428 N 406 E

Field school today rocked!!!! Oh man, it was so great. The weather wasn't so great at first, but by lunchtime I was able to take off my hoodie. There is something about our site... it's always windy. Always. There were a couple of lulls today which were filled instead by a nice breeze, but for the most part, it's windburn windy. Which is great for screening, I'll tell you what.

So today, Andrew and Kari (two crew members of our 4-person crew; Sarah and I make 3 & 4, plus crew chief Lindsay) were working in grid 428 N 406 E, and they found a hearth! This truly was exciting, and I'll tell you why! I went on a dig for about a week last summer, and we found a hearth there too, but it was historic, and the only way we really knew it was there was because it showed up in the trench profile as some bowl-shaped smears of charcoal layered with sand in the stratigraphy. Today's hearth, however, was smack dab (almost) in the center of the grid, and was circled by a clay ring that was kind of mounded up, like a big fat snake coiled around it. So cool!!!!!!!!!! In the middle of the hearth were a bunch of chunks (big ones) of adobe from the structure that housed the hearth, probably a pit structure. We haven't taken the center of the hearth down yet; we need to be able to give it as much attention as it needs (and keep it's contents safe from weathering until we can get it done efficiently and not leave it in the open), so we didn't do that today. We haven't found the edges of the structure yet. That was Sarah's and my job today; we opened up new grids and dug down through the duff layer to get down into the structure's top layer. We'll keep opening up new grids until we find the walls of the structure. Ah! I love archaeology!!

Anyways, this might very well be just about the most boring thing you've ever read (if you've made it this far), but I don't care. Today was so awesome!

I have definitely learned my lesson though: I will no longer underestimate the power of cold as harbinger of absolute misery on site. I hate being cold. Truly. I've neglected to wear the necessary layers for a few days now, and I'm not doing that anymore. Life is no fun when you're shivering uncontrollably in high, frigid winds and trying to do archaeology at the same time.

Anyways, I'm going to take some pictures of the sweet hearth tomorrow, and I'll post them on here for you all to be just as excited about as I am. Ah!

Go do something fun :)