All done but for the profiles and backfilling . .. .

Field crew from the morning of the last day of excavation - Later on Rome and Marnie joined us for the afternoon 

This year we did not miss a single day of digging on the Community Archaeology excavation to rain.  That said, on wednesday we barely finished the final photos of the profiles and main excavation block before it started to RAIN.  Yesterday, rather than backfill and draw profiles in the rain, we worked in the lab.  And today it is raining again.  It is beginning to look like we will be backfilling next week - who wants to backfill in the rain when they can wait for a sunny day?  And the lab work has to get done too.

Of more immediate concern I have to draw the profiles.  Drawing profiles is one of the most important tasks of the excavation, and I have this naggling sense of worry hanging over me until it is accomplished.  Drawing profiles is when I draw the sides of the excavation units (see bottom photo for an example of what I need to draw).  It is very difficult to see all the layers we excavated in profile and to map out their relationship to each other.  For instance, do some layers truncate other layers or do they simply lie on top of each other?

Drawing profiles takes a lot of mental concentration and then there is all the measuring and math to get the layer boundaries in the right places.  It is no fun to do it in the rain!  But today I think I will give it a try.  I'll try and get at least one of them done so I can relax for the weekend.

Also if you look closely at the bottom right of the profile shown below you can see a house cut and floor in profile.  It looks like the house had roof sods and it probably dated to a little over 6000 years ago.  I suspect this age because we did find a whetstone on the floor which indicates they were grinding slate.  We also found a chipped stone bipoint (see Jill's point below) and an ochre grinder.  The assemblage and floor resembles one we excavated last summer at old harbor (click here) that dated to about 6300 BP.

Patrick

Hard at work on the last day of excavation

That's a BIG pile of dirt that needs to go back in the hole - somewhere on the order of 50 cubic meters!

Rome supplies the screen with more buckets of dirt

From my screening 'perch' I can see what is happening everywhere on the excavation

That's me hamming it up while Leslie and Jesse clean up the main excavation block for profile photos

Jessica with a chipped stone knife she found

Jill and a nice OBI bi point

Our North wall profile - I have to draw 3 of these walls before we can backfill