Field School V: Winding up the second week

Wednesday the 19th dawned perfect, sunny and dry. It even dawned with a tolerable pink sunrise. I had the presence of mind to postpone plugging the coffee machine in, waked Linda, and ran down to the lake. It was a very gently rippled calm, and we could see little bars of pink rolling across to the shore. At this point, my camera's on/off button, which had been dicey since I bought it, gave up the ghost. The last picture it took was a really lovely sunrise. We put a print of it on the refrigerator.



Dick has been greatly discouraged by the lack of finds. Moved by our diligence in the God-awful heat, he decided we needed a field trip. He decreed this the day before, allowing the lucky ones who could to sleep an extra half hour. Sadly, the rendezvous meant an earlier start to get to the campsite, for commuters like Nathaniel, who drives in over an hour from Vermont. He still sleeps later most mornings than I do. Suck it up, kid.

We made a convoy through the Dixfield Notch to Berlin, retracing the route home from Mt. Washington. The library opened at noon, so we went and climbed up Mt. Jasper to the rhyolite veins in the heat of the day. Every time I go up that mountain I think it gets steeper. It was clearer, sunnier air than ever before, though.


View from Mt. Jasper over Berlin. (Linda photo)



Diggers looking into the mined-out portion of the rhyolite vein. (Linda photo)



Linda in the entrance to the mine (Brook photo)


And scrabbling around in the (may-they-come-to-their-ethics-and-quit-destroying-MY-heritage) rockhound/outlaw-flintknapper debris, I was able to find a whole slew of rhyolite flakes. Fear of losing the ability to see flakes over a winter or even a weekend is widespread among the archaeology community. Finding them proved I had NOT become artifact-impotent. They may not have been 'cultural' (which is to say, made by humans more on purpose than not) but there were a whole lot more flakes there on the mountainside than on the fields of Colebrook.

We lunched among mosquitoes and returned to the library. This time it was open and we were able to have a good stare at the Archaic and possibly Paleo artifacts, found on a dig in the 1970's around the Mt. Jasper rhyolite mine.



Typical curio case in Berlin Library, ca. 1977 (Linda photo)

I think by then some people were more interested in the bathroom and the Internet, which is indeed faster in libraries than state forests.

We tore them away and drove to Jefferson to show them another site where we had found things once upon a time, honest. For excellent reasons Dawn and I became separated from the group. The thirteen of them were lost for about half an hour and we were quite cross. And hot, even if it was less humid.

After we got home, Dick and Dawn and I went to the supermarket. Then several of us went around the lake in Will’s kayak again. The moose left after Linda saw it (she’s been in NH since 1987 and this was her first moose, so it was Way Cool), but I really enjoyed getting up close to the loons. The eagle made an appearance, catching fish and annoying the loons. For a few minutes the blackflies kept their distance.

That night Will and George set out the first campfire of the dig. The weather was cool enough to enjoy it and it was good to smell the woodsmoke.


Thursday, July 20, saw us back at the sterile test pit fields. First thing in the morning we found that Barbara the lab supervisor was going home. She had arranged to be on site for the middle three days of every week, teaching a few people a day to catalogue the finds. There weren’t any finds. She had done one day the previous week, and tried to work on site yesterday, but Barbara has back problems. She couldn’t even screen without bad physical results, so off home she went. I had hoped breaking my camera would provoke finds, and surely sending the lab supervisor home should bring something out of the ground? I told people we had sacrificed her. The gods do not seem to be easily bought.

Despite the discouraging lack of artifacts, the soil changes are interesting and require, one way or another (I mean either vertically or horizontally) a lot of dealing with. Brook, for instance, has decided to stay on rather than return to Idaho for the last two weeks; she says she’s learning a lot. Even I think I am, since I have a patchy background and a leaky memory and keep thinking I knew nothing last year. It’s a nice way to feel, and I hope after two weeks next year I will feel the same way. But we all miss finding Stuff. Dick says he feels worse than anyone, responsible as he is for bringing us here. I doubted that till I recalled many of us were running around in kayaks and talking to loons, while he was on the slowest Internet connection in the world deleting spam and responding to irrelevant questions. He makes us come out to lovely places and has to stay inside, and the slowness of the connection means that it is bedtime by the time he feels all right about quitting. Not a recipe for a happy boss.

Nathaniel and Catelyn were bringing a one-by down to the level of his original test pit, but not finding much more charcoal. Alain and Sue were trying to get the whole 1-by-1 meter down to the level of their weird bunch of rocks. Three or four one-bys had proven deep and featureless. Dick had taken a lot of people to do a very detailed and painstaking grid-out of the area in the center, around Edna’s hotspot (finding which appears increasingly miraculous. It’s a speck even in this field, let alone the whole area of the pipeline target). The layout looks sort of like a quilt, in different colors of nylon string and coordinating pinflags.

Since Mike had left Tuesday night, Will joined me in trying to make sense out of the interdigitating layers. We trowelled in unbecoming positions on our stomachs and elbows until I found some weird round spots on the floor of my quad. I tried to make them go away, but they persisted. After lunch I made Dawn come and look at them, and she made Dick come and look at them, and they made us treat them as possible postmoulds (places where some ancient person had had a post; when it rotted or was pulled out, the fill was a different color from the ground where it had been dug, leaving a distinct disk). We would all have been more convinced that these were valid features if we had found anything we could have tried to accept as an artifact, but we weren’t getting even any pieces of quartz to ask myself about. I have been worrying for years about a tribe of Very Tidy Indians, the O'SeeDee, who had a fetish about not leaving traces; we were certainly running into them once again. We took measures to make sure the ‘features’ would not dry out and vanish (though they were a fairly convincing color difference. And they may well be something to do with plants anyhow, which is why we are waiting for Edna to deal with them), dampening down the pit, putting plastic bags of dirt on the spots and lining the whole pit and putting the plywood over it.

Will got drafted for the gridding crew. I asked if there were anything I could do and Dick said, “Not yet.” Maddened by his rejection of me as a digger, a woman, and a human being, I found a patch of shade behind the field desk and took a nap. It was very pleasant and I really felt more awake when I came back 20 minutes later. Dawn was saying sadly that there was one test pit left unshovelled; she wasn’t amazingly over-utilized herself and had hoped she could do it, but Linda and I volunteered, and Brook came and helped us.

That night Dick and I were scheduled to make the dinner. He realized the Beast was almost out of gas and got home later than I did, but we still managed to provide roasted vegetables, gluten-free chicken divan (with small bowls left chicken-free or lactose-free; it reminded me of making dinner for my family), and apple crisp on the table at 7. The only stiff muscles I had the whole two weeks came from whipping a pint of cream with a whisk about half an inch across from my backpacking-yuppie kitchen kit. But people appreciated it. I think several of them had been unaware you could make whipped cream at home without nitrous oxide cans.

Linda brought me and Dick a bottle of wine to thank us for teaching her about her camera and Photoshop (“Doesn’t she realize we would give her one for letting us teach her?” Dick asked).

We had another campfire this evening. It was fine, but I was having trouble staying awake. Dick passed through like a fairly leisurely shadow, and only Dawn held up the honor of the supervising classes till maybe 11.

July 21. Now it's The Last Day. It's feeling humid this morning. It was humid, all day, not that that was very long. We had reached a plateau, and by noon Linda (with the help of Dawn) had plunged our test pit to 110 cm below the ground surface and proven to my satisfaction that there had been a great number of different seasonal flooding episodes.



Nathaniel was annoyed because his one-by only went down 105 cm and he felt he had been dissed. Dick remarked that the really lovely grid he had laid down around Edna’s hotspot looked like WWI graves in Normandy (“On Colebrook’s fields the pinflags grow/Among the gridlines, row on row”). At noon everything was backfilled or buttoned down for the weekend, and we ate lunch without needing the shade from the pop-ups.

Dick took the weekend-overs to the supermarket and the rest of us went back to camp. Linda and I were keen to have a shower, but a glance at the sky suggested I should strike my tent first. The peer pressure persuaded Linda as well, so we both had our stuff packed up just as the heavens opened. I stowed my gear in the frightening room at the back of the cabin, which meant there was still room for another person in Linda’s car. She drove me to my car in Concord. If I didn't not know I am supposed to go back for the very last week of the field school, after one week of trying to pass for normal, I would have been bleak as hell. But the certainty that I only have to pass for normal for a week, and that I need to do something about my camera, left me cheerful and Linda and I had a great time going back to Concord.



I am scheduled to go back a week from today for the final week of the field school and the intensive excavation around Edna's hotspot. By then I should have a new camera (extended warranty) and be able to get some of the pictures I took with Dawn's camera to post.