July 8th Part II (electric boogaloo)

Okay, Background photography completed. If you somehow don't have a feel for where I am...well, I could say something mean to you...but instead I'll offer a "ask me a question, I'll see if I can answer it" deal.

So, what was I up to today?

Zen of course. (I'm all about the zen of archaeology)

It all started with a nice little blobby stain of dark soil (with carbon and those sorts of goodies distinguishing it). Inspection of the area revealed...well, I'm not sure quite what to call it. It's some sort of "heat altered" rock. It's been turned red and shiny (as heating quartz-like stones tends to do) and it's very brittle. The large stuff will crumble if you poke at it wrong.

Some digging revealed the area was bound by this heavy gravel lens...which thanks to some sand and clay had turned to cement. This seemed like a pretty good natural level, it was (more or less) bowl shaped, with some golf ball sized "heat altered" rocks peeping through/embedded in the stuff. There wasn't any carbon or anything "featurey" in the gravel so it was let be...and by noon I had this:


Not much to look at, but an acceptable basin sort of thing.

Poking and prodding beyond the apparent boundary didn't reveal anything featurey in the gravel. In fact, there wouldn't be anything cultural about that were it not for the strange manner of the gravel concretion, and what was under it...

As it turns out those little ping pong ball sized rocks were just a couple nodules of something else...my own personal rock garden:


In a brief explanation of what didn't show up in the picture: jus to the left of center is a rock running ~ left to right. Well, there's an odd stain running to the right and down of that (it forms the slope of the basin) and connects to a small cobble. That's actually the "inside" of the rock, but it's disintigrating pretty badly, so it looks like the surrounding gravel lens. To compound the "huh what?" part of this conglomeration of now very large "heat altered" stones...I'm pretty sure that the two very large ones in the middle of the picture, just to the left of center are actually one huge rock. Also, I think that "line of rocks" going up the left hand side to the top large-ish rock are in fact connected to that top large-ish rock. I'm not entirely unconvinced that this is in fact just one boulder.

Anyhow, my off the cuff interpretations aside (and let's stress that they're just spur of the moment conclusions...which I often make as ridiculous as possible, because it's more fun to do, even if it only is barely based in reality...although in this case i'm not being too ridiculous) this is a nice complex maze of rocks, some clay, and lots of pea gravel and the weird cement-like stuff. I was getting pretty frustrated with it all until I realized: it is the nature of Wildcat to not give up her secrets. The only secrets worth knowing are the ones worth protecting. So muttering other faux zen mantras to myself I just relaxed in my rock garden poking around (and dulling both of my trowels...which reminds me, I should at least pretend to have an edge on them tomorrow).