I'm still tired!

I just finished the last of my homework for the Archaeology Field School. Yawn... There is a lot of work to these classes! I thought I'd tell you more about the 2nd week of class. It was MUCH better. Our group finally had a feature to dig. It is amazing that you really can tell where a feature is once you get below the plow zone, because the soil is a different color where the organic material decayed. It creates a "stain" in the soil. Sometimes they are very subtle, but they are there. Back to the dig... We only got down 5 levels, which is 25 cm. You only take 5 cm at a time, with a trowel unless you find something and then you use bamboo picks and paintbrushes to brush off soil. We found fire cracked rock, pottery sherds, ash, charcoal, some stone tools, and a lot of waste flakes. So, we know we had a garbage pit (a gold mine for an archaeologist!). We ran out of time to excavate any more so we had to leave it for the next group to continue to excavate. We already had a piece of pottery sticking out of level 6. It was hard to give it up, especially since it took so long to find a feature in the first place. I couldn't believe all of the paperwork involved with the dig. You make a plan map (where you will dig), based on a datum point you put in the highest part of the feature. You use that to make a level floor at each part. You take a sample of soil in the top of the level, which is analyzed back at the lab looking for tiny things that you would otherwise miss. These would be things like seeds that were preserved because they were charred in a fire. Then you start using a sharpened mason's trowel to take off a tiny layer of soil at a time. You do this over and over until you reach the bottom of a level. Anything you find in that level gets put in bags with the number on the bag that was assigned to that level. All the soil you trowel is also sceened through 1/4 inch mesh to find the smaller things that you may have missed. You think you are being thorough and finding everything, and then you screen the soil and find more. Once you reach the bottom of a level you photograph it with a sign board giving information about the feature number, level, etc. and you draw another map. These maps can change according to what you find in the feature. Ours got smaller. Sometimes you think your feature is bigger because of rodent runs and earthworms mixing the soil. Ours looked bigger at first because of this, but then under the rodent runs was sterile soil so we wereable to better define our feature. In August when we go back we will find out what they found under where we stopped. I enjoyed it so much more when I was doing something other than DIGGING!!!!