Octoberfest '07

We found stuff. And the weather could hardly have been better.

Thursday morning around 9 we (at this time Dick, Mikey, his sister Karen, Dawn, Linda and Yvonne and me) left the lab and drove to Randolph. Rich joined us and we had lunch and put our tents up, marvelling at the warmth, and then got the big tent up by about 5:30. We had spaghetti-sauce-over-rice and then a good campfire, and then no one slept terribly well.

Friday dawned cool but completely clear and we ate hash (apparently unknown in France and not widely appreciated in Canada) and went to dig out Blocks B

Rural B Block

(where I sort of work in between taking pictures and being a busybody)

and C, where Rich finds flakes and sometimes bifaces.


Block C before the tree became carnivorous.

We were doing proper archaeology well before lunch. I made timesheets and brooded over the paperwork. Sometime that day, Pierre and at least 9 Quebecois arrived (Jean-Pierre, Mathieu, Julie, Marie-Eve, Amelie, Emilie, Ariane, Audrey, Delphine) and Kevin and Anne, Brian J, Chris St.L, Sue M, Mike T,& Tim I, at least, arrived. Jean-Pierre went to look at the beaver pond, which was lower than we had ever seen it, and found a rhyolite flake in one of the beaver trails. We had Dick's chicken mole, which was very tasty, and another excellent campfire. I am a little foggy on the conclusion of the evening, but I am told I was having trouble finding my tent, even though Dick told me to look for the flamingo.


Can _you_ find the flamingo? and it was dark and there were, at that time, about twice as many tents.


So Saturday, there were three pairs of people digging shovel test pits in sticky mud and bright, hot sunlight down by the beaver lodge. The beavers had moved down to the next pool, since their entries and exits were high and dry.



They reopened Brian's Block F



and trowellers were shoulder-to-shoulder. George and Will got there late afternoon Saturday, which meant some people were reduced to full-time sifting. Emmanuelle turned out to be a specialist in optically stimulated luminescence, which would have been sexy if she had been made of plaster, which she is not.


Here she is with Dawn digging a deep profile for her samples.

The weather became a little less sunny and we put up huge tarp-tents over the blocks, which kept the rain off until supper. Mikey's wife Diane had arrived and they had erected the pop-ups outside the big tent, so there was room to huddle and still cook (Mark's jambalaya). Anne, wearing her rain gear in the drizzle, built a very successful fire. Dick suggested we take the pop-up tents down to the fire and we had a very agreeable evening watching the fire and listening to occasional drizzle. One of the Quebeckers played a very decent harmonica, and Kevin and Yvonne and I had brought home brew and there was generally enough to drink. In some people's cases, more.

Sunday we were unusually warm in the morning, like no sweaters. The sky burned off and it was lovely. Brian found a salamander




And then he found a broken-off scraper (surprise! F Block is all about scrapers)



in his block; a moment later, he found the broken bit, very close. It implies that area had been _very_ stable for the last, say, 10,000 years. People began leaving in larger numbers, which was sad. By the end of the day, F Block had been finished and filled in, the tree in C Block had tried to consume all of Rich's diggers



and we were tiring and lonely. We had a good but quiet campfire and lots of leftovers for supper.

Then it rained quietly most of the night. We were brave, because it had been such decent weather all weekend and if it had to rain, probably better on the few of us than on the many.


Dawn and Linda hope it will not be too wet.

It stopped raining, miraculously, about the time they finished drawing the profile of B Block, while I did clean-up-from-breakfast duty (using a piece of tinfoil to scour the frying pan really works. Amazing). I took the last picture



of the B Block section, and we packed our tents and then took down and packed the big tent, and then, still not raining, we backfilled B Block and went home.

Showers are about the best things ever. It was a great weekend. Much kibble.