[Chelsea]
Weather: sunny, hot, temperature in upper 70's
Working times: 8:45am-12:00pm
12:30pm-4:00pm
[Trevor]
Today we returned to the site after a heavy day of rain and thunder/lightning
on Thursday. Our goal was to knock out LT 6 [5MT 1749]. The
road was a little muddy and the site was pretty damp but it wasn't
bad enough to not work. Seth, Kellam, and I laid out tapes and started
mapping concentrations. We then did the site boundary and features.
There were 6 rock piles and 3 concentrations, one of which was a
midden loaded with lithics. A total of 6 projectile points were
on this ¼ of LT 6, a lot of which were pretty ugly, which
was probably why they were in the midden.
[Tucker]
This quad (SE) has 3 concentrations and a midden, and 6 rock
piles. This quad was long and skinny N/S and most all the features
were in the northern part, and the only reason that we could discern
3 conc. and 1 midden was because of trees and dead fall, otherwise
it probably would have been one huge concentration/midden.
Chelsea and I worked on the ceramics
today which was fun. Lots of great pieces of Chapin B/W, most of
them in Conc. 17. In Midden 1 a perforated lug was found and a perfect
quartz crystal as well. It was really great to find so many diagnostic
sherds today, and we can finally be able to give a decent date to
the site through ceramics.
The lithics people, Katie and Becky,
had quite the task today because of the large amount of lithics.
They took right up to the end of the day to finish. Ruth had sketched
a lot of the FLT's today so we only had a few to sketch before we
left.
In the midden a bunch of really odd
and partly made PP's were found, possibly experiments or from someone
learning. The one that I thought was the oddest was one that was
lopsided. It was a completed PP, unlike the others. Why make a lopsided
PP? was it some sort of blade instead?
[Becky]
Katie and I recorded lithics. We were finding the usual large quantities
of tertiary flakes, and Morrison mudstone, but we also found a decent
number of Burro Canyon flakes in the midden. We also found a lot
of projectile points (6) and not as much ground stone as we'd been
finding.
[Chelsea]
At 1:00pm Tucker and I had finished feature analysis. I joined Katie
and Becky in lithics analysis for the SE quarter and Tucker helped
record an isolate
.The SE ¼ continued the general site
trend of expedient lithic technology with eccentric tools. These
tools have included an eccentric that was ground on both sides and
retouched along all of the edges, an eccentric with denticulate
retouch, and lots of flakes with bifacial retouch. The SE ¼
yielded 181 tools, the majority of these tools coming from the midden.
It seems peculiar to me that while LT 6 is over 4 x the size of
LT 5 the lithic debitage assemblage is only about 1/3 larger than
LT 5.
At 2:30pm archaeologist Mark Varien
came out to visit the site and examine our features and artifacts.
He noticed that our rock piles were more densely associated with
the midden in the NE quadrant. Our slab-lined features are closely
associated which may indicate that they represent contiguous architecture.
He said that examining the area extensively for adobe would be invaluable
in determining the nature of the architecture at our BMIII sites,
however, if the adobe didn't burn then one wouldn't find remnants
of it.
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