Sept. 19th
 

[Chelsea]
Weather: Sunny, temperature in mid 80's
Working Times: 9:00am-11:45am
12:20pm-3:30pm
Teammates: Tucker, Trevor-mapping of site LT 5 [5MT 17274]

We arrived at site LT 5 at 9:00am. Tucker, Trevor and I resumed work on our site map. Kellam and Becky analyzed and tallied lithics for the remaining 3 concentrations (2-4). Seth and Katie analyzed and tallied ceramic sherds for the remaining 3 concentrations (2-4) as well. The artifact analysis of LT 5 [5MT 17274] took the entire day to complete.

[Tucker]
We started the day by laying our 1st tape E/W, then laid a N/S line and another E/W line in the Northern Part of the site…It took a while but we got it as good as you can, E/W-N/S. We checked our angles by calculations and measuring the hypotenuse of the right triangle formed by the lines. [Chelsea sketched this out--see it here]

Once we got the lines set, we began with finishing the site perimeter for the western half of the site. Then moved on to mapping the remaining features (4 rock piles, 1 pitstructure). Once completed with that we moved on to the concentration boundaries 2-4 and their accompanying Artifacts that deemed mapping. (ex: tools, pottery rims). This took us up to the end of the work day.

We talked about what the site means. How many people lived here, over how long of a time? And decided that there is no way of knowing this w/o excavations and getting dates from hearths which would tell us if these structures were inhabited simultaneously or at different periods. These dates could tell us a lot about how people lived, when they moved, how often they moved, etc.

[Becky]
Today we finished up LT 5 [5MT 17274]. Kellam and I continued w/ lithics going through concentration 4 easily and then more slowly through 2 + 3. Ruth helped us w/ concentration 2 which sped things up a lot. We found similar stuff to yesterday, but not quite as dense, and not as many multi-use tools. We found a lot of core frags, hammerstone frags, utilized flakes, and retouched flakes. We found an end scraper and a bifacial retouch, which were both neat…Also, we did find a couple of groundstones today. Most were just fragments, but there were three small pieces of well-ground sandstone, not very thick, that refit to form part of what looked like a round stone disk. Lid? Pendant? part of a game?

FLT 11, a fine-grained sandstone disk fragment, possbily a jar lid. Reverse side of FLT 11. Concentration 3 looking North Northwest

[Katie]
After Seth and I finished up the pottery sherd recording in all the concentrations, we recorded the two projectile points found at the site. We took pictures of them and then I drew them. When I was drawing projectile point #2, I noticed that the notches were done in a specific way. The left notch was done and then it was turned over, and the left side was done again. I'm not sure if you can tell which hand the person who made it used, but the left side was done on both sides, and not the right.

After recording the projectile points, we recorded an isolate near the site called IF 7 [5MT 17280]. It was a pile of reddish-brown (possibly fire-cracked) rocks, but it was too far away to be a feature of the LT 5 [5MT 17274] site. The only artifact worth mentioning is a hammerstone we found at this site, which I sketched in the notes.

[Kellam]
The organization aspect of having folks working on two computers [in the lab]-getting parts of a site form on one, and parts on another is making me crazy. It is impossible to know at any moment what is finished, and what is not. There are lots of little things like that driving me nuts right now.

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