We were a little nervous to return to the site this Friday, since the weather had been so terrible for the past week. The shiny new tarp had quite a bit of water to pump out, as well as a family of mice that called the site home. Once we were ready to get to work, I was assigned to piece plot the southern half of Unit 12 with Ben. As you can see, we were able to fill this bag with a good many finds including about a dozen flakes and a large fabric-impressed sherd. Meanwhile over in Unit 3, where Caroline and Sam were working, a second axe-head was unearthed! The odds of this are incredible, and I can't wait to see what we can learn from them in the lab. Piece plotting is done by scraping the soil lightly with a trowel, and flagging anything you might find (mostly flakes for us) with a piece of tape so that it can be mapped out on a graph before removal. This kind of documentation is important when it comes to debitage and shatter, because it can help to piece the material back together and work out how lithics were made. Ben and I spent the day doing this layer by layer, and we will continue next week until we reach 80 centimeters below datum. Before we set out at the end of the day, Robert brought out some blow guns for us to take a look at! He made these himself from local river cane, as well as the darts which he fletched with thistle. I tried to shoot one, and it is a lot harder than it looks. Very happy to have ended the day on a fun note!
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Student Blog (2018)Blog posts written by the students of the 2018 Broad River Archaeological Field School Archives
April 2018
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