The rest of field school

This is all one digestible (I hope) lump, because it was confusing reading the other part in inverted thirds. There is a photogallery at Yahoo (http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/passeriform/album?.dir=/97afre2&.src=ph&.tok=phxj7WFB.0oFIo_q ), because I wanted the pics on the blog to be small and quick-loading. You might consider opening another window and moving along the gallery according to the dates. Or you can stick to the small pictures here and go there later.

I am having ISSUES with Firefox -- it won't show me the pictures on Yahoo or Amazon (or several other places, including my blog). Yet the toolbar for Blogspot is quite different and worse if I am using Safari as my browser. Nor does it help that not quite all my pictures are on this computer. To hell with it, I am going to publish.


7/29/06

Back in Colebrook, after a week in civilization. It wasn't very nice weather in civilization, some outright rain and really intense humidity. There was the usual trouble getting my brains to accept being at work, maybe not helped by spending two of the five workdays at a computer class. I spent virtually all of last Saturday sleeping or trying to get the previous entries ready to post. Or sleeping.
Doug had said something about driving me up to Colebrook on Saturday, looking at the site and going home. This seemed daft to me and with some difficulty I persuaded him to go up Friday afternoon and spend the night in someone's tent. A lot of people went away for the weekends so I knew there would be empty beds, as it were.
We left the chickens outside because the weather Saturday in the Concord area was forecast to be dreadfully hot, and got out of Concord around five Friday afternoon, in the middle of a driving rainstorm. But by the time we were north of Franconia Notch, the sky dried out somewhat. A bear lolopped across the road a safe distance in front of us. . It's a long drive, 150 miles from Concord. We took a quick break in Twin Mountain and drove straight through from there to the dig site in Colebrook.





The sun was just setting in the really lovely mists --- the diggers had been rained off by about 1:30 and the North Country was saturated. Doug got to see the site looking incredibly romantic, with extra mosquitoes. Then we got back in the car and went to the campsite, which seemed particularly far away.
Considerable partying took place last night, and some more people have left either to go home or for a day trip to Burlington, VT. It is quiet and cool, at least out of the sun, and hardly humid at all. Doug and I spent a long morning messing around in an inflatable kayak,



taking bad pictures of (and annoying) six great blue herons, a youngish American eagle,



an osprey (who was annoying the eagle), and a bunch of loons. It is perfect here, particularly with the light wind and the disappearance of the blackflies since the earlier session.




Sunday, about 8:30 a.m.

It's cold. I haven't been cold in weeks. I like it, but it changes all my survival strategies –now I want to sit in the sun, not out of it. I may go change into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Knitting might be once more a sensible thing to do. I may start trying to close doors and windows.
The herons and loons have been making a racket.
Later:
It was lovely weather all day, dry air and cool in the shade, though beyond ‘pleasantly warm’ in the sun. I got the inflatable kayak to steer better and went to the far end of the lake, where the water was very shallow. No wonder the moose likes it there; I spotted her trail out of the woods. The evening was cold again. I slept zipped all the way up in my sleeping bag.


Mist fairies on the lake, most mornings (moist)

8/1/06

Now it's Tuesday morning, well beyond misty and moisty: it had just started to rain when I went to bed, and it has been raining most of the time ever since. The weather forecast for today threatens increasingly brutal heat, so I am not too upset.

Yesterday's weather forecast led us to expect decent temperatures, and I suppose it wasn't really over 85. It wasn't terribly humid, either, but I didn't cope very well and felt like the Beast had dragged me all the way back from town. Ibuprofen helped. I heard the first cicada of the year at the dig, and then heard them all the way along the road back to the campsite. It is now officially Late Summer.

We had guests Monday: sixteen Quebecois arrived on site. The U. Of Montreal's field school lasts 28 days, no days off; they dig till 5 pm and do lab work (and write up whatever of their notes for the day that they can remember) till 8 pm. Claude brought them here for a 'day off.' They dug like fiends. They are really pleasant people, and they let me practice my French.


Claude and Violette with the channel flake

Since the beginning of the third session the dig has homed in on Edna's hotspot.


At the end of FS Week 4

In the week I was not here, they dug the top 40 cms off of 5x4 meters square. Impressive. Flakes are coming in flocks, nearly all high-quality black chert, and morale has greatly improved.



Nine days later (five work-days)


Linda, George, Will, Meghan, Sue and Monica have gone home. Katelyn, Alain, Brook, and Dawn are still here. There are a couple of people from last year in Manchester (Ele (pronounced 'Ellie') and Seth), and some others who are away till Sunday night. Ann has been here a week; she is married to Kevin, who works as a supervisor for the Maine state archaeologist. She has done most things in the restaurant business, but her husband's stories persuaded her to try The Digging Life. Now she is going back to college to study anthropology. Kevin is joining her for this week. She has very good taste in Zinfandel.

The large number of people with no idea what we were doing, including me, made for something of a circus atmosphere. They put me with Alain and Kevin in a weird spot: back in 1997, Edna had dug a 1x2 meter test pit. We are working off her old grid, but we have the advantage of more precise surveying tools. So this 2x1 has the edges, about 20cm wide, of two of our 1x 1 meter squares, portions of a total of six quads. The three of us took turns trowelling and then, since we found stuff, Dawn got on my case for having too many bags, and I sulked. Then she and Dick and Edna took away my pit partners and gave me a very nice Quebecoise to sift for me and try to help me keep up my paperwork. She was so pleasant I decided I would let her trowel and I would sift for her. She promptly found a channel flake, then 35 chert flakes, two of unknown stone, and overcut the daylights out of the layer. Nor have I found more than a very minor flake or so since. With the extra workers, Dick had them extend the big pit another meter along the side, so now it's 5x5 meters.

And it was not supposed to be too hot, but I felt as bad as I had during the worst of the second session. A shower and ibuprofen helped a lot. We stopped on the way home and bought 17 pounds of chicken. The Quebecois bought beer and wine and came to dinner. While Nathaniel and Alain and Dick and Ann made spicy Thai chicken, people took turns with Kevin's atl-atls.



The only prey they came close to killing was Dawn's car, but Kevin had not brought his Nissan-piercing darts so it survived.
The Quebecois were helped to drink most of what they bought, and set off for home around dark. We stayed up (okay, I stayed up; some people were still up, in the 'passing out on the porch sense,' of 'up' till midnight) about another hour and crashed, just as it started to rain.

Tuesday, then, it stopped raining not long before we left for the site, and stayed rainless, very humid but overcast till just after lunch. I trowelled but it was not terribly productive. I was doing paperwork when, with about five minutes' warning, the skies opened. They had time to put the giant tarp over the 5x5 meter pit and gather the clipboards and get the people under the pop-ups before it poured, which it did for about 20 minutes. After that, most unfortunately, the sun came out and the temperature soared. I helped sift things, but the new meter range is apparently barren. I did see a charming frog who would have fit sitting on a quarter, green with a thin chocolate stripe. Later I was sent to trowel again, until almost at the end of the day Dick got worried I would die on him and sent me to sit in the shade. I still felt better than I had the day before. Dawn did not have a notably good day and came home and jumped fully dressed into the lake. She said it helped.




August 2


Last night was hot and humid and airless. We milled around and I went to bed around ten and fidgeted and couldn't get comfortable. There was lightning, so far away I couldn't hear the thunder, and I was waiting for it to arrive. I am told it was about 11, when a strong gust of wind came through the campsite and tore the fly off Brook's tent. She was already on her second tent, the first having been shown up back in the second session. The rain started almost as suddenly and as hard, breaking off at intervals for more huge strong gusts of wind. Two other tents bit the mud, neither of them mine. I stayed nicely dry, but the wind was strong enough I was glad I was inside, weighing the tent down, and tried to figure out whether I would be crushed if a tree went down.
Meanwhile there were various people all wearing head-lamps, some in raingear and some not bothering, moving people's possessions into the cabin. I slept quite well until morning, when I found drowned bodies of refugees sleeping all over the living room.



It stopped raining by the time we headed for the site. Contrary to Dick's darkest expectations, the tarps had not blown off the pit leaving it to fill entirely with water, evolve life that would burrow and dig aand leave a mess of unstratified finds in a destroyed context. Nathaniel bailed the standing water out of the tarp; we pulled it off being careful of the walls, and we went to work.



Although it was supposed to be the hottest day of the summer, the sun stayed behind the clouds until after lunch. I trowelled along the west wall with Alex and Matt, finding nothing but enjoying trowelling the damp sand. I had to take a break before lunch, because, despite the relatively clement weather I was feeling the heat.
I was not the only one, as Edna began seeing a huge footprint in the sand (it was as if an occult foot had set down and left its shadow in darker-colored sediment). She began to show it to Dick and they looked at each other and shouted “Lunch!” in unison, fifteen minutes early.

The sun came out finally, and it turned into a stinker. I trowelled some more after lunch, and then made Matt finish my quad so I could cool off under the pop-up awning (qv). Then I helped sift; although the soil was a delight to trowel, (and way too easy to overcut) it was as much silt as sand in many places. The slightest humidity (hollow laughter) made it clump just enough to choke the one-eighth inch screen. It looked like a pile of obliging dust, but you had to beat on it with your trowel or smooge it through the screen by hand.

It rained again almost as soon as we reached home, but I slept through a small thunderstorm.

Thursday August 3

We bailed the tarp off again and went to work, an hour early as this was the last full day of digging. The killing heat has broken, although it is still in my estimation quite warm enough. There has been an increasing shortage of places to work, as various squares have proven sterile and fewer and fewer are still active. Ele has spent most of the week asking people if they needed sifting or water or sunscreen or anything, and the sifters have become very protective of the half-buckets of dirt the trowellers provide.

Either I am growing up or this is a most unusual site; I am actually eager to see what Dick and Edna will write up. I am guessing a wait of perhaps five years, if I am lucky, once they a) decide what tests on what samples they would like to analyze with mass spectrometers and other objective tools; b) get other specialists, like paleo-lacustrine and riverine geologists (and you think I am a nerd?), maybe some paleobotanists as well, to look at the soil samples, think about them, and return reports; c) get funding to run the analysis; c) concurrently run theories past people whose criticism they trust; d) have the copious spare time--remember, they both work for the state, approving or disapproving developers’ plans, dealing with dead bodies--usually not of the developers--, attending staff meetings, and having home lives and relationships and so forth, not to mention Octoberfest and next year’s field school—to write all this up in coherent form. There was a site across the river in Manchester from last year’s field school; the principal investigator runs her own business and even has funding for the write-up time and it has taken eleven years, assuming her report really does come out this winter.

But it has been quite the bijou little site: nice big area ringing the hotspot that we sampled quite seriously, which was nice survey-type archaeology with nasty rocky bits, many test pits on a fairly close-set grid all over the meadow, then the hotspot itself, nice unit-type archaeology with multiple layers and sand, at least some finds (Ele found over 400 small black flakes in one 50 x 50 cm quad; the quad next to her had 35. Tidy Indians), and more features than I have seen working in New England the last eight years combined. In all but one direction we definitely put edges to the hotspot, including bottom.

The diggers this third week have continued the general wonderfulness of the group we had second session, with the welcome additions of Matt K (his third season with SCRAP) and Heather R (her fourth). The weather has been either too hot during the day or too wet during the evening for campfires to be desirable, but the porch of the cabin has been great. Even the second session when the bugs were intense, they stayed largely away from there, and the blackfly and mosquito presence this has been negligible. The food has been good. The loon calls have been occasional but preternaturally lovely– to my chagrin, I slept through the incident Thursday night when the car alarm went off somewhere on the campground and set the loons off, too, perhaps in sympathy. Dick suggests this must be why loons don’t live in cities, as the constant wailing would be too much for them.

He was the guest speaker to the Colebrook Historical Society Thursday night; not perfect timing, as it meant he did a day in the field, went home, prepared a PowerPoint presentation, did the next day in the field and went the half hour back into town and presented it. We had an early dinner and Matt, I, Heather, and Chris cleaned most of the dishes up before taking our lives in our hands and letting Ele drive us to the town hall. The Historical Society had the sort of loft floor they had put in when turning the old church into the new town hall, which meant it was really warm. I think they would have filled all the seats even if some sixteen diggers (very clean) had not also shown up. Though it was strange to hear him talking in feet and inches, Dick did a good job explaining what we had been doing and making it comprehensible to the townspeople. We were involved with history some thousands of years earlier than anything in their exhibit, which ran to turn-of-the-last-century ephemera and furniture from the old school house. They seemed pleased about it all, particularly when Dick gave that season’s official T-shirt to the owners of the land we were exploring.



Evening in Colebrook

It was a beautiful evening, and for a change, it did not rain that night.

August 4.

It is my son’s birthday; he is 22. We are doing serious standing around, while one or two people trowel frantically, rather tastelessly continuing to find flakes in the southeast corner. The rest of us clean for photographs and try to help get paperwork done. There is a lot of that as they are bagging the fill of the features, the stake holes and the hearth.

Edna determined to get a “soil column,” a sample that we are so very much hoping with preserve the layering over the area with the features. She asked for a bunch of the Agnes scoops (little 10 x 20 cm galvanized steel demi-rectangles designed by a digger named Agnes Larkin many years ago, into which we trowel up the soil like perfectly designed dustpans. Occasionally we scrape with them, though we are not supposed to) to be carefully washed, which Alex did most bravely with one of his socks. Then I helped her stack two scoops of each chirality against the side of the 5-meter pit nearest the features, making a kind of double box, and I held them while she pounded them into the wall with a small sledgehammer.



I was relieved that her aim is as good as I had expected. Then she trowelled away the top 17 cm above them, and we got the heaviest guy on the site to plunge a spade straight down behind them and cut them off from the wall. We levelled the dirt off as carefully as we could. I wrapped them in many layers of tinfoil, labeling the top of the top one and the top of the bottom one so the geologist could put the two fruitcakes (almost that heavy) end to end and have a piece of the stratigraphy to play with.

Meanwhile people were drawing the profiles of the sides of the 5-meter pit. In England I learned to call these the sections. In any country, they are careful scale drawings of the layers of soil visible in the sides of a cut or a pit. We had drawn smaller profiles of the test pits and the feature-fillings. After lunch, the last pair of profilers (one measuring from a leveled, surveyed-in string line along a tape measure along the ground, and one drawing in and connecting the points) were finishing drawing the east wall, while other people were shoveling all the dirt we had sifted over the whole field school into the western half of the pit.



Eventually we backfilled the whole thing and replaced the sod on top, even though it didn’t look very healthy. Other people yet were packing all the field gear into the truck, which Dick had driven onto the site just this once.



We finished about three. The sadness of the day before had given way to a certain exhilaration, even if we didn’t have a “then, on the last day, we found ---” kind of sudden excitement.


Matt and I were supposed to be cooking, but it had been explained to me that this ‘cooking’ was to involve using up what was in the refrigerator. There was quite a bit of chicken, and at first Matt was going to grill it, but further research indicated to me that we would do better to make a kind of risotto thing. Matt said he had no idea what that was, so I brought him a succession of things from the fridge to chop and made something not unlike food, even if the ‘risotto’ did involve teriyaki sauce, baby corn, and bamboo shoots as well as the pepper and the onion and the mushrooms. I had to serve them as a side dish with the broccoli because too many people thought mushroom were revolting. This even though I cooked them with Italian salad dressing, and they were tasty.
After dinner Nathaniel did a trial-run presentation of what he had been learned about the manufacture of fluted points. He was studying in the evenings when he had not been driving the hour-and-a-half back to Vermont or working his real job; preternatural vitality, given that I preferred not to read anything over fourth-grade level after my much shorter commute and no day job. The evening dissolved into small groups after that, without much end-of-dig party feel, but I was exhausted and it was all right not to be traditionally drunk.

The next day people left one by one, and Dick and Edna masterminded the packing up of the lab and the kitchen gear. We tried not to steal any of the pans that had come with the cabin. SCRAP has acquired an impressive mess-kit, even if the really good knives had been lent by Mark and the casserole dishes by me. It gives Dick an excuse to troll the yard sales. I really enjoyed the setting this year; having a central cabin with a stable kitchen works better than the usual Octoberfest arrangement of four Coleman stoves in the huge plastic tent with no oven, no sink, no cupboards. There was space to hang out inside if you needed electricity, and for rained-out campers to sleep, and a big enough porch to eat outdoors at one big table. There was also storage for people like me who came and went, without having to cart off our camping gear back and for the, and a room that looked a bit like NASA headquarters with a couple of computers and printers and hundreds of power cords and connectors, where Dick spent too much of his time using an inadequate Internet dial-up. We certainly left the cabin in better shape than Dick had found it, with the mice and the squirrel and the snakes forced to admit we lived there too.

Then we packed as much as we could into Edna and Deb’s cars and into the Beast (they would make another trip the following week) and drove back to Concord.