Well, who knows if this will post? All I know is that Blogger is acting very weird.

Not much new with me these days. I'm back from a week of test pitting in forests, thick brush, and tall weeds that were taller than me! A sure sign of fertile earth? When the goldenrod effectively isolates you from the rest of the world and your co-worker can't find you until you hold up your shovel.

It's very physical work and it was kinda depressing as we didn't find any site per se. We did find a wicked stone boulder fence in the middle of a now forest. The boulders were piled up to sometimes three stones high and some portions of the wall went above the 6 ft mark. The wall was in two surviving portions- one was about a 100m long and the other a little less than 50m.

And yes, I am aware that I just mixed two different measurement systems in the same paragraph. I'm of a flexible generation...

This day in town is proving to be a bit frustrating. I am waiting for a letter of clearence from the collection people that I paid years ago. Without this letter, I cannot apply for funding for school. They insist that this week they really will send it. To be honest the whole thing is freaking me out, and I want to yell at the guy who keeps saying its taken care of. Listen "Steve" its not taken care of because I don't have it yet. You keep saying that the letter is sent (I never received it), that you can fax it to me (he hasn't) and you never pick up your extension when I call (I finally got through by way of being transferred through a few people). Then today you say that it should go through because you gave the number to your "girl" to send. Dude, wasn't that same person in charge of mailing the letter to me?

Anyways must go off to have pho(soup). Must power up for my last week of work and Dayle's family reunion up at the farm tomorrow.

Well, who knows if this will post? All I know is that Blogger is acting very weird.

Not much new with me these days. I'm back from a week of test pitting in forests, thick brush, and tall weeds that were taller than me! A sure sign of fertile earth? When the goldenrod effectively isolates you from the rest of the world and your co-worker can't find you until you hold up your shovel.

It's very physical work and it was kinda depressing as we didn't find any site per se. We did find a wicked stone boulder fence in the middle of a now forest. The boulders were piled up to sometimes three stones high and some portions of the wall went above the 6 ft mark. The wall was in two surviving portions- one was about a 100m long and the other a little less than 50m.

And yes, I am aware that I just mixed two different measurement systems in the same paragraph. I'm of a flexible generation...

This day in town is proving to be a bit frustrating. I am waiting for a letter of clearence from the collection people that I paid years ago. Without this letter, I cannot apply for funding for school. They insist that this week they really will send it. To be honest the whole thing is freaking me out, and I want to yell at the guy who keeps saying its taken care of. Listen "Steve" its not taken care of because I don't have it yet. You keep saying that the letter is sent (I never received it), that you can fax it to me (he hasn't) and you never pick up your extension when I call (I finally got through by way of being transferred through a few people). Then today you say that it should go through because you gave the number to your "girl" to send. Dude, wasn't that same person in charge of mailing the letter to me?

Anyways must go off to have pho(soup). Must power up for my last week of work and Dayle's family reunion up at the farm tomorrow.

Update: Well, I finally got the letters yesterday afternoon, a little after 3pm, which made it too late to pop up to the university with it. Curiously, for a document that the company has been claiming sent out for over a month, the date of "release" was August 25, 2006. Now, really, if you're going to lie about having done something, shouldn't you cover your butt a bit more effectively?

One of the things that is often a trial for me in my non-archaeology life is my weight. Since starting a field position this summer, a number of people have asked me if I've lost weight from archaeology.

Sadly, no.

However, I did hear that somebody was worried about how my weight loss program was going, due to me being away from the gym and all. I must be getting fat.

Thankfully, no.

But a day in the field can let you know about muscles you'd forgotten you had. It takes stamina and strength to shovel litres of soil all day, and a full screen of dirt is a mighty heavy object. And that's just on the days I get to work on a full, 1 by 1 metre square pit.

Then there's field testing. Walking through kilometres of plowed dirt, dragging a shovel and screen through forests and bush so that I can test pit every 5 metres, complete with my back pack full of water, flags and maps...

It's not a job for the sedentary inclined.

But since I will be going back to school this fall (yay me!) I will have to think about ways to keep fit. Washing artifacts is simply not as calorie burning.

In real news, all is going well. We're a little further north this week, doing some test pitting. And have we found anything?

No.

So blah.

So, when a cool artifact is found in the movies, the scene often goes something like this:

In a dim but somehow golden light (even if its in a cave) hands are carefully sweeping away dirt with a small broom. The earth/dust falls swiftly away to reveal a gorgeous ceramic pot. Soon the pot is free and gently pulled out to an admiring array of excavators....

How a cool artifact is often really found.

Take your shovel and sweep 4 or 5 good shovelfulls into your screen. So far its the third screening from your square and you really haven't found anything. Some sherds of pottery, some flakes, your plastic baggy has enough that it won't blow away in the wind, so its resting open beside you on the backdirt pile from the last square.

Shake your screen back and forth about ten times. Sort out cobblestones. Shake some more, then look into the screen and begin picking out stuff.

Rock. Rock. Pottery.Pottery.Pottery.Pottery. Oops, no, that was a rock. That one there, that's definitely a sherd and decorated too. Rock. Flake. Flake. Pottery.

Bone. Oh, that's nice.
A long thin strip of bone. You pause because there are marks on the bone. Cut marks, no incised marks. In a pattern, a sort of squiggly line in between two straight lines. Just for decoration.

Time for Show & Tell!

"Hey everyone, I think I have something here." You hand over the thin, rather delicate artifact to a collegue in the pit beside you.

"Holy..... Wow." He passes it over to the next person.
"Oh, cool!"
And so on. I officially have the coolest artifact of the day. In fact, when the owner comes by to drop some stuff off, he is shown the artifact and says,
"Now, this, this is really neat. P. (guy who showed him a bone bead a moment earlier), you suck. You K., you rule!"

I found other pretty stuff today, but nothing quite as neat as my sliver of bone, that was probably someone's comb.

This is such a cool job sometimes.

Love to everyone.

So, this is going to be a short post. Two long days in a row. It's late and my hosts will be wanting this computer room to be darkened and abondoned. And I still haven't eaten supper yet.

Finding cool, cool stuff.

more tomorrow maybe. Or Thursday.

In the meantime, if I don't get through tomorrow...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEX!!!

Well, I'm back but only for a night.

Last time I posted, I was on my way to a wedding in Oakville. That was about a week ago. And I don't think I've even talked to my family since Monday night.

The wedding was great and was held on Sunday, so as to take advantage of the holiday Monday. Several of Dayle's friends from university were there and a few people he knew from other contexts as well. The reception was held in a heritage barn, and filled with twinkly lights, an effect that I rather liked.

All the archaeology/historian people (& their consorts) were seated together. Except for one lone historian guy who was supposed to be seated at the "singles" table but came over to party with us later on. And our table *did* dance and party through the night and later at the hotel. I went to bed relatively early at 2am. Blah.

On Monday of course I was tired, but there is no rest for the wicked and off Dayle and I went to New Lowell, so we could pick up all the crew equipment we'd left behind, so we could ferry people to the wedding.

Tuesday morning we were off bright and early to Welland and I had my first official "away" experience as we stayed through the week in a motel room. I'd love to talk about what I saw in Welland but well, there just wasn't time or energy. We get up at 6:30 am, stumble around getting dressed, getting breakfast, getting coffee and driving the 20 minutes to the site. Work 10 hours. At 6pm, we stumble back to the car, and debate what we need to do (pick up groceries, pick up supplies, pick up supper?) and do we need to shower before we are fit to be seen in public? 10 pm comes very quickly on workdays...

So, no time for sightseeing.

The site itself is proving to be an enjoyable experience. It's in a shaded glen (mosquitos!) and just a few centimetres below the surface is an Archaic (5000-3000 BC) site. It's mostly a lithic site, which means that it is a site where people sat around and made stone tools. There's no sign of living there (i.e. a hearth, a trash midden etc.) but there are 40-90 artifact coming out of every square. Mostly its the flakes that come from the tool making process, but we've run into a few tools and an imcomplete point as well.

I don't know where I'm going to be this upcoming week. I might be back in Welland, I might be up around Barrie again. I won't know until Sunday night. And I'll be up in New Lowell for most of the weekend, so I really have to pack well. We're up in New Lowell, to entertain a family guest from France and apparently take him to Algonquin Park.

This is really awful of me, but there's a part of me that would rather curl up in my apartment and rest for a few days, but them's the brakes.

Hopefully I'll blog again soon. Probably on Sunday, when I know what's going on!

First of all, to my sister. Yes, there will be message sent to our beloved matriarch regarding the Leo's package.

It is Thursday and it is the beginning of four days off although I have such a chaotic weekend that I may post in the middle of it (we've got an out of town wedding to attend).

I spent yesterday at home, missing work because of heat exhaustion. Can you believe it? I felt fine on Tuesday until around 11pm and then.... WHAMMO! I guess my body was having trouble recuperating from the day. And I found out that I wasn't the only one, another member of our team, a guy who's been with the company for years, also succumbed. So I spent yesterday drinking, drinking, drinking all kinds of fluids and moving very little. I found out early on in the day that every time I tried to push myself, I got all woozy. But by the early evening I was feeling better - just in time to enjoy the HUGE thunderstorms that ripped through the area last night.

I have to say, thunderstorms are much more interesting to watch in the country than in the city. You can see everything rolling around out there and its quite scary at times. Dayle and I sat in with his parents and just watched everything go by. We had potato chips too.

Today, I was raring to go and I'm really glad I let my self recuperate yesterday because we ended up having a 12 1/2 hour day, and we just crawled in recently. I'm still looking forward to dinner and a shower.

The cause for this were the three test pitting projects we had on our plate today. Test pitting is what you do in an area after the preliminary research about a property has been done. An archaeology crew is armed with shovels and dirt screens and we walk rows up and down the site, about 5 metres apart. Every 5 metres we dig a pit (about the size of our shovel) down to the stones or sub-soil. Some test pits I've experienced have been as deep as my leg. Most of the ones we dug were 3-12 inches deep.

Today's challenge was the evil bushes that occured on every single site. There was bush, brush and every thing else that could tackle a person even with out equipment.

We found one site.

More later,
K.

118 artifacts in one square metre! Yeah! That's like a personal record. My square was full on Woodland pottery, flakes and a nice bone or two. It was an awesome feeling watching that stuff come out of the dirt.

You know how archaeologists are always going on in interviews about how archaeology is all about the analysis and its all in the information gathering. Yeah, well, they're lying.

Okay, analyzing artifacts is interesting and you learn about the artifacts by washing and cataloging and then by mapping everything out you can find quite a bit of stuff out. And that has its own special thrill.

But really? We're in it for the cool stuff we get to find.

So, if you read yesterday, you would have noticed that I said we were going surveying. But plans changed and we found out at the office that we were to hit this pre-contact midden site.

And yes, the day was hot. Gah. Very hot.
And my square did get nominated for the hell hole of the day, due to the tree trunk in the middle of it.

Oh, but it was sweet!