Hotter than Satan's hairdryer

Yesterday I was back on the site. I told Dick I was sorry for whatever I did that made him send me to my room at the lab, but I imagine I will do it again next week. I hope whatever it is, it's fun. Saturday was oppressively hot and humid, a bit less so when it clouded over.

I saw a Life Bird (if you are a birdwatcher and you see one you have never seen before, it's a new Life Bird. I think my life list is in the high 100's, not very special), a peregrine falcon. A pair nested on top of the insurance building and fledged four young; I had heard about them, but not seen them. Today one helpfully sat on top of the "N" in Insurance, and then two of them came over to the bridge. One of those binocular cameras would have been handy. It seems the 'osprey' I saw last week and some of the wheezing 'catbird' noises have been the falcons all along. It was exciting to see one, just like the falcons in an Egyptian tomb painting.


Since we are a field school, some people are doing this for college credit or teaching CEU's. These people do projects, like term papers. Amanda intends to make a prehistoric style pot, fired traditionally. John is, God help him, a fan of modern history. He has been doing research with the real estate records and city work orders for the area immediately around the site, trying to discover what the slag layer is. In the process, he has found out that a water main was laid across and relaid several times. They have been tracing its path across the site with tape measures and soil probes, explaining some of the disturbances in the stratigraphy. The deep pit to the north turned out to be a carefully centered sondage on the water main; they tok it down a bit farther and took soil samples from the undisturbed layers. Then they filled it back in and replaced the grass. It looks quite convincing.




Most of the diggers are now on the south side of the shed. Those pits on the slope are no fun to work in. I was on the upslope and we were about 25 cm below the surface, about as deep as you can go without getting into the pit, into which, of course, I was in danger of falling. Sam on the downslope was in somewhat better shape. I dug, and surprisingly did not overdig, a three cm level and found two quartz flakes.



Here you can see Sam holding the surveyor's staff, while I use an optical transit to read the depth of the level the bottom of the staff is sitting on. You may notice the staff ends up in the tree branches. They make it harder to get the staff straight. The staff has to be extended that high for the transit to be able to read it.

We are now halfway through the dig. We have not yet found anything dramatic, assuming I would recognize such a thing. But it is not uninteresting, particularly now that we are finding fewer machine parts and broken glass. Even tiny quartz flakes are better than coal.