Last Week of Excavation, Day 2 by Dan P.

Dan uncovering a find

My alarm repeatedly reminds me of the time. 7Am has come again. The sun has not yet breached the tops of the trees but I can already tell it's going to be a warm day. The previous day we had started a new CU, before we had to stop. The number of lithics that we had uncovered has been amazing in comparison to what we've seen thus far, and it keeps getting better. Just as we started to go down from 10 to 20cm we started to uncover rounded rock. Only a few of them turned out to be artifacts but at the time I felt like a kid on Christmas being forced to take the entire day, monotonously and surgically unwrapping each one. As we uncovered the artifacts all I wanted to do was pull them out and look at them. But no! That's not the right way. We have to wait. We leveled off the unit at 20cm and we had discussed the possibility of a feature being present in the sidewall. A feature would mean a chance to do some real archeology excavating. I'm not sure as to all that a feature would entail but I am excited to learn something new.

Later that night we all dined together and discussed the day’s events. Many of my class mates where enjoying the bountiful amount of lithics that their units where providing. This was a wonderful change in pace from the other two sights. My fellow dig bums all seemed jovial and in good spirits after another hard day of excavation. We finished off the night with a guest discussion with Ethan about the importance of the sights we have been working on. Ethan also talked about his past and passion for archaeology.