Week 4 and Going Strong

It's week four and Adam Lane, Jamie Haener, Jared Mclaughlin, and myself, Shelby Richison, are blogging this week. Everyone is still getting up at 5:00-5:30 in the morning, leaving camp at 6:00, working 'til 11:00 when we have lunch, and 30 minutes after that back to work until 2:00 in the afternoon. When we get back everybody splits up into their designated "teams" of four to five people to do a different chore every week. Our group started out cleaning up after dinner, then we spent the last two week artifact washing and sorting, this week we are blogging, and next week we are on cooking duty. And without further ado, we'll now blog about what we found at the site today.

Adam worked with Bridget today in a 2 meter by 1 meter unit (normally units are 2 by 2 meter squares). It is hoped that the unit will contain the edge of the structure, but at this time, only small amounts of charcoal have been found. That was Adam's take on the matter.  He's very serious about his troweling.

Jared worked with Shelby for a few hours. We troweled down to level, which was 25 centimeters below datum. Our unit is a two by one, an l-shaped unit. Troweling can be tedious, but we are seeing more progress everyday. Sarah Dumas sprayed foam around the post molds (charcoal), to help preserve the charcoal, and also to do wood sampling.

I also worked on Block 2, the unit scheduled to go down into the Archaic occupation.  The soil below 60 centimeters is clay, which is hard to sift, and takes longer to screen.

Below is a photo of an arrow head that was found in Tim and Cory's unit.

Jamie worked with Justin and Bryce today with the gradiometer. We each got a hang of holding it level and walking to the beeps rather quickly.  Our job for the day with the gradiometer was to see if we could find unmarked historic graves at Fort Towson. We had a great time and can't wait to help those at Fort Towson to understand more of what is happening under the ground.

In Block 3, we have reached an intact Archaic floor, which is quite exciting.  We recovered two more Archaic points, for a total of five from the unit, along with abundant debitage and a large Johns Valley chert core.  In the southeast corner of the unit, we encountered a large cluster of burned rock at 70 cmbd that may represent an Archaic hearth.

Adam Lane, Jamie Haener, Jared McLaughlin, Shelby Richison