We’re at the point of the excavation where it is getting interesting because we are moving from unknowns to knowns (or at least what we think we know!), and making predictions and testing hypotheses. Now that the upper layer has been removed from most of the excavation units, we are getting down to the levels that might hold some clues about the construction and destruction of this house, and maybe a little bit about the people who lived here.
We had a visit today by Dr Robert Pearce, a Trent MA alumnus from the 1970s and now retired archaeologist. He visited us last at BcGn-17 almost exactly two years ago! I should have taken a picture but I was too busy playing tour guide. Thanks for visiting Bob, it is always a pleasure to see you!
This season we are following a context-based excavation strategy. Our last two seasons at this site have shown us that large parts do seem to be intact in a complicated stratigraphic sequence. This means that instead of taking the unit down in arbitrary levels, it is intact enough that we can basically unpeel it in reverse order of how it was formed. So as contexts are exposed, we photograph, plan, and then decide which context is the most recent, as it will come out first before the older material. Some times we guess wrong, and a context that looks like it is lying on top of another might turn out to be the same in the end, or we find out that it has been disturbed, which made it very difficult to unpack the sequence.
It has a different workflow from excavating bulk material out by level. We assumed when we first began at this site that it had been so heavily disturbed that there was no intact stratigraphy, so we decided to remove materials in arbitrary levels so we could capture a general idea of older and younger artifacts on the site. Since our site actually seems to have a preserved stratigraphic sequence, we are targeting the digging to remove certain parts of a unit, cleaning of the surface to better see the exposure of new contexts, and then a lot of recording, some pondering, and then back to digging again. It slows things down but this type of excavation lets us capture the intricacies of what goes together in what sequence, the relationship between the parts of the excavated material and where things came from.
The Snakes (first to be assigned the mapping exercise!) collected all their data points by the end of the day yesterday. Their task today was to convene in the Archaeology Centre lab and learn how to convert their degree and distance measurements into coordinates, which they could then use to make a map of the artifact scatter. Sorry there are no pictures but imagine intense concentration, some hair pulling/head scratching, and finally at the end a neat and tidy map!
Tomorrow we will be doing labwork of various sorts as it looks like it will rain the entire day. So please check back in for some dispatches from the Arch Centre, where we have a smorgasbord of activities for our students to select from including more artifact washing, primary artifact processing, secondary artifact processing/analysis, digitization/GIS, and mapping.
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