Emma Hechler
On Monday May 12th, 2025, the Trash Pandas (Syd, Sam, and I) have officially adopted Megan into the team. While everyone else has made their way to the forest site BcGn-15, we stayed behind on BcGn-17 to continue excavating OA2 [4], coined “The Eminence”, aka the root cellar drain feature. Our goal was to take a “slice” out of the side in order to profile it, with a subgoal of finding the bottom of the drain.
Before this day, the main artifacts being found were what one might expect for a domestic site: lots of nails (wire and cut), glass shards, ceramic pieces, metal sheets (probably from a bucket?), and even a shirt button.
But once we were able to cut into the drain, much larger and more intact artifacts began to be located. All of the above was still present, but now there were bones! Pig bones- to specify- no need to get scared.
It started with small pieces of ribs and vertebrae (some smaller ones being identified as caudal bones), then the pieces got larger and more whole the further down we excavated.
Then we began to find larger pieces of long bones! A tibia fragment, some unidentified (but definitely pig!) long bone shafts, and even a few metapodials (most likely a metatarsal due to the hole through the centre).
The day took an extremely exciting turn when Sam uncovered a very large distal end of a long bone while gently removing some of the larger rocks and bricks of the drain.
Sam and I then spent the next nearly 30 minutes carefully excavating the bone, revealing that it actually kept going into the drain. Eventually when we were able to extract it, we discovered it was a nearly fully intact pig humerus!
James and Kate researched a way to determine the possible size of the pig based on this humerus, which resulted in a near 600 lbs piggy (that’s ~272kg!). (James has named the pig George if a boy or Sally if a girl).
Due to its size, the pig was most likely a few years old. Which means it wasn’t used as a typical for-food pig, as those tend to be butchered around 5 months. George or Sally may have been kept for breeding or as a family pet!
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