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A beautiful day in the lilacs

Everyone seemed to have a nice holiday weekend and was ready to jump back into the final week of field school! Everyone is now at BcGn-15, and we had an absolutely glorious day. There are lilac hedges all around the site and they are blooming, there are birds singing, we have some curious chipmunks and red squirrels passing through…It’s really a nice place to work!

One of the main tasks today was backfilling completed units after they are recorded. First to be filled was Nicolas, Jacob, and Thomas’s unit, which gave us a tantalising glimpse into the basement of the structure but alas concrete slabs bulldozed haphazardly into a jumble barred the way of any subterranean explorations!

Nicolas, Jacob, and Thomas marvelling at all the rocks they removed in the course of excavating the unit!

Second unit of the day backfilled was excavated by the AlphaRats Asha and Zenya. Their unit told us a bit about the extent of the midden and domestic artifact scatter on the site. Fuelled by ABBA, they were able to get their unit backfilled and then jumped at the chance to practice some more surveying for the rest of the day.

Asha and Zenya in correct alphabetical order standing in their almost backfilled unit!

Last but not least today, Matie and Julie’s midden unit OA4 was recorded and backfilled. This midden unit gave us a nice cross-section of the domestic trash discarded in the later phases of occupation of the site.

Because of the trees, the screen had to be located away from the unit, which complicated backfilling! Matie shovels dirt into a bucket to transfer to Julie, who is tamping it down with her feet. Because they excavated a 1×2 m unit, it does look a little suspicious!

We had some new beginnings on site as well. Thomas, Jacob, and Nicolas started a new unit a little west of their first unit, to hopefully track the western wall of the structure. The stalwarts who finished off excavating at BcGn-17 opened up their unit to hopefully catch some of the northern extent of the structure. It’s early yet but this crew moved a lot of dirt today, and I think enjoyed it a little more than the heavy mucky clay they had been working in at the other site!

Emma, Samantha (who dropped down behind the screen just as I took the picture!), Megan, and Syd work on the top layer of their test excavation.

The rest of the open units are still being steadily excavated. Some of them should be at the state where they can be recorded tomorrow, and perhaps backfilled as well!

Jordan and Greg shovelshining the last few centimetres of their unit into subsoil.
Enya and Hailey working on exposing the wall segment. Hard to believe all those rocks and bricks came out of that 2x2m unit, isn’t it?
Suyang, Kyra, and Breanna are still investigating the rock feature in their unit.

So many interesting artifacts today — we didn’t have time to vote on an artifact of the day (plus I don’t want to steal any student’s thunder if they want to write about certain artifacts for their blog posts!) but I might do some extra blog posts after the field school is over to cover some of the things we have found that I think are cool.

Here’s a literary quiz — we were able to figure out the book based on this tiny scrap of paper, can you?

We don’t often get paper preserved on sites, but there was a fragment of a book…which gives us a terminus post quem or earliest possible date for at least some of the material in the unit under excavation!
Jordan and Greg recording their excavation unit. They are drawing a plan view of the excavation extent.

The weather looks like it might not hold for the rest of the week, so it might be a bit of a mad scramble to fit everything into the time we have remaining!

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