Finally got you guys all convinced that we’d be working at all new sites every couple of weeks and then WHAM, we are back at the site from Weeks 2-3. As a quick re-fresh, that’s where we had found the rare hearth feature (also check days 5-12 in the Journal section). Some of the others I talked to seemed pretty disappointed that our other possible camping/work site had to be cancelled, but I am the odd one out, excited that we get to fully explore what the old site has to offer. It was like an unsolved mystery that we now get to investigate.
“It’s like a little archaeology factory!” – Karen (Photo by Stephanie)
On familiar ground again it didn’t take us long to settle in. It was a strange mix up of the very first week with the big screening set up, the location from the second two weeks, and the multiple excavations units from the 3rd and 4th weeks. I guess it makes sense now that we are nearing the end of the summer to amalgamate them into a complete process. Granted it still took a while (hey, it’s a Monday. What do you want from us) to actually set up the grid for 10 excavation units, but once the order to dig was given, it was smooth sailing for the rest of the day. For once we actually knew what we were doing!
Conveniently placed log (Photo by Stephanie
Our biggest challenge was overcoming the obstacles appearing in each unit. In the past we thought we’d had it bad with large roots that conveniently crossed the entire middle of the unit, but we had our work cut out for us with the historic – for lack of a better term – giant log that was the size of a whole tree cutting across multiple units. We lucked out with our city worker connections and got in a guy to work a chainsaw to get some of it out, but the rest was up to those excavating the units. They’ll just have to dig around it for now.
As far as finding stuff, it was a classic game of I-Spy to pick up the tiny fish bones, occasional ugly flake, and whole shell samples from the screening process (sifting the dirt you’ve removed). We know the site was disturbed, so there was lots of old historic nails and glass to bag as well. Hopefully we can find some things in the next few days to either tell us when the site was disturbed, or how old the original site was!
♥ Steph
Trying to remove the log (Photo by Stephanie)
into the field 