[Chelsea]
Weather: hot, sunny, windy, temperature in mid 80's
Working times: 8:45 am - 11:45 am, 12:15 pm - 4:00 pm

[Trevor]
Today we got to work on site LT 6. We first established our definite site boundary by having everyone walk the boundary area and look to see where the concentrations tapered off. We then flagged artifacts in sector four, the southwest sector [actually it was the northeast quadrant-kellam]. There were 5 concentrations and 1 midden, each seemed to have a fair amount of artifacts, especially the midden. In addition we located 2 cists and 5 rock piles [there were eventually 13 total in this quadrant, I believe-kellam]. In concentration 5 I found 2 cobble mano tools. I also found a very cool cobble hammerstone with lots of battering on the edges. None were in complete form. There was also a large amount of groundstone fragments and retouched/utilized pieces of mudstone.

After that we (Chelsea and I) pulled all flagged lithics outside of concentrations. We then set to work recording the lithics. This was hard for me because I had not done it yet and was not yet familiar with the material types. In addition it was hard to define retouch and use-wear. I had to ask Kellam and Ruth a lot of questions. A lot of the lithics were very small and finding bulbs of percussion was difficult. If you flintknapped I'm sure it would be overall a much easier job. It was also hard to find cortex on some pieces because they had been in the dirt so long that it made unbroken areas hard to distinguish from other areas.

Lithics is also a hard job compared to mapping, which I had done on the first 2 sites, because you don't move around much.

[Tucker]
While people were flagging, Kellam and I began to go around and label/get on the GPS all the features in the NE quad. We ended up with 13 rock piles, 5 concentrations, 3 cists, and 1 midden.

After lunch Becky and I took photos of the quad and all the features, and recorded the direction and description of each.

We then moved on to recording the ceramics in each concentration and midden. Not as much pottery here as at other places, just some interesting pieces.

A few Chapin B/W, Chapin seed jar [rims] and even a piece of a PIII mug.

[Chelsea]
Several lines of upright slabs were found in the north eastern section of the site. As these lines were less than 1 m. long they seem indicative of small storage cists seen during the Basketmaker III period, however two of the lines of slabs seem to be situated in such a way as to suggest they might be from the same structure. These two lines of slabs are several meters apart from one another, suggesting the structure they once supported was on a larger scale that a cist - possibly a roomblock. If these slabs represent a roomblock then it seems more formal architecture characteristic of Pueblo I is present on site. In addition, Seth discovered a rock pile of roughly half-a-dozen slabs which seem to be stacked, suggesting again that the architecture has moved beyond simple pitstructures and is possibly transitioning into the roughly shaped sandstone masonry that appears in Pueblo I.

It is difficult to tell from our sandstone upright slabs whether we have cists or possibly slab-based jacal walls indicative of larger structures. As we only have a few blocks in a row we cannot really detect whether the slabs make a curved cist shape or not. One thing that typified the BMIII transition into PI was a combination of different types of buildings that marks the shift in inhabiting pithouses to living in aboveground roomblocks. If we find more sandstone blocks that seem to have some form of stacking we might be able to say whether our survey area has some Pueblo I occupation in addition to Basketmaker III.

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