Its day 11 on the island and the countdown to a long, hot shower has begun! There’s only three days left and already things are starting to get crazy, but still we progress. Today the Hilly Mountain Goats (as survey 2 have been called) finished the surface survey on the steep, sloping edge of Stingray Point, with all members still in tact… just.
Our day started with a new transect for survey, marked out by a couple 60 metre tapes and some orange pegs. While three of us began the treacherous journey up the hill in search of artefacts, two of us remained behind to set up our survey equipment, our total station named Olga. Olga was having a bad day and it took an hour to set her up and get her level so that we could record the location of anything we found today. However, back up the mountain, the goats were labelling our artefacts, putting them in small zip-lock bags that we will later analyse in the lab. We soon sorted Olga out and managed to record all our 600 artefacts for the day! That’s a lot of fire cracked rocks!
Just when we thought the worst was over, we were given instructions to excavate the midden (AKA the blob of soil with shells in it) that we had found three days previous. This was not an easy task! We were actually 1000 metres above the ground (or so it felt), dangling off the edge of the eroded cliff, holding a spade in one hand and a bucket in the other as we adopted some extreme archaeology techniques. With our feet placed precariously on the moving ground we swung our spades in a feeble attempt to de-turf the shell midden.
Once we had used all our strength to hack out the turf layer, we began to excavate down and found some fire cracked rocks and little pieces of obsidian. This required some sweet balancing skills paired with some great total station moves as Sophie had to balance on top of the midden in order to shoot in the coordinates of the artefacts.
Photographing each layer above the midden was another test of how far we were willing to sacrifice ourselves in the name of archaeology. It required the entire force of our five strong team to take just one photo, not because we were technologically challenged, but because we had to hold Emma down so she wouldn’t lose balance and plummet down the hill!
Things got more difficult when the island’s microclimate threw a tantrum and couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted to rain, so we were constantly on alert, ready to sacrifice life and limb to protect the total station. Note that our total station was right at the bottom of the slope, 100m down the road, so we were in for a long sprint, thankfully it didn’t come to this!
Overall it was a productive day and we really enjoyed ourselves, even if we were facing great peril (or so we thought). We look forward to seeing what the excavation of the midden will reveal tomorrow and hope that no one falls off!
– Shannon and Emma A.