Image of the walk down that we take each morning to the site.
The morning start was a little less prompt today, despite the early nights all around, the sleep timer failed to wake the four slumbering women in my room. But there is no rest for the busy and it was time to get to work!
I was working at Te Mataku this week, an area that was started in the June excavations, and had been found due to eroding material exposed with tidal movements and occasional stock trampling. To get to this site we have to hike up a hill and down again, avoiding thistles, patches of sheep droppings and sometimes very unstable patches of dirt. But it is a very good way to wake up in the morning, and it certainly gets the blood pumping, ready for a day of digging. It also helps the view is stunning!
The view we get at lunch time.
We opened up more units today, extending the excavations to include a few units in the middle of the area to expose more hearths for our visiting Geophysicist, Gillian Turner. She was there to record large in situ hearth stones in order to determine the geomagnetic changes that occurred in hangi stones once they have been fired. In order to do this, we had to find the stones for her, and so dig we did!
People at work (I am the one with the pole)!
We found a range of artefacts
We were working long hours at the site – from 8am to well after 5pm, and with a high tide we had to go back via the mountain pass instead of around the rocks –which was by far the more convenient option. We managed to find an assortment of things that day, as mentioned above, with quite a bit of fragmented bone, lots of fire cracked rocks and an assortment of stone artefacts. The sun was hot, and because we were working in the sand we had to work in our socks so we didn’t collapse too many of the edges of our trenches. This was by far the most challenging thing on survey, particularly as you have to go between everyone’s excavations and be careful not to stand on delicate areas or areas where sand may collapse. There are a lot of ‘sorry’s’, ‘can I stand here?’s’ ‘is that all you have’ and ‘who has the next label’?. It requires a certain presence of mind as you have to make sure you have recorded each code of artefact correctly, make sure you shoot around features so they are represented spatially and importantly of all – make sure the machine doesn’t get rained on!
I enjoy survey though because it allows me to get an overarching view of what is going on across the whole excavation area, what kinds of artefacts are being found and how everything is progressing.
By the time we ended for the day, Gillian had recorded 6 rocks for her palaeomagnetic study, we had found a beautiful range of artefacts, and everyone was ready for registry and bed. Once we got home we had to finish registering, as we had a back-log of artefacts for the day, as well as ticking off the ones that made it back to the house from the field. That took a little longer than any of us wanted to, and it was a 9pm finish followed by a 10pm bed – a late one for us on the island!
-Sophie