After the rain of yesterday it was really nice to have just overcast skies today! Work is continuing on the test units, and we are starting to find a lot of artifacts, which will be fun to process in the lab in the last few days of field school.
I usually spend most of the day cycling through all the excavation groups, offering advice or answering questions, and often taking pictures! Some of that is for our records of course, so we can see the progress of the excavation, but I also like capturing little moments of the day.
Lauren, Maddy, Cameron, and Avery are coming to a different stratum in their excavation, the lighter coloured soil with more rocks in it. It almost looks like sterile subsoil but it can’t be, because there are artifacts in it!Breanna, Falon, Kyra, and Suyang have found a possible feature (the concentration of rocks) in their excavation unit, so they are recording a plan before sectioning and excavating part of it to determine what it is.Haley and Trinity have finally found signs of the exterior wall of the structure in their unit! Now comes the exciting part to carefully clear away the dirt from the wall to expose it.Asha and Zenya have figured out a comfortable way to complete paperwork for their excavation unit!Jordan and Greg have been steadily taking down the levels of their excavation unit. I am pretty sure they have lucked out and have the unit with the fewest rocks this season!Jacob, Thomas, and Nicolas have finished their test excavation, so they have now taken on mapping and recording duties for the site. We need to find the coordinates for the corners of our test units and also draw a site map with elevations.Matie (in turns with Julie, who is behind me as I took this picture) are painstakingly screening all the artifacts from the soil of the midden unit. They’ve found a wide assortment of artifacts that will tell us a bit about the people who lived here.
The forecast says we are going to have rolling thunderstorms in the morning, alas, so we preemptively decided to button up the site for the weekend and focus on artifact processing and paperwork catch-up instead of trying to dig tomorrow. After today we only have five days left!
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