[Chelsea]
Weather: Sunny, temperature lower 70's
Working times: 9:00am-12:00pm
12:30pm-4:00pm
Teammates: -analyzing and recording pottery for LT4 [5MT 17273] -Katie
-analyzing, recording, sketching, photographing ornaments, bones, and projectile point isolate-Katie
-recording IF 4 [5MT 17273] -full crew
-walking transect lines-full crew

[Katie]
Today we finished our first site. Me and Chelsea finished recording and analyzing the pottery sherds. Since we recorded and analyzed most of the sherds [two days before] it didn't take long and the results were still the same: mostly undifferentiated plain grayware jar body sherds and Chapin grayware jar body sherds. We ended with 82 inside the concentration area, 21 in the general site. The lithics ended with 150 in the general site, mostly tertiary Morrison mudstone, Morrison quartzite, and Burro Canyon mudstone.

[Chelsea]
In the final evaluation of the site it has been determined that it consists of five rubble piles [we later started calling these rock piles-Kellam] and two pit houses (in addition to the artifact concentration).

It is inferred from the nature of the artifacts and architecture discovered at the site that people had residences there and some sort of lithic tool production. It makes sense to me that we have found two pit houses at this Basketmaker III site considering the nature of the architecture. Pit houses during this time were often built in groups or in villages. Therefore it seems like the five rubble mound/roomblocks in association with the pit houses possibly housed a small group of people. The abundance of lithic debitage flakes suggests the area was used for the creation of tools…

[Katie]
After lunch we started transecting the other side of the fence on top of the mesa. We walked from the fence, west along the north edge of our survey area all the way to west side. We did two walks, each just short of ½ mile. We located at least 3 sites, one a very large site. It was pretty awesome. I think these sites are all Basketmaker but I don't think we are going to look at the larger site just yet. Ruth said that on top of the mesa we will probably find mostly Basketmaker stuff and in the canyon, more PIII stuff. I'm excited to find more PIII stuff because it will have to do more with my project, but I'm not looking forward to the harsher and thicker terrain and brush.

[Becky]
In the afternoon we ran 2 sets of transects the rest of the length of the mesa top from the fence to the edge of our survey site (from our northern boundary on), approx. ½ mile in length….We named sites LT5-LT8 [5MT 17274, 5MT 1749, 5MT 17275, 5MT 17276] and took GPS measurements at each so we could find them again. Our survey lines were no longer E-W by the second one, as we had 7 on the transect line and were always mixing up the spacing. We then followed the edge of our previous line back-causing a couple more spacing issues when people ran into huge site and got excited. [Large sites tend to take on their own gravity-drawing surveyors out of proper order towards the center-Kellam]. We ended up having to jog north about 30m or more a couple of times, which will make our next transect lines much more complicated. (Lesson learned: 7 is too big!). After that it was back in the van, home to Crow Canyon, a delicious dinner, and some paperwork.

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