If you've ever done any kind of fieldwork, you know that collecting data out in the real world is different from collecting data in the lab. You control what you can control, but the real world will always be unpredictable and sloppy in ways that are usually not helpful. An important part of learning to do field archaeology is learning to plan, anticipate, prepare, and quickly adjust to figure out how to meet your goals even when the real world doesn't seem to want to cooperate.
Yesterday was one of those days when the real world threw us an elbow.
For the most part, things have been going surprisingly smoothly during this field school: the students have been great, the information we're collecting is of significant value, and we've barely lost any time to weather. As I wrote last week, I formulated a plan to wind down and close things out in good order over the remaining field days. Some parts of that plan still hold. Other parts now require substantial re-working.
Let's do the good news first.
In the "upstairs' excavation block, Units 4 and 6 and have been leveled off at 100 cmbd (centimeters below datum), the base of level 8. There is lot of material in the floor at this depth that will have to wait until excavations are re-opened at some point in the future. Additionally, the final floor scrape revealed several roughly circular areas of darker, charcoal-flecked sediment that are almost certainly the tops of cultural features. Large pieces of fire-cracked rock are scattered around on the floors of the units.
Yesterday was one of those days when the real world threw us an elbow.
For the most part, things have been going surprisingly smoothly during this field school: the students have been great, the information we're collecting is of significant value, and we've barely lost any time to weather. As I wrote last week, I formulated a plan to wind down and close things out in good order over the remaining field days. Some parts of that plan still hold. Other parts now require substantial re-working.
Let's do the good news first.
In the "upstairs' excavation block, Units 4 and 6 and have been leveled off at 100 cmbd (centimeters below datum), the base of level 8. There is lot of material in the floor at this depth that will have to wait until excavations are re-opened at some point in the future. Additionally, the final floor scrape revealed several roughly circular areas of darker, charcoal-flecked sediment that are almost certainly the tops of cultural features. Large pieces of fire-cracked rock are scattered around on the floors of the units.
Base of level 8 (100 cmbd) in Unit 4. Large pieces of fire-cracked rock are scattered around an area of dark, charcoal-flecked sediment that is probably the top of a pit feature. (Note; the photoboard says 'level 6' - that's an error).
I had the students draw the large rocks and the stains on a single plan map for the two units, which are at the same depth. My guess is that we're seeing pit features similar to those exposed in the machine-cut profile wall at about this depth. Depending on the vertical integrity of these deposits (i.e., how much artifacts have been moved around vertically from where they were originally deposited), the features may pre-date the Mack component or may be a part of it. We won't have an answer to that until the features and the surrounding deposits can be excavated. I'm not going to assign feature numbers to these stains until I have a chance to work on them further -- a few more centimeters of depth in these units will probably help resolve the stains into discrete features, allowing them to be confidently defined in plan and excavated.
A refresher of the original profile of the machine cut. Features 4 and 5 (pit features lined with fire-cracked rock) are at a similar depth the probable features exposed in the floors of Units 4 and 6 in the block.
Unit 5 is also coming to a close. The base of that unit will rest at 80 cmbd. The large rocks in the floor will remain until the next time the unit is opened.
And now for the bad news.
The beautiful 3m-long profile wall that Jim Legg has been working on all semester suffered a major collapse while we were gone during the week. It doesn't look to me like the severe weather we had on Wednesday had anything to do with the collapse: there was no evidence that water had come in from the top or eroded the wall at the bottom. It appears, rather, as though the soft sands of Zones 3 and 4 just decided they didn't want to be on the wall anymore. They may have lost their cohesion as they dried out, sloughing off about 25-50 cm of the wall into a large pile of slump.
And now for the bad news.
The beautiful 3m-long profile wall that Jim Legg has been working on all semester suffered a major collapse while we were gone during the week. It doesn't look to me like the severe weather we had on Wednesday had anything to do with the collapse: there was no evidence that water had come in from the top or eroded the wall at the bottom. It appears, rather, as though the soft sands of Zones 3 and 4 just decided they didn't want to be on the wall anymore. They may have lost their cohesion as they dried out, sloughing off about 25-50 cm of the wall into a large pile of slump.
The damage to the west wall of Unit 9. The technical term for this is "total bummer."
The collapse came at a particularly painful time, as we were planning cleaning and photographing the entire 5m profile that morning in preparation for drawing the whole thing. I was even planning on taking the field school photograph with the beautiful profile wall as a backdrop. Obviously, a change of plans was required both for the day and for the field school exit strategy.
The first thing to do was deal with the sediment from the collapse. We moved some screens into place and pulled some students from the "upstairs" block to move and screen the dirt. Even though the artifacts were now out of vertical context, anything in the slump still has the potential to tell us something about the occupations of the site (we still don't have any diagnostic artifacts from context in the lower deposits, for example, so an Archaic projectile point from the slump would help us understand the sequence of deposits even if we didn't know exactly where it came from). We went ahead and chopped out the overhanging near-surface sediments, as their presence would make protecting the profile more difficult.
The first thing to do was deal with the sediment from the collapse. We moved some screens into place and pulled some students from the "upstairs" block to move and screen the dirt. Even though the artifacts were now out of vertical context, anything in the slump still has the potential to tell us something about the occupations of the site (we still don't have any diagnostic artifacts from context in the lower deposits, for example, so an Archaic projectile point from the slump would help us understand the sequence of deposits even if we didn't know exactly where it came from). We went ahead and chopped out the overhanging near-surface sediments, as their presence would make protecting the profile more difficult.
Dealing with the collapse.
The profile of Units 1 and 2 (protected behind plywood since last May) still needed to be dealt with, and the north wall of Unit 9 was intact. DuVal and I removed my plywood buttressing from the Unit 1/2 wall and found that it was pretty much as I left it, which was a relief. Also, the nest of snakes that I had dreamed would be behind the wall was absent. Jim Legg scraped down that surface (which was partly excavated on the 1000 E line and partly a concave surface left by the original machine excavation) and two students made a profile drawing after we photographed it in the afternoon.
Students draw the profile of Units 1/2 (left) while Jim Legg prepares the north wall of Unit 9 to be photographed. In this photo, all the slump has been removed from the Unit 9 wall collapse.
Needless to say, the circumstances we faced yesterday in the field were not what I would have chosen. My vision of having that entire 5m profile all open and clean at once decisively (and literally) collapsed. It's a setback, of course, but in reality we didn't lose that much information. As it stands now, the 3m profile can still be cleaned, photographed, and described in a way that will add significantly to what we know about the deposits at the site and provide context to the artifacts recovered through the excavation of Unit 9. It won't be as nice as having a profile all along the 1000 E line, but I'm not sure it will make a whole lot of difference in the long run. I'm formulating a plan for dealing with the profile that will allow me to securely protect it until I can return to it with a crew again and get it all in good shape for the future.
On another "glass half full" note, I want to say that I was very happy with the way my students handled themselves yesterday. I asked several of them to switch gears several different times to help out as we dealt with the collapse and the aftermath. They all responded, pitched in, and helped when and where requested. The students "upstairs" finishing up the block units did almost everything on their own, from uncovering the units in the morning to covering them back up at the end of day. I went up there sporadically to assess things, make strategic decisions, and give tactical advice. But for the most part they did it themselves. As a teacher, it's a great feeling to see them at this level of competence and independence -- they've come a long way from what they could do on that first day we went out there. That's a win.
On another "glass half full" note, I want to say that I was very happy with the way my students handled themselves yesterday. I asked several of them to switch gears several different times to help out as we dealt with the collapse and the aftermath. They all responded, pitched in, and helped when and where requested. The students "upstairs" finishing up the block units did almost everything on their own, from uncovering the units in the morning to covering them back up at the end of day. I went up there sporadically to assess things, make strategic decisions, and give tactical advice. But for the most part they did it themselves. As a teacher, it's a great feeling to see them at this level of competence and independence -- they've come a long way from what they could do on that first day we went out there. That's a win.
RSS Feed
