It was windy again today. We had 70km an hour winds to start off the day, which lessened by perhaps 2 or 3 km an hour throughout the course of the day. Intermittent squalls paid us a visit during the first few hours of excavation, which had all of us working on Excavation Areas (EA) 64 and 66 temporarily making a strategic retreat to the comfort of a lone, old pohutukawa tree. After lunch the sun came out to warm us up; natures reward for continuing our excavation through all she through at us. She could have turned off the AC though.
After hopping between Simon’s trench in EA65 and the big EA64 during the previous excavation days, today I (Emma) finally claimed an excavation space of my own. Alongside Logan and under the watchful eye of Alex, we had de-turfed a 2 by 3m extension to EA64 in the SW corner and cleaned it up yesterday, bringing it down to the cultural layer. The area was chosen due to the presence of some visible rocks seemingly in a line to the west of EA64; the aim was to explore further west and bridge these rocks with the current edge of EA64. Today in the extension we spent schnitting (German for digging off a thin layer with a shovel; but a hell of a lot more fun to say) to quickly bring us down onto a mottled yellowish deposit whilst still systematically collecting artefacts. Speaking of artefacts, we found some obsidian, quite a few fire cracked rocks, and even some ochre. Back to the layers; both the cultural deposit, the more mottled yellow sand deposit and a more organic looking ruddy brown deposit, which made its appearance in the NE corner of the extension, reflected deposits present in EA64 proper. Most interestingly was a dip present in the baulk of the trench (aka sides; we love German words, in case you hadn’t picked up on that), about half a metre before we hit the stones on the west side. There was some clay visible and the area went straight from the cultural deposit to the yellow deposit. We speculated that perhaps this indicated a filling in of the space to create a flat area for cultural activities; the stones would act as a barrier to line the edge. However it is still early days in our trench. The plan is to bring the whole area down another layer and keep investigating the relationship of the large row of stones in the centre of EA64 and the ones we have in our trench.
Thus concludes my novel of a blog entry. All this despite the fact we were all eating more sand than excavating it thanks to our lovely little breeze.