Wind, Wind, Go Away

This morning the sun was shining through our window and I was excited for the nice weather. When we got out in the open, we found out that you could parasail without a boat in this wind. Right now I can hear it gusting around outside.
The section drawing wasn't too terrible in the wind. I finished that up by the first tea break, but after that I was assigned to clean a large area of rubble for a photograph. That's difficult in the first place, but with the wind blowing gusts of dust into your eyes, out of the bucket, and all over the stones, it's really awful. Cleaning has officially become my least favorite job... but I can't complain too much. I found a nice piece of flint while I was cleaning. It wa sitting right on top, so I bagged and tagged it. Usually in cleaning if there is a small find, you leave it in until it can be excavated, but this was too small and loose to leave.
We got the cleaning done, but it wasn't fun, and my eyes were tearing dirt for the next... well, they're still tearing dirt.
After lunch my Willamette group got to learn to do Geophysical Survey. I'm still a little fuzzyon how this specific technique works. Hopefully I will learn more about it tomorrow.
To perform the survey, we charted out a grid on a clear field of 20x40m, and used a large, but apparently fairly simple machine to conduct electricity through the ground and back to the machine. It then maps what and how effectively the stuff under the ground conducts electricity. This is how they figure out what might be down there. I know this is all so scientific that it's difficult to understand. Hopefully I'll be able to describe this process better tomorrow after I've seen the results and had them explained without howling wind obscuring all noise.
We might not be able to work tomorrow though, as the forecast says Thunderstorms with 98% chance for precipitation. I gues we'll see. :)

County Fair and USCB (Unidentified Sea Creature Bits)

Saturday I went to the Kirkwall county fair. It was simply called the "show" but it was surprisingly like the county fairs where I live, except much larger. There were a lot of tourists there, and I get the feeling that is pretty common, so the locals prepare.
We went through looking at chicken, ducks, cows, and ponies. Apparently a Highland cow won best in show, but we didn't see it.
We watched some of the horse competitions and it was really fun to see the riders in their fancy riding gear on little English saddles. I guess I've never seen that in pereson before.
We had heard rumors that there were going to be sheep races and sheep-shearing contests, but we didn't see them if there were. We didn't get there until about noon either.
There were vendors of all sorts. They were selling wool textiles, paintings, bags, clothing, wood-burned art, jewelry, haggis, burgers, alcohol of all shapes and sizes, chips (which we call fries), sweets, candy floss (cotton candy), and so much more.
I bought a pattern to use for either counted-cross-stitch or counted-tapestry, which is a design of Skara Brae. (Hopefully I can finish it before I'm 90 years old. That means I'll have to finish the dragon at least by 80.) The friend I was with found a painting that she really wanted, but she didn't have enough money so we pooled our money and checked to make sure we had enough for the bus tickets home. We did, but just barely.
Most of the people from the fair went to a soccer game after which was between the teams from Ham and Sandwick. We thought that was really funny. Anyway, we were out of money and pretty tired so we didn't go to the game. Instead we went to eat dinner in the same Chinese place that has the best fish-n chips around. While we were standing in line to order, we saw our professor in there waiting for his food. He came and talked to us for a while and we happened to ask him if the restaurant took credit cards. He said no, and we looked at eachother in a kind of "uh-oh" way. He saw it and gave us a 20 pound bill. We would have had to find another place to eat, or gone hungry. It's a good thing that place has good fish'n chips because the Chinese food was iffy at best.
We went to Tesco which is basically the Wal-Mart of Orkney, and bought some groceries for the week, then saw that the next bus back to Stromness and our hostel, wasn't for another two hours, so we went into a Bistro and ordered drinks while we waited. The Bistro was decorated with American things, which was really amusing. They had lisence plates from at least 30 states up on the walls. There was an 8B from Idaho! Somehow it seemed so out of place to see the lisence plates there. I took a picture of the one from Idaho. I felt weird doing it, but I just had to. There was a wooden Indian on the wall with a feather sticking out of his hair, and an old leather base-ball glove next to a wooden bat, under a picture of a taxi.
Today we were going to have a field trip, but it ended up not happening, so my friend and I went to the beach at low tide and combed. We found lots of cool stuff, some of which we brought back to the hostel. We will need to high-grade before we try to pack it though, unless we want to buy an extra suitcase for all of it. We have sea glass, several different kinds of shells, some chips of pottery worn by sand, and two oddities. One is, or at least was, clearly a table knife, but now it is a rusted... thing. We've decided it's from some famous ship wreck. We're not sure what the other thing is.  It's about two inches long, and the shape of a tusk. It's hollow, and white on th inside, but a dark greyish purple on the outside. It might be some kind of really large crab's claw... we're just really not sure. If only I could upload pictures, maybe some of you would know. Anyway, we like it and it's really sturdy so it's coming home with us.
We went to lunch at a pub/restaurant and had fish'n chips. (The fish'n chips are just so good here that we eat them all the time.) It was about four in the afternoon but there was one very drunk older guy at the bar who started singing "Black Velvet Band". The scene was so steriotypical of a Scotish pub, that it felt like an excerpt from a movie.
We only have four more days on site. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The Wall and the Wait

Today was overcast as usual, and sprinkled occasionally, but not enough to even need a rain-coat. Most of the workers always wear their rain pants, or some form of water-proof trousers because we're up and down, in and out of the dirt/mud all the time. That's fine, as long as you can strip off the muddy layer when you're done for the day.
First thing in the morning, I was instructed to clean a layer near structure 14. (Cleaning is taking the trowel and scraping down a very thin layer of soil, to re-expose the different colors and layers in the ground. It's a tedious process and probably my least favorite, because you're supposed to get all the miniscule clods of dirt off of the surface so that the soil in the ground can be viewed without the crumbs.) The cleaning didn't take very long, and when it was done, my supervisor examined and analyzed the results, then had me take a cut out of some of the newly cleaned space. He was expecting us to find a "robber cut" which is a section of wall where the stones have been removed to construct later structures. Usually the robber cuts are full of random rubble. I found random rubble for about 8cm down, then I found a section of wall that had not been distroyed by neolithic thieves! It was pretty neat. My little section was about 1.2m square, with nice flat stones at the bottom (which are the top of what is left of a wall.) One of these stones is about a 40cm wide by 50 or 60cm long, and only one side of it is exposed.
By lunch time I had cleaned up my section, and made a nice vertical cut in the soil, up from the wall level. This cut had other bits of rock or rubble protruding from it, but if those stones are in between the two sections, you leave them poking out and just square up the soil all around them. So basicly there is a miniature climbing wall on the edge of my section.
After lunch, I was waiting for one of the supervisors to help me, and just before he got to me, they discovered a cache of flint and at least one tool among the cache. Anyway, I couldn't get help until almost the second tea time and even then I didn't get much. I decided while I waited, that today ws probably my least favorite day, just because I wasn't doing anything. That's ok. The day was still good.
About 30 minutes before it was time to leave, I got instructions on how to do a section drawing, which is drawing the climbing wall part of my section, from a horizontal view, looking straight at the face of the wall. The shapes of stones isn't so iportant but the slant and the width is. The section drawing is done by first stringing some twine above the top of the section to be drawn, then making sure that the twine is level. Then a tape measurer is strung up above that. My job was to measure from the taught line to the tops, edges, and bottoms of every rock/surface, so that I could accurately portray them on graph paper at a scale of 1:20. (This would be so much easier if I could just put a picture in here. A picture is worth more than a thousand words in this case. If you go to ingleborougharchaeologygroup.org.uk/masongill.htm and scroll down about 2/3 of the page, there is a simplified version of what I am talking about. It is black and white and under "INTERPRETATION".) I got the basic idea of it before we had to leave, but I'm looking forward to working on it more on Monday.
Well, my work clothes should be clean and dry by now, so I'm going to take care of those, then go to bed and sleep in tomorrow morning. :)

D&D and Counted-Cross Stitch=USEFUL

This morning I finally got to go digging again, and it was amazingly eventful. By the first tea time at 10:30, I had already made 5 small finds, several of which were pretty cool. Two were just small bits of pottery but the third was a large basal sherd, which is what the pottery experts like to examine. I wouldn't have known what it was when I found it if I hadn't taken my sick day in the house cleaning and learning about pottery. Even with that I was a little surprised. It was about the size of a fist, but I could see it was pottery. I asked my supervisor anyway because I had never seen such a thick chunk. He confirmed that it was a basal sherd, "basal" meaning that it had part of the base on it, and "sherd" meaning a piece of pottery. This particular piece had a concave interior with an 'L' shaped exterior, where the base was attached to the wall of the vessel.
The other two pre-tea-time finds were worked stones, which were rounded. Anything we find on site that is round was at least brought to the site, and often worked and used for smoothing, or polishing. All of the natural stone flakes into very flat shapes. That was confusing at first because every sneaky rock looked like a man-made brick or tool. (Gee, I'm such an expert now that I've been at it for a total of three weeks.)
Between tea time and lunch, I found another five small finds, but they were all small pieces of pottery. That was a lot to find in 3.75 hours. It was much better than finding nothing, but there's definately a happy medium of not enough and too many. I was bordering on too many, because I wasn't making much progress into my context (layer of soil).
After lunch, one of my fellow "Willamettes" who had been planning, was moved on to work in the finds hut, and another of them was sent to write the site blog, so I got to take over their planning job.
Planning is drawing the outline of every stone and significant slant or other topography in a particular area. First I had to find the propper E-W line and then put a string taught along the edge of here I needed to plan. Next, I strung a tape measurer along the string, so I could line up with the last drawn square meter of planning.
There is a pre-made planning grid, that is made ofa square wooden frame, and the measurements along the interior of the frame are 1mx1m. Within the frame, there are strings making a grid pattern with squares of 20cmx20cm.
I lined the planning grid up and drew in the stones, and everything onto graphing paper, on a much cmaller scale obviously. I think the 20cm squares from the planning frame were shrunk down into 1cm on the paper. I used a plumb bob to locate where the edges of rocks were, and then counted the grid squares to draw the stone in the correct place. Using the plumb bob prevents visual distrotions because you know where in the square the point is, rather than where you think it is. You can't get directly over the grid to see straight down into the frame.
There were a lot of symbols to use to represent slopes, small finds in-situ, trench edges, and all kinds of things. The only difference between this and making a map for a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons was that here you were recording something real, where as for a D&D camaign, you record what is in your head. There were a few different sybols, since hopefully the trench doesn't contain triggers, traps, or monsters, but other than that, it was the same. Which worked out great for me because my favorite part of creating a D&D campaign is drawing the map.
So far planning is my favorite job. I know that what ever job I have most recntly learned seems to be my favorite, but I think this one will keep first place for a while. I hope I get to do more of it tomorrow, or next week.

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.