Floatation and Field Trips

Today my migraine is 95% gone, so I feel fine, but can't think straight or remember what I'm trying to do.
I got to do floatation today with another girl from our group. We were the last two to go. Our professor drove us to the University in Kirkwall where all of the soil samples go. The purpose of floatation is to determine what the soil samples consist of. The procedure is pretty simple, but time consuming if done carefully, which is very important so that there is no cross-contamination. We dumped each sample into a large, watery box, and then mixed the water and soil all around. The bits that float were collected by a small sieve that collects bits >1mm and the bits that float but are smaller than 1 mm, pass through that sieve and are collected by a second, smaller sieve that catches everything that is >300 microns.
When the sample was thoroughly stirred so that all the floating materials were out, and so that the plain dirt had a chance to wash out of the gause under the sample, we drained the water and examined the "residue", which is what's left. It usually consisted of gravel, some larger rocks, non-floating charcoal, burnt and 'cremated' bone, and occasionally chips of flint, or pieces of pottery that were missed during the initial excavation. We took out any small finds, (which were flint and pottery for us today), and then carefully described what and how much of each material was in the residue, the >1mm sieve, and the >300 microns sieve. The >1mm sieve usually had bits of plant mater, rootlets, and cramp in charcoal. The particles from the >300microns sieve are too small to describe with the naked eye, exceppt for the ratios of charcoal to grit.
There was a comment section on the information sheet where we needed to include any other relevant pieces of information, such as if the sample contained clay that was washed away. If so, we recorded what color the clay was, (usually yellow or grey for us today.) We needed to include the fact that a live spider was removed from the >1mm sieve once, because pollen or residue of the sample could have been taken with him, or he could have introdced something modern that would contaminate the sample. Another time we needed to include that a hair was caught in the >1mm sieve. This gives you an idea of how specific we needed to be for this job.
After all of this was recorded, along with all the information about where a sample came from, we collected each section of the sample (small finds, residue, >1mm, >300microns) and stored them where they could dry and be examined later through dry sorting and microscopic examination. We're not going to get to do any of that, unfortunately.
When the sample was cared for, we got to carefully clean every bit of equipment. Even that was fun, because we got to do it with hoses squirting preasurized water. There was  a lot of mud and water in today's job, but I liked it every bit as much as the other jobs I've learned so far.
At the end of the work day, we went back to the site, where we set off on a field trip with the entire American group. Nick, the site director was our guide, which was really neat. He knows a lot of stuff about this, which makes sense, but still... a LOT of stuff.
First we went to the Ring of Brodgar which is in sight of the Ness of Brodgar. The Ring of Brodgar is made up of about 20 standing stones, but it used to have 60, if my memory serves. It is the third largest standing stone circle in the UK. I was surprised at how large it really was. I had thought it was smaller, but I had only seen in on post cards. There was a large circular trench around it which was apparently carved right into the bed rock. That had to be a huge task back in the day. It's not exactly a piece of cake now. We didn't have much time there because we had an apointment for a tour at Maeshowe.
Maeshowe is also within view of the NoB. (All of theseelaborate monuments are right there and it's interesting to think about the implications of their arrangement.) It was originally a Neolithic burrial chamber, but it was used by Vikings, then by the Scottish and various groups. From the outside it looks like a strange hill, surrounded by a grassy trench. The trench here was not as predigious as the one at the Ring of Brodgar, but I still wouldn't have wanted to be the one digging it. It was also carved into the bed rock. The hill had a stone-framed hole in the side, that was about 3'x4' square and that door continued on as a hall-way for about 40' or so. It was akward to maneuver through into the cavern, but it was worth it. (Someone with claustrophobia would nevr have made it.) Inside was very neat. It was... like being on the inside of a hill, but the walls and ceiling were corbelled with large rock. There were four large standing stones in the corners and burrial recesses in the three walls that didn't have the tunnel. There were also neolithic and viking era grafiti on the walls. One of the runed insriptions that was half-way up the wall said something like "I, ----- carved this up so very high" I bet our graffiti will never be treasured as much as this stuff was.
Well, I'm really tired and was hoping to be aslep about 2 hours ago.

Cleaning Clumps of Dirt

I felt pretty rough when I woke up this morning, but there was no way I was going to miss two days of excavaton in a row. I went to the site but wasn't doing very well... when I got there I wondered if maybe I was more in the way than useful, but I think I ended up doing alright. I worked in the house on site, with one of the girls from my group who has come for three years now. She is doing specialized work on pottery from structure 12. She let me help her clean bits of pottery that had been drying for days, and then she described them with all sorts of fancy codes and entered them in a database on her computer. Really all I learned how to do today was clean pottery, but it was fun and it didn't make me any more sick. (Apparently several people at another excavation were sick with migraines Sunday and Monday, so we must be experiencing the weather changes. I wish we could just get joint aches or something.)
So, with a small but stiff brush, I brushed dirt off of all of the pottery bits. The pottery sizes were anywhere from 5mm to 8 or 9cm today. I learned how firm I needed to be to get the dirt off, but how careful I needed to be so I didn't break more than was necessary. Some of the stuff we worked on today was completely abraided and it was awful to try to clean. When you would pic up a piece, it would fall into several bits before the brush even touched it. Sometimes the "pottery" that someone had tagged as a small find, was actually just a big clod of dirt. It's surprisingly difficult to tell the difference sometimes, even when dry.
The dust flies everywhere when doing this job. It's so fine that you see whisps while brushing the pottery, and you inhale a lot. The room has to be cleaned every day after this task because a thin film of dust coveres everyting.
It was fun to clear away caked dirt from a piece and reveal the pretty designs around the rim, or identify rims of vessels, or sometimes the base, or base of the wall of a vessel. Sometimes there were no pretty designs and the darn pottery would crumble in bits, but sometimes we were rewarded with cool stuff.
There were three finds trays full of crumbs of varying sizes, that were all part of the same pot, or at least part of the same small find, (theoretically the same pot.) It looked horrible to try to work with, but towards the end of the day, we had to omve on to it because we had finished all of the other dry pieces. After a few minutes of working on some of the larger bits of that pottery, we found white paint on the surface of some of the pieces! It was very exciting. (They call it white slip, although they really don't know what it was made of yet. I was under the impression that "slip" refered specifically to pottery mixed with water to change the color, but I guess that's not how slip is defined at this site.) Anyway, even while feeling pretty crappy and not digging in the dirt, I got to help find someting exciting. We found several pieces with substantial white slip.
I'm feeling much better tonight, although  have what my mother calls my "migraine hang-over." It doesn't hurt so badly, but I'm disoriented and can't remember what I'm doing. That's why it has taken me so long to get ready for bed and type this, so I'm going to sleep. Sorry that the pictures still aren't working. I'm not sure if it is because the internet connection is so poor, or becuse blogspot doesn't cooperate well with my tablet.

Goodnight

Abandon Site!

The weekend, or at leat Saturday, was great. We all slept in, then I rode the bus to Kirkwall with some of my friends. We walked all aroud, went in shops, bought a few things, tried Orkney ice cream, and got fish'n chips from a Chinese restaurant that supposedly has the best fish'n chips in Orkney. (Yeah, I thought that was funny too, but after trying that meal, I don't dispute that claim. They were wonderful!) The Orkney ice cream was served in double cones, which have a normal cone-shaped bottom and then there are two tops on it. It looks like a upside down pyramid with a super 8 placed horizontally on top. It was awesome.
We also saw a blackening, which is kind of their version of a bachelor party. Traditionally a few days before the wedding, the bride's and groom's friends would cover them in treacle and soot (which made them black) and then cover them in feathers and parade them around the town. Then tie them up to the cross in the middle of the town and leave them there for I don't know how long. It was supposed to be a lesson in humility and show that those two could take on difficult times together as a couple. Today they cover the bride or groom is what looked like mud and cardboard. All sorts of rubbish, drive around town banging on the truck with the victim in the back, then cling wrap them to the cross outside of St. Magnus Cathedral. We saw several trucks go by making lots of noise, but when we passed the cathedral, a girl was wrapped up there with her friends watching. It was neat.
A field trip was scheduled for Sunday so I couldn't make it to church. I got up and made my lunch, and got in the van with everyone else but by the time we made it to Kirkwall, I was extremely sick with a migraine. It hit me so quickly. I was able to get out of the van without being sick in it, but it was very close. Our professor was meeting us there. I told him I was sick and he took me to the house where he and his colleagues are staying. I was there alone all day, which is exactly what I needed. I was sad about missing all the sites they got to see, but I would have been a lot sadder if I had gone. Well, there was just no way. I would have thrown up in the bus if I had been in it another 30 seconds. Around 9 last night my professor drove me back to our hostel in Stromness and I went to bed, but I was a bit better than I had been that morning. This morning I was still pretty sick, so I didn't go to work, but around noon all the kids showed up here and said they were told to go home because it was so rainy. The rain ruins the striations,, not to mention many of the artifacts that have been protected from it for thousands of years.
I'm feeling ok now, but honestly I'm hoping that the site is too wet to work on tomorrow because while I think I'm on the up hill slope now, migraines are evil and cunning. A day more of calmness would be safest.
Well, I don't have much to say that might interest anyone now, so I'll quit.

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.

A-mace-ing

Today I went to the finds hut to ask if they needed any assistance before I even headed out to dig. The person in charge said I was a god-send and better than the angel Gabriel to her and her assistant because they were in such need of help. Apparently the small finds registry that I worked on yesterday was three days worth of finds, behind! So all day I organized and recorded small finds. It was long, but i enjoyed watching the blank spaces fill as misplaced finds surfaced and were entered. It is very organized and I like it.
I was relieved at the beginning of the day when I learned that there was at least a day's worth of work for me with the small finds, but as the day wore on and I saw all of the finds pass by, I wanted to be out finding some. That's alright though. For my class credit I need to be proficient in the finds hut, and so I would need to work there for a while anyway. I consoled myself by saying there was lots of back-breaking digging to do and I would certainly have to do much more before the next two weeks are up.
This evening we had a lecture given by one of the archaeologists who arrived on site today.His name is Mark Edmonds and he is an expert in stone tools, which is ironic because shortly after he started excavating, he found one of the nicest stone tools that has come from the Ness so far. It is a mace head and very neat. There is more about it on today's site blog.
Anyway, the lecture was fascinating. It was about how stone tools were made and why. Mark believes that they were not only for practical use, but for status symbols and showing off one's skill to make them. Apparently much of the stone used for ax heads of Neolithic Britan came from the most difficult places to reach, such as the very top of mountains and cliffs. There were many other more convenient places to get the same stone, but they chose to risk many dangers instead.
After the lecture I went to  pub with three of the other Willamette students and one of the workers on site who is from London. We played pool and some electric quiz version of battle ship. We had a good time. Unfortunately our new friend is leaving after tomorrow's excavations so we won't have more time to socialize.
Since I went out, it is later than I would usually be writing, so I need to get to sleep.

Addition...

In the finds hut as I orgnized items, I was encouraged to take out and view any that I wanted to, as long as I made sure they went back in the propper bag. Today our excavation blog (orkneyjar.com/archaeology/nessofbrodgar) mentions two halves of a smll stone chisel and a small flint ax head. I got to work with both of these finds, (technically all three because the two sides of the stone chisel are clssified as different small finds) as well as several pieces of groove-wear pottery, (pottery with intentional grooves put into the surface for decoration and design,) and a small ball of fired clay that may have been a game piece or a something else unknown to us. I also worked with more pieces of flint chips, a flint scraping tool, several worked stones, and a plethora of less unique items like crumbling or undecorated pottery, daub, and cramp.
Yesterday I didn't mention that the guy I was digging next to uncovered a really neat large stone, about the size of a bread box, that had a concave scoop carefully chipped into the middle of it. It was very neat to see. Since the entire rock it isn't fully exposed yet, it is not tagged as a small finds yet. I hope that when they do give it a small finds number that they put a picture of it up on the website.
One more thing--there is a picture on the excavation blog that was taken today and shows me in the background surveying with my GPS. The picture is next to the "View from the Trenches" and I'm the one standing up in the back, dressed all in green, holding up a pole with a dish on the top.

Surveying and Finds Hut

It was supposed to be pouring rain today. It was quite windy and sprinkled on and off. It was unpleasant but I wasn't digging today. They started me right off on the GPS surveying the finds. There were so many today that I didn't have a minute to breathe. I went around and around the entire trench doing all of the tags, and by the time I had made it around, there were more finds to do.
After lunch they asked for a volunteer to help in the finds hut and I offered to assist. I was tired of the surveying and the weather so being in the finds hut was great. My job was to take boxes full of unorganized small finds and put them in numerical order based on the number of the find, written on the bag. I did that for the first half of the afternoon and I enjoyed it very much. Organizing is fun for me, but my next job was even better.
After the sorting, I entered all of the finds in the log book.
The wind outside of the trailer was so loud that it sounded like I was in a blizzard, but outside of the small window was the fresh-water loch and it had white-caps on it. The weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow, which means I'll be too hot. Oh well. :) I'm still enjoying the work.