Day 11 (By Elena)

It was raining heavily all night and early morning, so Dr. White postponed meeting at the SCIAA building until 9 am rather than the usual 8 am. Giving back that one-hour of sleep to our Broad River crew was legendary. We arrived on site at 9:45, and I could see the amount of pep and readiness in everybody’s eyes just because we got to have a extra hour of sleep. Due to the rain, there was a good amount of water to bail out of the site on the upper deck, which drained some of the peppiness from my crew. But, by 10:30 Sam and I were taking our beginning depths for Unit 5, and everybody was getting into the archaeological groove.

Looking good, feeling gorgeous, and ready to piece-plot.

We ended last week at around 78 cmbd (centimeters below datum), so our goal for today was to piece-plot any artifact that wouldn’t just slide through the ¼” screen and level off Level 6 at 80 cmbd.  Initially, we had to go through our paperwork and compare our data with the FS log to make sure all of our material culture was recorded accurately. Thankfully, the Unit 5 team had everything together last week, so it was just easy sailing from there on out.

After we reached a decision on our goal, we started piece-plotting artifacts. Sam and I were moving a bit slow, and our entire class was being quite talkative, so Dr. White had to remind us why we were here and why it is important to get as much done as we can with the amount of time we have. With that in mind, we kept troweling downward, piece-by-piece. Compared to previous weeks, this day was coming up kind of short on material culture. We were only finding small flakes, tiny rocks, and occasionally a tiny pottery piece.

Lunch time arrived and we got to sit at this picnic table directly next to the beautiful Broad River. Although I thoroughly enjoy the archaeology responsibilities I have to uphold, socializing with my crew and eating a quick lunch is the best part of my day (mainly because it was a beautiful day, and there were a lot of turtles out).
 
Sam and I had plotted 35 artifacts, and when we finished eating we still had to record the northing and easting of each piece. Although that extra hour of sleep helped enhance the morning energy, the subtracted time made time fly by and we didn’t finish plotting our pieces. We ended up short of our goal of 80 cmbd by just a centimeter or two throughout the unit, but we've still got one more remaining day of excavation.