Ella the Girl of the Cinders

Remember how I thought that I would be spending most of this week filling out feature forms? And then excitingly enough Mark let me excavate a feature? Well, me the naïve and inexperienced archaeologist that I am, had no idea what it took to excavate a feature…and actually I’ve wound up excavating two since there was a feature within a feature. The first feature I excavated was the fill of a small kiln or oven. It turns out that I actually had to excavate half of the room that the kiln was in as well. It turns out that the deposit is so rich with ash and cooking material that they want to sample the entire thing! The largest bags we have are 10 liters and so far I have filled about 6 or 7 bags, and I’m not even half way done. Aside from digging out the deposits that fill the room, which as you can imagine is time consuming in itself…I’m using hammers, trowels, and other huge heavy tools and pounding away at compacted mud, silt, and hard as hell limestone bedrock…if you didn’t know I was an archaeologist you might think that I was doing some sort of slave labor. I antipate my arms to be pretty sore tomorrow. But this is not theonly thing that takes up time…So I have filled about 7 bags as I said, and have probably at least 10 more to go…everytime I fill a bag I need to do the following



Write on the bag the following material
Site: GPMP 2008
Area: KKT
Square: 101.Y28, 101.Y29
Date: 10.iii.08
Feature Number: 21879
Bag Number: 2008-0001
Sample: Flotation
Excavator: KLW

I then have to fill out a bag registration slot and write out all of the information again, next to a new bag number. Additionally I write a description of the feature I am sampling.

After this I turn the page where there are bag number labels. The labels contain blanks with all of the same information written on the bag. I rewrite the information on the label, cut out the label, put the label in the bag so this bag has 2 identical information labels, and then I fill up the bag, then staple it.

Repeat

Dig dig dig, sample sample sample

Today I did this for about 5 hours.

The first hour of the day I spent trying to make sense of the information from 2005 to find the architectural features that were assigned numbers but do not have feature forms….as I have said, we are missing a lot of forms because so much time was devoted to mapping…well the chaos that was this morning was becasuse for 2 of the squares we have features assigned, but no maps with them labeled…at least for everything else we could find the features they were talking about….all I had to go by was the 2005 feature log which would say the square the feature was in, and a one sentence description…and by one sentence description I mean this:

21943: “EW MB wall that abutts wall 29887”

so where do I find this wall, especially since I probably don’t know where 29887 is either?

It was quite the puzzle but I think I figured out most of it. Definitly time consuming though

I also helped Peter take about 120 elevation measures using the level. Its basically binoculars, on a tripod…you level it out by adusting these nobs until a little pain in the ass bubble moves to the center, to tell you that you are looking straigh out on a flat plane. And then some stands with a huge measurement stick from various points within the site. You have to search for it in the eye hole of the level, which sounds simple enough to do but its actually really hard to see and really hard to find. And then you write down the measurement. At first I was terrible at this because I could never seem to find the measuring stick whenever someone had to move…you usually have to refocus everything after you turn it. But I figured out how to use this triangle that sits above the eye piece in order to find it quickly. Peter said that I was really fast at taking levels at that usually it takes people a few days before they get the hang of it. So yay, I’m doing something right.


Still not sure I’m excavating correctly or anything but no one is yelling at me yet. Yesterday Mark asked me how I enjoy excavating and I said that I loved it. He seemed shocked (he is happiest when mapping I think) and said that if I did a good job they would find more stuff for me to dig. Yay!

So since I spent 5 hours digging and chopping and brushing up silt, by day’s end I looked quite filthy. Of course I had no idea what I looked like but everyone would look at me and laugh and call me things like chimney sweeper or Cinderella. Ah well. I tried taking a picture but you can’t really see how dirty I am.



Tomorrow shall be filled with more of the same fun stuff so let me know if this is getting boring to read.