The weather was, again, supposed to be abysmal. So we stayed indoors to try a hand at flint-knapping.
It turns out that trying to teach yourself how to flint-knapp with some poor quality chert and rocks you found at a swimming hole based on youtube videos is actually quite challenging. Some of our chert turned out to just be limestone, and some of the rocks we were using as hammer-stones were softer that chert and so ended up breaking far more than than the rocks we were using them on. I managed to make one decent scraper, but all of the points I tried to shape kept breaking off large pieces of the tip area.
After a few hours of this, Dr. Knauth called Robin because she was at Glunk and wanted to see how our dig was going and was wondering where we were. Then Dr. Knauth came back to the college to check on our class. It turns out there was a stash of flint-knapping tools in the main Archaeology lab, which Robin does not have access to.
At that point, it was clear that the weather report had been a lie, and it was actually a lovely day to dig. So we went out, including Dr. Knauth, to Glunk to get some work done.
We didn't find much of anything in our unit. There were a few bits of rock, but that was basically it. We finished up level 3 for the whole unit. We also determined that our level 4 should be from 21-24in, so we could be level with Dru's unit instead of leaving an awkward lip where the wall was being removed. We barely got started on that in the NE quad before leaving for the day.
It turns out that trying to teach yourself how to flint-knapp with some poor quality chert and rocks you found at a swimming hole based on youtube videos is actually quite challenging. Some of our chert turned out to just be limestone, and some of the rocks we were using as hammer-stones were softer that chert and so ended up breaking far more than than the rocks we were using them on. I managed to make one decent scraper, but all of the points I tried to shape kept breaking off large pieces of the tip area.
Flint-knapping really isn't easy.
After a few hours of this, Dr. Knauth called Robin because she was at Glunk and wanted to see how our dig was going and was wondering where we were. Then Dr. Knauth came back to the college to check on our class. It turns out there was a stash of flint-knapping tools in the main Archaeology lab, which Robin does not have access to.
At that point, it was clear that the weather report had been a lie, and it was actually a lovely day to dig. So we went out, including Dr. Knauth, to Glunk to get some work done.
Dr. Knauth observing excavations.
We didn't find much of anything in our unit. There were a few bits of rock, but that was basically it. We finished up level 3 for the whole unit. We also determined that our level 4 should be from 21-24in, so we could be level with Dru's unit instead of leaving an awkward lip where the wall was being removed. We barely got started on that in the NE quad before leaving for the day.
Chris and Dru tried very hard to keep bits of the wall from collapsing chunks into our unit.
