Have you seen a bright yellow 30 ton machine come through here?

Digging today, as we actually do from time to time, we noticed a cop car stopped at a break in the treeline at the edge of the field. Odd. Then we noticed the cop making his way though the gap towards us. A couple seconds later a second member of Dayton's finest stepped out of the other gap in the tree line, effectively cutting off any easy route of escape, those dastardly do-gooders!

After the requisite tough-guy questioning "who did you ask to dig out here" (as if there were some great plot involving the three of us to secretly dig a series of very large very shallow holes on the sly) and getting confirmation that Cemex knew we were there we learned the story: they were looking for witnesses to the crime of the century.

Overnight someone stole one of Cemex's front end loaders, demolished a 60x60ft building and then took off. Unfortunately we were not at the field overnight, so didn't see this crime (nor, for that matter could we have seen it in any matter because the Cemex facilities are somewhere way off through the forest and I've never seen any of their operation until today). Equally unfortunately I was having a very difficult time keeping a straight face because while this may have been thus far the crime of the century...it's also pretty amusing. It appears that they found the front end loader, because a couple hours later one cut through the field and hightailed it off along the access road.

In a not-as-amusing note, the one cop (the younger one) spent the entire "interview" (if you will) with his hand resting on his pistol. Two things struck me about this: first of all really? Even after we've moved past "we weren't here at 2am" and into "what do you find out here?" conversation that is pretty inevitable he kept...what? Trying to subtly indicate that he had the power? Odd. But equally dismaying was that as he approached the possible evil doers his hand was on his pistol, and not his taser or mace.

Ben and I have a theory that there's no way this is an inside job, nono, it had to have been the work of the marijuana cigarette smokers in Dayton (the police claim that they've pretty much dealt with the coke and heroin problem, so the recent uptick in murders must be the result of marijuana).

(vroom vroom! Outta my way I'm committing the crime of the century!)

Frankie Says:

Relax.

It was a pretty low key, yet productive day. We now have a cart thingie with a large sprayer in the back. So we're able to soak our blocks pretty thoroughly (still no tarp to cover it all up though, which is a little counterproductive). Stuff popped out a little better, but it's still rather sparse, which is still okay. The coolest part of all this, if you like, is the cart. It's meant to be hitched to a 4x4 or something, which we don't have access to, so we pull it by hand. It's not quite arranged correctly to pull comfortably as there's always a heel or knee being tagged by the handle. Anyhow, we basically use it like a rickshaw, which provides me much amusement as I do my impersonation of a rickshaw driver. I just wish we had a second one so that a low speed chase could ensue (kind of in a Hong Kong Fooey sense).

Post holes seems to be all we're seeing, no big pits or anything. Ah well, that's the nature of the beast.

It's so hot out

How hot is it?

It's so hot out that our tarps were melting. Mmm melty plastic-y gooey artifacts! I'm not actually joking, or griping. Honest injun' I looked at one of the tarps we'd put out when we went to lunch and in the 30 minutes (okay, hour...or 2) the edges had turned into a sticky tar-like substance. As plastic is a petroleum product, I can probably call it "tar" and not just "tar-like."

Machine stripped the site today, and things went pretty smoothly in fact. Found a series of stains where we'd expect them based on previous excavations, although not as many as we'd hoped/feared. While on the face of things that is rather disappointing, it should make the summer more manageable, and in a selfish sense give me more time to track down mud.

Burn motherf***er burn

So it was (almost) dry enough for me to get back to work today, so I proceeded to start some more testing on the bottom of the hill. In case you missed it before, if there is one bright shining point to the Wildcat site...it's the bottom of the field. It's where the good stuff is.

I'm more convinced that ever that there is a (not-so) dry creek bed there hidden under the weeds. Actually, I'd guess that the no-name creek that forms the west boundary used to run right through here...and still does to some extent underground. I should remind you that when I mention a "subterranean river" I'm not referring to some picturesque cavern or grotto you can go cave diving in, this seems to be water that continues to seep through some of the loose soil a couple feet below the surface. I think that "seep" is a good word, I should use it more often.

Anyhow, I'd like to share my final shovel test of the day, or at least the notes. "Displaced 5m to the west due to still active snake burrow. Flooded out at 30cmbs." Yes, I got sent running screaming and flapping my arms like a flightless bird trying to take off while diving deeper into the weeds due to a snake nest popping out snakes at me. When I'd composed myself and got back to work I managed to find my missing river. It was a relief actually, I hadn't seen much of my river (can I name it the Marcus Subterranean Creek?) all day, but thankfully the snakes put me back on track.

Hmm, it sounds like I'm just bitching. I'll try to cut that out (I'm still a little overheated/dehydrated, so my sense of humor is a little wonky). In all honesty being chased by snakes (and no I didn't wrangle these or check to see what kind they were. They weren't garter snakes and they were longer than my forearm) to end my pretty miserable day was pretty funny. I really think a good fire would make this field a whole lot more manageable. Unfortunately swidden archaeology (as I've branded it) has yet to catch on with the mainstream establishment yet. I can't see what could possibly go wrong with razing a field for science.

Summer 2009

Right. So another new year out at Wildcat. If you've never been to Dayton, there just aren't enough words in the English language to describe it. It's hot, it's so humid as to be damp, and it doesn't really smell too nice. Hmm, a hot, sweaty, stinking...I'll let you decide which body part is the best analogy for this...

Okay, complaining about Dayton aside.

The field is pretty much the way I left it last year, which is good. I'd post pictures, but my camera is acting all weird on me. I'll see if I can't get it working again and get something up here. But the upshot is: the weeds are waist high (and growing like...uhm...weeds...thanks to all the rain in the last few weeks), I can't see the poison ivy through all the cover, and the humidity/dew means I'm soaked to my thighs by the time I get anywhere. It's awesome.

Nothing too much exciting has been going on yet: chased out some anomalies on the far side of the field. As expected, three 2x2s later, they're just a pile of magnetic rocks, likely dumped while the gravel company leveled a road just outside the field.

Wildcat, if I haven't told you before, is on a ridge overlooking the Miami Valley. We're located just one terrace down from the top, and the field slopes towards a small no-named creek. The site, predictably, is at the top of the slope, with the bottom being choked with marshy grasses and some young trees that are trying to reclaim the field now that it's not being plowed. I'm supposed to be spending this week, and last week too, trying to get a handle on the stratigraphy of the lower half of the field. However, it's been raining, and the marshy area is...well...marshy. All the shovel tests have been filling with water, which makes drawing a profile very difficult. So I've been pacing off the units, sticking my shovel in the ground, getting flooded, and wandering off to the next unit, trying to find some high ground to get something done. As I'm updating this at 10:30, you can tell how useful that's been.