Field Day 4

Today Laurie, Dene, and I began the excavation of the dry well, a.k.a. Feature 1. A feature is a non-portable artifact. Sometimes features are discovered in the course of excavating. In this case, we knew the dry well (if that's what it is) was there from the start. We began by laying out a rectangular unit around the well. This was tricky, because we needed to be able to identify the position of the unit within the grid. Apparently the people who created the dry well weren't taking our grid into account when they did it. How inconsiderate of them!

We take a lot of photographs. Since archaeology is inherently destructive, it's important to be able to reconstruct how the site looked and what you did to it. Below, you can see photos of the feature before we excavated it. The trowel points north.

Lastly, here's Dene testing the dirt. Can it form a ball? Can you roll it into a snake? These are the questions that archaeologists ask to determine what type of soil they're dealing with. This is (we think) silty sand. It takes a lot of experience to be able to identify soil types easily.