[Chelsea]
Weather: Sunny, windy, temperature mid 70's
Working times: 8:45am-12:15pm
12:45pm-4:00pm
Teammates: flagging artifacts for LT 5 [5MT 17274]-full crew
mapping site LT 5 [5MT 17274]-Trevor, Tucker

[Katie]
Today we went into the field again. We went to LT5 [5MT 17274] and flagged all the artifacts and made a site boundary. Chelsea, Tucker, and Trevor mapped the site; Becky and Kellam recorded lithics; and Seth and I recorded pottery sherds. There were four concentrations at this site. Seth and I recorded 2 concentrations and started a third. The first concentration that we recorded had about 300 pot sherds, most of which were grayware jar body sherds. However, there were some scattered PIII sherds at the site, but they didn't belong to the site. We also found a nice Chapin B/W sherd. The second concentration that we recorded had about 50 sherds, it wasn't as large. The method we used to record our first concentration was by sectioning off an area of the concentration and then searching it thoroughly for sherds and placing them by flags because we didn't have enough flags to mark all the artifacts in the concentrations throughout the site.

The weather was, again, nice. It was sunny and warm, not too hot. With all the sites we've been finding in the short time that we've been surveying on the mesa top, this area must have been covered with habitations in BMIII! I wonder if they were all living there at the same time, or maybe a smaller group of them moved around on the mesa top at that time? Or maybe their group of people kept growing either by birth or maybe it was a smallish gathering place for a few groups in the area to come live? I wonder if that could be seen through excavation, and if so, how that would show? It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to see that in pottery I would think.

Most of the pottery found in the area is grayware jar body sherds. It is hard to distinguish between one grayware jar body and another…so family or class groups, if they had a distinct pottery style would be very hard to tell apart from pottery. Lithics seem to be pretty much the same across the board as well. All Basketmaker sites seem to have their housing oriented the same, so groups would be hard to distinguish that way as well. For as many sites as there must be on top of the mesa, I wonder what the food situation would have been like if they had all lived there at the same time?

[Becky]
We found about 600 lithics in Concentration one. We also found almost 30 tools, including cores, hammerstones, choppers, and "swiss army knives" (all 3 together). We also found a lot of core frag/hammerstone tools-they appeared to be almost following a pattern to make them; they all looked similar.

[Kellam]
Becky and I spent the day recording lithics-596 of them in conc. 1. 30-odd tools; we have some sort of formal tool made of large primary or secondary flakes with retouch, sometimes grinding, all sorts of stuff going on. A real swiss army knife.

[Chelsea]
We divided the crew at 10:15am into groups to record all of the pertinent information for the Colorado Cultural Resource Survey site forms. Katie and Seth were assigned to ceramics analysis, Becky and Kellam to lithics analysis and Trevor, Tucker, and myself to the site map. I am also in charge of the site packet for LT 5 [5MT 17274] and am responsible for the complete and timely completion of our site forms.

Trevor, Tucker, and I, utilizing our compasses ran a due East/West baseline of 50m through concentration 1, the easternmost concentration of artifacts on LT 5 [5MT 17274] We first plotted the site boundaries in this 50 meter eastern section of our site. Trevor would stand at the double red flags marking the site boundaries and Tucker would take a due north or south bearing from Trevor (depending on which side of the 50m baseline Trevor stood on). Tucker read the distance he stood on the 50m baseline in relationship to the eastern boundary of the site (eastern boundary as x = 0). This distance was divided by two in order to convert this x point into the 1:2 scale for our map. Trevor paced his distance from the boundary flags to Tucker and multiplied his paces by his pace factor (0.8) in order to determine his distance in meters from the double red flag marker to the baseline. This distance was then divided by two in order to get this y coordinate on the map in the proper 1:2 scale. I sketched out the proper coordinates on the map.

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