Point Clouds and Rain

Today looked like it was going to be rainy and awful. This morning as we were all waiting for our van driver (who is one of the real archaeologists on site) to arrive and drive us in to the site, the sky was dark and there was pretty good rain. It looked like the weather was going to be awful, but the weather here changes 180 degrees in about ten minutes. This evening we came into the Hostel from the store and the sky was completely clear and sunny, then ten minutes later the fog was so thick we could see to the other side of the street, but not much farther. (The fog is really neat here and since we're right next to the small ferry terminal, we get to hear the fog horns.)
When we got to site this morning, the rain had already stopped and while the sun was not out, it was light. It was cool and slightly breezy, which is perfect for the manual labor jobs that the majority of the grunts (including me) get to do. I checked in the finds hut to see if I was urgently needed but today the two professionals in charge of the finds hut were trying to consolidate the finds, and really needed to do it themselves. They were still very appreciative of the work I did yesterday. If I was a labrador, I would have been wagging my tail when I left their hut and headed for the trench.
I worked with the same supervisor that I called evil a few days ago. He's growing on me quickly. Maybe he had jet-lag or something that first day, because he has improved every day since. He is still not especially patient though, and so we were using Maddocks and shovels for a good part of the day. He can afford to be less careful in his area of supervision because what we think is there, is late Neolithic rubble covering parts of walls and paving of early Neolithic construction. There isn't much pottery or anything else there, except for burnt bones and now and then a clay deposit.
When we reached the paving with the maddocks, we cleaned up our loose soil (our "loose") and continued with more delicate tools, mainly trowels, but occasionally brushes for clearing up the rocks, or rather "stones". (I have never heard a person here use the word "rock". Even when the American kids ask, "Is this something or just a rock?" the response is usually "Oh, yeh, it's just a stoon.")
Around late morning, my supervisor called me over and asked me for help using the GPS which he has no idea how to use. I learned that most of the supervisors don't know how to use it, because it is expensive (17,000 Pounds or about 26,000 dollars) and because most of them have more important things to do that take small finds locations. Back when they were grunts, they used different systems.
I learned how to do a survey line with the GPS machine today, because when I didn't know how to help my supervisor do that, we called over the tech-savvy one (who is also our van driver and probably about 35 years old) and he taught us how, or more taught me how and then I taught my supervisor.
While I was doing his survey line, people saw that I had the machine up and working, and because I had gone all over site doing it a few days ago, they all knew that I could take their small-finds points. They get pretty anxious to have those points put in because people need that done before they can continue digging underneath where the finds were.
Knowing how to work the GPS surveying machine has caused about half of the workers on site to know my name, and easily most of the supervisors who want points taken from their designated areas. They all seem to think that whoever acts the most urgent will get his or her points done first. I just walk around the different structures in a circle, doing all that i find. When the lunch break happened, I put down the GPS and found a trowel again so people would stop bugging me, but I was soon called away from the dirt again.
A guy came with a laser surveying machine today and kind of taught the Willamette kids how to work it. It was absolutely amazing technology. It seemed like something from a sci-fi film. It shoots out lasers to a targeted area, for instance 180 degrees in front of it, and measures the distance from the base machine to millions of points around it that might be formed by rocks or dirt, or people. He called this a "point cloud". Using those measurements, it creates a picture of the site and can tell all of the spacial relationships between different obects. It was really neat. That machine cost 45,000 pounds. We asked about both of those machines today because we were all curious. It made me nervous to carry around the GPS machine, knowing that it was so expensive.
I got to dig some more after that, then I was needed to work with another of the former Willamette students who actually graduated a year ago. She is working on a large project with pottery from structure 12. She taught me how to wrap bits of pottery so that they can be preserved for years and used at a later date, then we packaged them and recorded exactly what was in each box.
It was a long day, and has been a long two weeks for that matter, but I haven't found a job here that I don't like. Hopefully I won't.