Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Back from the Holiday, into the Heat.

Everyone made it back from the Memorial Day Holiday, ready to go into the unexpected heat. Elsbeth had to remind everyone to drink extra water due to temperatures rising to 95 degrees with nearly 90 percent humidity.

In Block One, we almost have all of our open units at the same level, which will give us a better idea of the features associated with the burned structure.



For lunch we all headed to an area on the other side of the site where Amanda, Adam L, and Trey were working to cut back a profile of the terrace in an erosional gully.  Little did we know that by following Bert Pelletier, the USFS archaeologist, we would go on a slight nature hike detour through all sorts of poision ivy.  Finally, we arrived at the campsite near the river to eat lunch.  Just up the hill, the other excavation team was finishing the soil profile. Three distinct strata were visible down to a depth of 120 cm, and lithic debitage was recovered to about 90 cmbs.



Back at Block One there were a a few interesting finds. Our normal photographer is Amanda, but since she was helping with the profile, Elsbeth stood in for her. There was quite a commotion over that since she couldn't seem to get far enough away from one of the units that needed to be photographed. The clouds  made it easy to photograph, but as soon as the perfect cloud cover happened, the camera's battery died. Epic Fail. We ended up having to use a back-up camera, and things finally worked out after that.


It was a good day overall despite the heat, and only being able to proceed using labor intensive trowelling methods. We even met new friends along the way, like this gigantic wolf spider who lives in one of the units at Block One. We have named it Tomas!!




Sarah Bagley, Nick Wood, Stefanie Matthews

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