Refreshed after the weekend break, we got the trailer unloaded this morning and our base of operations set up and running for another week of excavation. The order of business for today was to take the units we laid out on Friday down to the cultural levels of interest so we can hopefully answer some outstanding questions about the past history of Structure 1.
“Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper…”
Washington Post, 25 October 1911
The first law of holes says essentially “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. Metaphorically this is of course advising how to solve problems of one’s own making. This definitely doesn’t apply to archaeologists because sometimes the answer to one’s problems is that the hole does need to be deeper!
Most of the excavation areas for this season are covered by a lot of fill that wasn’t present in our 2017 and 2018 excavations. In order to level the surface and cover the structure after we finished our excavation, Trent’s groundskeeping crew brought in a lot of fill to cover the archaeological site before grass could be planted. Unfortunately, that fill is now in our way and blocking our view of the cultural layers that were relatively easy to access in 2017 and 2018.
The midden crew identified a new context quite quickly, and despite some dastardly tree roots were able to see where two new contexts were underlying the layer they removed. One layer seems to be mostly empty of artifacts, but we hope the darker layer is the same type of soil we identified previously as midden contexts with lots of artifacts.
We made the decision to switch to mattocks for some of the compacted fill for the west wall excavation area, in order to quickly and easily loosen up the soil for removal and screening. The WW crew also tidied up their walls and excavated carefully around the wall rocks, leaving their excavation in nice shape by the end of the day.
For the summer kitchen investigation, the Advanced Field Methods students August and Sophie determined through sondage that there is about 47cm of overburden to remove before reaching the contexts of potential interest. The SK team went to it with a will and were able to move a lot of dirt today, bravo!
The north wall crew were able to fully expose the previously excavated wall section in their unit, and then moved to removing the unexcavated contexts to the north of the unit.
We had a couple visitors on site today, Nii, one of James’s graduate students came by to say hello and see the excavations. We also had a visit from Gordon Dibb, who is a (semi)retired local archaeologist who owns York North Archaeological Services.
The second law of holes states that: “when you stop digging, you are still in a hole.” For archaeologists, then it is time to backfill!
One thought on “The Law of Holes”
That is what I call Trench warfare. I felt like the soldiers during WW1, the difference being no regard for disturbing the ground, breaks, and equipment used to dig six feet deep before the enemy entrenched themselves or advanced. I do feel proud that with Keira’s troweling, Alex’s perfect shovel squares, August’s leadership, Sofi’s cultural expertise, and my muscles for screening were able to excavate our first large trench unit.
Bradley Navaranjan