Today marked the first proper day of work, here at Great Mercury Island. After a trek through long grass and sheep paddocks we made our way to Coralie Bay where we would be focusing our attention for this season.
We were all slightly weary after trying to adjust to the new habitat, but nonetheless eager to start finding out what we were in for. Divided we conquered the many tasks at hand. While one small group disappeared behind the main house into the dunes of Oneroa to survey, the rest formed into neat little packs to begin site preparation.
We did a resistivity test on a 20m by 20m area whilst others began identifying, marking, and labelling the multitude of exposed artefacts at the eroding dune face. It was pretty exciting actually discovering stone artefacts and fire-cracked rocks for ourselves! What was less exciting was thinking we’d found some fascinating stone artefacts which then turned out to be little presents left behind for us from our friendly neighbourhood sheep.
Meanwhile the survey team was learning why reception is an important part of archaeology. Still back at the main house, we were setting up the deceptively hard to pronounce Theodolite total station. This is a turret esc robotic laser surveying system, which tracks a prism on a stick to give you a map of artefacts or the layout of your excavation. We were crawling on our hands and knees combing the grass to find the mythical wooden peg which we would place the station over. Sitting on the previous year’s field school site we could spy on the main group roughly a kilometre away. We definitely did not contemplate lasering them. That would be an absurd notion. Setting up the triangulation point the station’s hand held device decided it wasn’t talking to the main Theodolite. We walked up and down a hill waving the hand held at the station, but even at point blank the Total station didn’t respond. Josh, the wizard of surveying, fixed it within two seconds. We were relieved, confused, and really itchy from the swarms of insects escaping the dunes. Once the points were set and we triangulated the main team’s location, we packed up the gear and carried it across the Tombolo of Great mercury island.
Back at Coralie Bay, the resistivity survey had shown an interesting anomaly that the dig team was going to investigate. After using Pythagoras’ theorem to create a perfectly square area (who’d have thought trigonometry would actually be useful!) we were on to de-turfing. Initially, this sounded fine. Then we began. As somebody who has never picked up a shovel in her life, I was in for a shock. I was given the run-down and demonstration by our supervisor who made it look way to easy. The first challenge was getting the spade to break the earth. Humiliation ensued. Eventually (and I do mean eventually) I got the hang of it, sort of. My poor body was not expecting such pain. As Emma so aptly put it, it was complete torture; so how were we still having fun? The de-turf did reveal a fascinating stone arrangement, so I know everyone is really excited to learn more about this. Worth it.
The main point of surveying arose as more and more artefacts were unearthed. We were late to the site because of the setting up process and there was a fair few little baggies for us to use our science on. The prism staff (also known as the wizard stick) has to be held perfectly level for the Total station to create a virtual map of all the locations of artefacts and trench walls. Every find required the position to be marked with a perfectly level wizard stick. The tiny little bubble in the level was afraid of being the centre of attention. We had a common train of conversation: ‘Ready?’ ‘One sec… Its steady.’ (Five seconds will pass). ‘Ok you can move the stick.’ By moving the stick it meant you could unlock your joints that were holding the staff hard against the wind and dusty ground. Suddenly we were the most popular people on site, moving from test pit to trench and back to our artefact scatter to try and get a few done before our services were required. It turns out people aren’t amused when you say they are the third in the queue and could you please hold the line.
As a team, we ended the day with patchy sunburn, aching bones, splitting headaches, but all of this was cured by a swim in the sea and a chocolate pudding that was too good for words to describe.
Bring on tomorrow,
Hayley and Logan