(the only day I brought the camera)

Typical dig picture:

Our Hole, to the right. The back portion is 50 x 50 x 50 cm, and provided a good number of artifacts on Saturday 8/13/05.

The front portion has at this point only been dug to a depth of 10 cm. We decided to dig it (Sunday, 8/14/05) due to the number of quartz tool points and artifacts found in the southern quadrant of our pit. Maybe there'd be more.

The orangish item is the flag demarking the SW (southwest) corner of the pit to be dug. (It is attached to a wire plugged into the appropriate place in the ground; you can't see that in the photo. For your reference, it is plugged in at the lower left portion of the original pit.) The yellow string demarks our current 50 x 50 workspace and is attached to some rather hefty nails.

Note, in the deeper portion of the pit, you can see a soil change at approximately 20 cm depth. It goes from topsoil (worked over the years) to clay (probably not worked).

In the back, there's another flag, marking a hole dug by V. earlier. We (mostly myself) filled it back in already.

Dirt as we dig and explore and then sift is dumped on the tarps. The stuff in the back is mostly the clay (deeper) layer so it is a different color than the material in the foreground (topsoil). The stuff in the back is also dry-er, having been deposited the day before.

The white thing that looks like paper is paper, on a clipboard for recording our finds. A small stack of manilla envelopes are provided for enclosing our finds. If we find really large objects, or very fragile objects, there are other containers available. If we find an object in situ, we record depth, and distance from the X and Y axiz (marked by the flag) in centimeters.

The bucket is important. You miss a lot in situ, sometimes. So, you scrape up everything else and drop it in the bucket. Then, you stand up the mesh screen (lower left) and dump the bucket's contents in there, and shake the hell out of it. All the dirt (if dry enough, which has pretty much been the case) falls through, and you are left with rocks, worms, and bits of vegetation. And, if you are lucky, a number of Native artifacts.

Plywood piece near back, left: Handy for covering up unfinished pits overnight. We don't want to cripple large animals or trespassing people wandering around in the dark.

Equipment not depicted: shovel (for removing the top level of turf), small flat trowel (essential for digging), dustpan (volume scraping to dump into mesh screen), two sizes of brush (although the larger size is lying down behind our pit), tape measure, level, bottles of water. Gloves, knee protectors (the doormat served as mine, K. had professional contractor's knee protectors, V. used a gardener's pad, and the children and their mother didn't care).

Large Image is Here.