Our weather is still holding out. Periods of heavy drifting fog and some filtered sun today – but only a light wind and no rain.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words…so here are three pictures to tell you what I did today:
Misty Nikula digging Unit 2
**Here I am finishing up Unit 2, Level 2 of the Vodapadnaya excavation. I am nearly to the bottom of the level, which I have been trying to find ALL day! Since this unit is in the middle of the other two, and I don’t want to walk on other excavations while scraping away my dirt, I am hanging over the edge and reaching down about 50-70 cm to scrape and lift out the remaining dirt. (Photo courtesy of Mike Etnier) *
**Vodapadnaya Excavation, Unit 2, Level 2 complete **
*This is the bottom of Unit 2, Level 2. It has taken two days of digging to get to this point. The Unit is 2 meters by 2 meters in dimension and is currently about 50 cm deep in the upper right corner (the SW corner) and about 75 cm deep in the bottom left corner (the NE corner). There is a significant slope or hill that drops off about 40-50 cm out from the SW corner and we found a lot of very large pieces of charred wood and fire-cracked rocks all along the bottom of that slope. Our working hypothesis is that this would represent the ground surface when people, probably Okhotsk culture, lived here in the 8th-9th Century. *
Completing Unit-Level Forms
Here Shelby and I are working on completing the forms for Unit 2-Level 2. For each level we need to record a lot of notes for later reference. This includes a list of the artifacts and samples that were collected with their ID numbers, who dug in the unit, the locations and depths of any specific artifacts or features (such as the large rocks that you see in the photo and the "hill”), the final depth measurements of the bottom surface of the level and a general description of the level and its sediments. Also pictured are Colby Phillips, Taku Osaka and Ben Fitzhugh. (Photo courtesy of Mike Etnier)
Tomorrow is my turn to help Anastasia, the camp cook, so I will spend at least the morning and part of the afternoon in the lab tent working on preparing for the Webinar next week.
Da Svidanya! Misty