Field blog for November 6 and 8

By Connor Sparks

 11/6: Today in class we continued in our units in the barracks. I started into the last layer of my unit. Unit 201 was very hard to dig through because it was all very thick clay and not very fun. Dr. Dumas thinks the clay is not natural for this blufftop and was probably dug up by someone in the 18^th century and brought to the fort site to help level the ground and stop erosion. Michael, Daniel and Sarah all still have this very easy dirt and it is very easy to dig up. Michael has been finding a lot of nails in his top layers of his dirt. They are very pristine and dropped like in rows, so it could be from where the barracks were caught on fire and dropped down. We don’t have that many more days left in class, especially with all of us going to Ireland next week. Really hope we can all finish what we have left and to see what artifacts we can find in the remaining layers of our units.

Here is a photo of me using a bamboo pick to carefully remove animal bone from the clay layer. 

Here are Daniel and Michael working on Unit 204 in the soggy clay. 

11/8: We did not go out into the field today; it rained all last night and well into the morning making it extremely muddy and unsafe for our profile walls. Instead we stayed in and tried our best to water screen the millions of buckets we have in the lab. We got a good amount of the buckets done and found some bones and Indian pottery in some of the buckets. Next week we will all be traveling to Ireland, so our blog post will be a little different. We will all be writing an entry on a different thing we saw or did while we were there. We cannot wait to share with everyone our adventure abroad in a different country.