Tuesday, June 15, 2010

TAS Field School, Days 3 & 4

Yesterday was the day the business of rising and setting with the sun and working all morning caught up with me. I was too zonked to think, much less post coherently. So today I took my speed - as my husband calls the morning cup of fully caffeinated tea in which I normally cannot indulge if I hope to sleep - and as a result I'm fit to report.

Not that there's much to report. We have six units open and all have been relatively disappointing after the heady first day's screening. I've been kneeling in the future barbeque pit scraping nearly-sterile (except for ants, hackberry roots, and such) dirt and reflecting that either only a handful of men ditched their military equipment here, or I'm kneeling on a gold mine. And I got some evidence to back me up this morning when I found another couple of those rivets-with-leather and familiar-looking corroded plain buckles that were so abundant in "the pile," right on the edge of the south wall, which is also the north side of the pit. There's a corroded bone (probably a ham or beef shoulder blade) right at level and some color changes in the dirt indicative of rust and leather. When I tried brushing the dirt away from the bone, a piece of it broke away from the wall and some leather-and-rivet jumped out from below it. If anything cool is to be found in Unit 5, Level 4 - opened bright and early tomorrow - is where it will be found. At some point tomorrow or Thursday the bottom of the pit will be shovel tested - i.e. a limited area dug straight down - to check the gold mine hypothesis.

I've also meta woman who gave me the phone number of someone in the Quihi Historical Society and took me to a place where I saw a blackpoll warbler (life bird!), so I personally am ahead for the week even if we've found all there is to find.

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