Winding it up

The meat at Gauchos in Manchester was amazing. The non-meat was also excellent, although all of us opted for one more slice of pork loin rather than a conventional dessert. Wonderful feasting. [My son's 21st birthday event with my family went very well and all of us enjoyed it. Sam likes drinks involving mango purée. He did not even consider doing the 21-shots-and-call-911 routine.]

Staggered home (I did that on Thursday and Friday nights, too. Was only remotely hungry before lunch on any of the next days).
Thursday and Friday I was on site. Here are the shots from July 30 of the trench and its extension





and here it is the next week, getting cleaned up:





and having its profile drawn, with the horizontal orange strings giving a solid-enough datum to measure from.




Here is Julia with some of the long profile.

Once again, Dick won his dice with the weather gods. Thunderstorms were forecast, and blew right through. Those last couple of days were hot but not intolerable, except when the wind blew the very, very fine sand in our faces and crunched in our teeth. People continued to find tiny flakes and good sized pieces of modern metal right up to the end; possibly Heather did it best.



She and Mikey dug about a meter and a half (by 50 cm by 50,a Shovel Test Pit)deep and hit something rounded. Since Dick has been being haunted by Glacial Lake Merrimack
lately, he assumed it was a beach cobble. When Heather hit it with her shovel, I could feel it ring several feet away, so I was not altogether surprised when it turned out to be an unmapped two-inch pipe.

Dick says he's never going to dig in a city again. I think it may have had to do with the number of pipes (of which apparently DigSafe was unaware)that went through what we had believed was unchewed land. But other fears, like someone tipping over our Porta-Potty or doing unauthorized excavations by moonlight or passing out in our trenches, went unrealized; and none of the diggers fell off the hill onto the train tracks or was hit by a car.

It was a good dig. Not a great dig -- we didn't find occupation layers as interesting as I had hoped, given our proximity to the heavily stratified sites that were once nearby, or large pieces of pottery that might have fit back together, or mysterious Late Paleo/ Early Archaic artifacts. But I think the students learned a good deal about excavation and the intricacies of (and justifications for) paperwork. Jen said she had not been much good at recognizing firecracked rock before this dig and I had been worse; now we think we have that down. I had never seen any pottery in the New World before. I hope it will always be in dry soil a completely different color. And I have more confidence about telling peregrine falcons from catbirds.