Nov. 5 - Excavation

Last week's dig was unfortunately canceled due to Hurricane Sandy. Fortunately, not much damage was done to the trenches. We began digging at 3:00pm. Quite a large number of leaves had been deposited in both sites, but there was no structural damage to the trenches. I dug in QG1. The soil was muddy and moist due to the heavy rainfall. I thought about what implications that had to the excavation, but it turns out, not too much! It's unikely that the change in soil moisture levels will damage any material culture that has already been in the ground for a long time.

We immediately unearthed the purple/burgundy "pipe" that we hadn't been able to get out last time. It was a good centimeter thick, but the curvature was slight, indicating that perhaps it was not a pipe but a roof tile (we aren't sure what roof tiles are on Hope College, however). Other than that, we did not find anything significant. It appeared that the deeper we dug, the less material culture we found. The amount of glass and ceramics decreased noticeably. We did find another significantly sized chunk of roof tile/pipe, however. We dug through to the next context, which was more brown in color, and stopped shortly afterward as the sun set and we had no light. Also, it got really cold.