Beautiful piece of obsidian
For most people archaeology is excavation. Although (as you have noticed by the previous two blogs) this is definitely not true, that was the main task assigned to us for the last three days. We learned new techniques like spade jumping, troweling and keeping a watchful eye for tiny artefacts. Gardening may be a fun activity for most people but taking the turf out is a very difficult job which we had to deal with on the first day. The real excitement came when we found stone artefacts like obsidian (volcanic glass), fire cracked rocks (in abundance) and basalt flakes (mostly broken).
Archaeologists at work!
Some excavation teams were lucky enough to hit the bottom of kumara pits or drains. Filling buckets and buckets of the dug out material and sieving it for even tinier artefacts made this job very time consuming. While digging deeper and wider, we have to be very careful not to disturb any features lying underneath. Excavation also makes you very familiar with forms- for a hole in the ground we filled out three different forms. Although this might sound tedious, it is now a second nature. We had the best introduction to archaeology through excavation and all that we have been reading about has finally become a reality.
– Sayali and Sophie