More artifact washing

The last day of field school was just spent washing artifacts.  Since we were cleaning the finds from our own pits, we didn't find anything new and exciting.  It's a very important part of the process, but it's not really something worth waxing lyric about on a blog.


So that concludes my field school blog.  I hope it wasn't too boring and jargon-laden.

Last Dig Day

We knew this was going to be our last day out in the field, so we needed to get everything as complete as possible for the season.  Unfortunately, it was also kinda drizzly.

Since we were worried about the drizzle turning into full-blown rain at any moment, we worked with the tarp half-covering the units.  Unfortunately, this made it quite hot and muggy especially when the sun started to come out more.

Chris finished up level 5 in the SE quad since he digs faster and we wanted to get this done.  Sam finished removing the wall between our pit and his (EU 18).  I was carrying the buckets from the units to the screens.

Once Sam finished removing the wall, I got into the unit to start working from the other side.  Chris was still working on the SE quad, but we needed to get the NW and SW quads finished as well.  I started working on the NW quad.  It had a lot of annoying roots.  Chris and I were able to finish level 5 completely by attacking the last two quads from different sides.  All in all, level 5 barely produced anything that got bagged and was essentially a sterile level.  Then Chris and I got back out.  Emily and Sammy started to remove the 2 corner-balks along the south wall.  Chris sifted for Emily, and I helped push the annoying clay through the sifter.  Sam drew each wall of the now-continuous pit so the complete stratigraphy could be recorded.  Emily and Sammy got through the dark clay layer (which was considered the end of level 2 in my unit) on both corner-balks.

Then we had to leave our lovely, unified pit. :(

We spent the afternoon washing the artifacts from our units.  It was just standard artifact washing stuff.  We did have a little pizza party though to celebrate the end of our dig.

Digging again!

Chris had gotten through level 4 in the NE and SE quads the day before.  There really wasn't much of anything in them.

So we got the NW and SW quads down to 24in. as well.  Barely anything came out.

By this time, Dru had gotten down to about 39in., so our attempt to match his depth had been thwarted.  So we started Level 5 to get down to match him again.  You would think that a 15in. level would be hard to dig through, but it wasn't.  It was a very soft and loose sand with occasional clumps of a thick pink material.  Basically, you just have to lift out the pink clumps and then you can remove about an inch's worth of sand at a time with one trowel sweep.  So it was actually faster to dig than level 2 (which was only 3in. of a thick clay).

 Chris working on Level 5 while Dru takes out the wall.

Chris completely finished Level 5 in the NE quad.  I got about 5in. down on the SE quad before we had to pack up for the day.  I would have gotten significantly deeper, but a lot of roots started cropping up.  When you clear off sand that quickly, the roots basically have to be chopped after every single time you use the trowel.

After the wall was completely removed, we found a little alien-face soil stain.  Isn't he cute?

Level 5 had lots of buckets when absolutely nothing got caught by the sifter.  Only around 10 very tiny objects came out of the NE quad, and none were found in the SE yet.

Slightly more successfull flint-knapping

We tried flint-knapping again.  This time we had better tools and a more helpful youtube video.  So I managed to make 8 more good scrapers.  Emily actually made a point, although she didn't get it very sharp because it probably would have broken horribly.  I personally preferred using antler for the fine shaping rather than the copper piece.  The copper only seemed to make the rock shiny, and just didn't feel like it delivered as precise of a blow.

While we were flint-knapping, Dr. Knauth came by to do teacher evaluations.  They're a required thing for every class to see what changes should be made in curricula and such.

We flint-knapped a bit more until lunch.  After that I went back to my room to catalog some more artifacts.

Adventures in Flint-Knapping

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.

 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.