New Site Jitters

Stomping down the vegetation and laying out the grid at the Kashevaroff Site

Community Archaeology begins tomorrow and we are excavating at a 'new' site.  I think the Kashevaroff site will be on the order of 5000 years old but it is 'new' because we know barely anything about it.  We only found it last fall and just dug one test pit (click here).  Last friday when laying out the excavation grid (6 by 6 meters) we tried a soil probe and confirmed that there is a deeply buried charcoal rich layer.  Still I am a little worried we will not find anything.  It's always this way when one starts at a new site - particularly at smaller, special-purpose, seasonal sites (old fish and hunting camps).  At old villages with all the artifacts on the surface, middens and housepits it is pretty obvious that you will find something.  But at the smaller sites it always seems possible that one might not find anything cool.

I probably should not worry too much about it.  The nearby Bruhn Point and Amak sites showed far less potential (click here) and then just this spring in Old Harbor we dug at 2 smaller sites yet (click here).  And we learned more at those four sites than I have at many village sites.  The point being - we know a lot already about what happened in the villages.  We know very little about what happened at the small special purpose camps where people hunted, fished and gathered away from the main village.

Still I am keeping my fingers crossed - here we go!

Patrick