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Archaeology of College Hill 2006
Archaeology of College Hill 2007
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]
Today was our last day on site. Its hard to believe, really.
The day was a little warmer than last week. Luckily the hurricane which hit New England over the weekend decided to take the day off (it came back on Tuesday) so it was dry for us.
The day started off slow with Stephanie, Cindy, Chelsea, Whit and Tyler drawing top plans and sectionsof D1 and D2. Once the rest of the team arrived we proceeded to do the same for all the other trenches.
When Cindy, Whit and Stephanie finished drawing they took over soil sampling duty. Which entailed taking a sample from every strata in every trench and marking its position on the accompanying section. This procedure is not as exciting as it sounds, and there were alot of cold fingers, but in the end it was a success with many baggies full of dirt recovered for future analysis in the lab!
The rest of the team commenced backfilling the six trenches around 4 to 4:30 and didn't finish until well after sundown at around 5:30. Thanks to daylight savings we lost an hour of daylight and so it was even darker on site than we were used to. It was a lot of work, with bucket chains going non stop, but in the end we got all the trenches well filled (and compacted - hopefully no subsidence this year!) and everyone agreed that they got a good workout. No need for the gym today!
It feels kind of odd that the fieldwork half of the class is done - especially since the weather has been so clement this year. The leaves on some of the trees on site are still bright green, whereas last year on backfill day all the leaves had turned color and already fallen. Still, we are bound to get a frost soon and now we get to move onto the lab and analysis of what we found, which should be fun.
The last thing we did in class today was pick topics for our contributions to the final report. One of the things we will be doing htis year is posting our data online as we acquire it. Each topic will have its own page listed under "data" on the homepage - check it out in the coming weeks!