Well, the weather fooled us yesterday, it was a beautiful day with not a drop of rain! A day off meant everyone was ready to go this morning!
We had some visitors to site today! Dr Laure Dubreuil from the Anthropology Department, and Yumi Pedoe, our Academic Administrative Assistant came bearing some cake and cookies! Charles Cumberland, one of Laure’s MA students also came along, and Michael Obie, a former MA student of James’s (and no stranger to this site!), who is now a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto!
We’re well into the excavation at the site, and now our excavation areas are getting cleaned up and defined. We have three areas we are focusing on for the remaining few days we have at this site. I was not on the top of my photography today, I apologize for the number of students with eyes closed!
First is the well, we uncovered and documented it a bit in 2023, but now we are going to collect some more standardised data, and have the students profile it.
The second area of focus is the rubble structure, which James christened as “The Eminence” today. We hypothesised it was maybe a root cellar, and I have found some recent articles which do suggest that this is likely what this feature is. The students worked steadily today uncovering the rest of the drain and rubble. They can do plan drawing tomorrow morning and then hopefully we can remove a section to see how far down it goes and what is inside. There are artifacts peeking out tantalising everyone for tomorrow’s work!
The third area of the site is around the planking we found in 2023 and potentially a midden area. The students working in this area were able to determine the previously excavated part of this unit, and have been steadily digging down to the covered feature. Tomorrow we will hopefully be able to reveal the planking again and see if there is anything around it that we didn’t see before.
The students not excavating today were finishing up their maps from their survey exercises. I think everyone is mostly finished with that now.
Tomorrow is the last day of the second week, we are almost halfway through the field school already!
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