Great Mercury Island day 9 of excavation

The day began with 2 sad (but hearty) jam sandwiches, a strong coffee and a banana, a meal fit for a hard day’s work of excavation. My shoes had dried out after falling into the ocean the day before, I was beginning to communicate with the local sheep and the weather was perfect, with slightly overcast skies and a gentle breeze which took the edge off the heat of the day. Today I was working alongside Kelly in EA 65 continuing our search for a terrace in the Western extension; and I intended to follow Simon’s clear instructions thoroughly to “dig until [we] hit the ‘hard clay-like orangey layer’ (translated from his archaeological lingo). Precise instructions indeed, but we knew what he meant! Strangely this seemingly simple task seemed to take quite a while longer than we had originally hoped, and the ‘hole’ which Kelly seemed to be digging into the side of our trench turned out a significantly large obsidian core and a potential drainage system! Time well spent! Nevertheless, when this job was complete, Tim moved in with his Lidar scanner (a device which looks like a weapon for world domination) and produced a pretty impressive digital image of our trench made up of millions and billions of tiny points shot into his computer using a laser. Simon then decided to move me into the Northern extension of EA 65, where we hoped to gain a better understanding of what was going on with the fire features and hangi pits found in the main trench. So together we spent the latter part of the morning cutting through the turf layer, turning out a decent amount of obsidian flakes and fire cracked rock (luckily no sheep poo this time)! I was hoping that we might find Atlantis, but sadly this was not to be. At dinner time I was informed that great progress had been made in the larger trench (EA 64) and that whilst we were finding only small amounts of artefacts, they were uncovering large chunks of obsidian, bones, and all sorts of exciting things (Lucky duckies!) and Sarah says that in EA 66 “there were so many artefacts that we could barely go down any layers!”.  But the find of the day award went to Matt (our British friend who has just joined our excavation) with his find of a fully formed and polished adze after only an hour of scrambling around in the dirt- a very impressive feat indeed and one which will leave me crying with jealousy all night long (good job I brought my teddy with me). Due to the success of the day, with only a small rain shower dampening our spirits (lame pun) there was a tremendous amount of artefact registration to be done in the evening, so me and some buddies decided to help out! The rest of the night was spent with good company, relaxing, tending to battle wounds and filling our faces which some well-deserved food. Tomorrow we look forward to much of the same (minus the rain shower), and hopefully this time I will beat Matt with the ‘artefact of the day’ award. But for now, I shall retire to bed with a good book, some chur music and my teddy bear Victor.

Richard xo

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.