Another beautiful day for fieldwork -- maybe a little on the warmish side by the end of the day, but the humidity was still low enough to make the heat tolerable. We started the day completing the layout of our grid and several excavation units -- below, Jennifer and Rachel hold the ends of the long reel tapes while other students are placing pin flags in the background.
Here Erik is placing one of the nails at the corner of his team's excavation unit.
By about 8:30, we were stripping the sod from our first set of excavation units for Summer '07.
Our backdirt pile was fairly tiny after the first wheelbarrow was dumped...
But by the end of the day, the hard work of the students was evident several dozens of wheelbarrow loads later...
As the temperature rose above 90 degrees in our open field in the late afternoon (no matter what the "official temperature" was), I introduced the students to one of those small pleasures that makes life worthwhile after a hot day of hard digging -- a gentle spritz of cold water about the face and head.
By the close of the day, we had removed the plowzone (the upper soil disturbed by years of plowing) from 20 square meters of units. By mid-morning on Thursday, we should be starting to expose the postholes, pits, and other features preserved intact from almost 1000 years ago. As we expected, not a lot of spectacular artifacts were found in the upper disturbed portion of the site -- but an interesting sharpening stone did turn up in one of our units. A few hundred years ago, native peoples used this stone to sharpen their stone axes, chisels, adzes, and other tools before discarding it.
More news tomorrow.