
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