Sept. 30th
 
[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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