Anyhow.
I'll begin with the summer of 2007. A fine summer. A fairly cool summer (if memory serves). And a summer filled with "that guy." We all know "that guy," so I won't go into too much detail. To this day his spirit lives on in all of us, motivating us and lightening our souls. Ben declared that in 20 years he'll still be shouting "Get on!" and windmilling his arms. No one will know why he's doing that…but he will. And he'll laugh.
Anyhow, that summer we did a 20m grid on the top half of the field (and a small peninsula down to the bottom quarter) not that those details matter to you. Anyhow, here's one of our old shovel tests. What…you can't see it? It's right there! I mean, it's so obvious that there's no way while thrashing through waist high weeds I could have missed it, stepped in it and turned my ankle, right? Actually it's just a demonstration of how the weeds have come roaring back, even though this section was mowed last year, and the year before…and actually back in 2006 during the first Topo survey/Mag reading/Total Station run
Here's what it probably looked like in 2007:
Anyhow, the year of the shovel tests was good…we plopped down a couple of 2x2s, hit a couple features (juicy stuff, enough to keep an intrepid field student or two excited about the prospects of archaeology). Searching through my archives: a bell shaped pit from 2007 (1.3 m deep). Look at it. Revel in its bell-like nature.
While that's really cool in a "stuff" sense ("Gotta get the stuff! Gotta get it out!" – that guy), we're post hole fishing now, trying to finish off a couple of structures that we caught the middle of…but no edges on…in our trenches from 08. So my life is all about these (no, not the plow scar, the other thing…):
Exciting stuff, eh? Okay, while not visually exciting, or filled with "stuff" it's actually pretty darn cool, and I'm enjoying the game of trying to piece together these little dark circles (when they're real posts, and not rodent runs) to make some sort of structure. As a side note, you can kind of see the clay and gravel mixture here that makes things so wonderful, although none of the famous Wildcat Magnetic Cobbles are visible. The store just up the hill has been tremendously helpful, they've let us borrow all sorts of stuff (like sprayers, a couple years running they lent us an ATV to haul stuff), and have just been everything we could hope for. Every once in a while when we stop in for a drink, or supplies, or whatever, one of the clerks who recognizes us will ask us how it's going. The other day Ben and I (rather excitedly actually) explained that we'd found a series of posts holes. The man stopped…and after a second of thought responded "Post holes? Like what I dig for my fence?" The underlying text being: Really? That's it? Damn kids…get a real job!
Oh, here are the remains of a 2008 trench (filled in by yours truly: The Bobcat-driving, backfilling, bad ass). It's kinda cool how the plants grew back so differently where we backfilled…you can still pick out the 2x2s from 2007 and 2008, as well as the old trenches. (The trench is the strip of tall weeds with the white tops). I'm standing just at the edge of the newly growing forest and the old slash underground creek looking back up the hill.
I can't wait to see what our uber deep trench (okay, uber deep for us…to the OSHA limits or so) will look like in the future… (yes, the datum line is sagging and the floor dirty…but we finished with the trench a while back, it's kind of dilapidated now, just waiting to be backfilled). Look at that awesome break from the A to the B. Although, from this angle you can't see the other cool layers within the subsoil…but I didn't figure you wanted a profile picture with all the stratigraphy illustrated.
Oh, on a side note, I came across some odd tracks in the field…I wonder if it was a deer or something…
can deer drive 30 ton bright yellow front end loaders?
Okay, that's pretty much all I've got…some quick background is all done, a brief update on what we're working on (but none of the top secret stuff of course…after all, it's top secret…let's just say we've got proof of a radical Fort Ancient deer domestication program, it's undisputable…very exciting stuff, going to rewrite every book ever written. We've got top men working on it. What men? Top. Men.)
No comments:
Post a Comment