Lucia putting new skills into action
Scrape, scrape, scrape. Yet another rock, some more scraping. Obsidian? No wait, this has two serrated edges, in the shape of a triangle… shark tooth! And that was my most interesting find today. I must say it was a bit of a sharking discovery, and overall made the rest of the day’s scraping quite fin.
Deturfing
Archaeological field school is definitely not what I expected. I was fully prepared to rough it out for two weeks with the bare necessities, yet I arrived to find everything was completely adequate, if not more than what we needed. I have realised that no, you cannot dig straight down into the ground to get the nice stratigraphic profile, the layers get taken off one by one like you’re peeling a painstakingly crumbly onion. I also have discovered that I like my watch tan, and getting covered in dirt every day.
Trowel technique
Coming on field school has definitely been a massive learning curve. Learning things from doing is so much better than reading it out of a textbook! I have so far learnt the best angle to hold your trowel, the best way to separate the top layer of grass from the soil, and how to backup and reorder photos taken in the field. We were rained out and the trench got flooded yesterday (bring a reeeaally good raincoat), which provided some exciting photos. It is only the third full day of the trip and I am loving everything we have done so far. Bring on the next 10 days!!
~ Lucia
Trench filling up in downpour