The First Cut is the Deepest

When I last left our updates on our work, we had just opened up and started to dig in D, the 50 centimetre extension to the south. Now you can see that we’re well into it, and just as much stone rubble is visible in it as there was elsewhere.

The expansion, furthest away from the camera, seen in concert with the other two units.

We were also fortunate to finally get a beautiful day. If you’re reading this from outside Nova Scotia, you may not realise that this has been one of our worst summers in recent memory, with nearly constant rain. Since we have a yurt over our excavation area, a tent over our equipment and lab area and a small yurt over our soil sifters, we can work rather happily in any weather conditions. That said, we’d still rather see the sun, especially since the yurt allows us to take photographs in any weather, too, so we don’t have to be the typical archaeologists praying for overcast weather so we can take our photos.

A view of the excavation area from outside the yurt.

With two days of work, we were making progress in our area, but we had to work carefully around all of the stone you can see in the photographs above and below. At this point, the nature of the stone is unknown. Is it rubble that’s been tossed in on top of a feature? Is it something structural that collapsed in this pattern? Until we know the nature of it, we don’t want to remove anything, since on the light end, it will make patterns much harder to see and on the heavy end, it’s a change that cannot be undone.

Participants and I sitting on top of the stone rubble in question. Should we remove it?

The decision was to remove the stones in one section that Becki called ‘a window’ to see what resulted underneath. The window was a 1 metre by 2.5 metre subdivision of our existing excavation area, running north-south. The next day we began to carefully remove the stones and wood, charcoal and other debris began to show up underneath. A timber, to match the timber which had been running across the other side of the unit at the boundaries of our structure was seen running out of the expansion and into the other unit, but it had been pushed down, seemingly, by the tumble of stones on top.

Once these stones were removed, this wood started to resemble a timber running across the unit.

Elsewhere, Joanie dug into the sterile sand which we’re seeing as the boundary of our structure, to get some sense of its limits. As she did so, a clear cut into the soil began to show up clearly in the profile.

The profile shows the cut where our structure was dug down into the sterile soil alongside it.

A close-up of the trench cut.

Curiouser and curiouser.

And a few more photographs to sum up our day:

Screening soil on a (finally) sunny day.

Digging in the expansion area.

Screening again, with the excavation tents beyond.

About these ads