Last second excavation

In a sudden and unexpected turn of events, we were forced to dig open and excavate an entirely new trench this weekend. We left the dig site Friday, after covering it up with topsoil and doing our final mapping and measuring, and went home without any idea that two days later we would have to begin the whole process over again, but with less time and more to uncover.

Above: An aerial shot of the new site. The organic layer, which, based on initial interpretation, appears to be made of chocolate cookie crumbs, has been removed from the main trench, outlined in string and pretzel pieces. Underneath the organic was a thin layer of almonds and oatmeal cookie crumbs, and then a leached layer of vanilla cake. In the top corner you can see a fireplace, and in the bottom corner, our sand pile on a tarp.

The stratigraphy of the trench followed the same pattern as our main trench: a cookie-crumb organic layer with some chocolate frosting, a leached layer of vanilla cake, a dense layer of chocolate rice-crispy square ceramics, an enriched banana-bread layer, and then some chocolate chip cookie hard-pan. Most excitingly, the ceramics layer included some jellybean amber beads, something we never found at our original site.

Above: Deciding exactly how to excavate the trench was obviously very difficult, as we didn't want to collapse the layers into each other, or miss anything when dividing it up into pieces. Fortunately, every layer remained intact and worthy of considerable investigation.

Above: A good picture of the profile of the new trench. The rice-crispy ceramics layer is particularly thick at this point, which everyone was very happy about.

So, having completed this surprise excavation (cleverly surveyed for digging by Laura, one of the undergraduates from McGill), we were done with all the heavy-lifting and done with the Field School. It's been a fun and busy few weeks, and we've all learned a lot about Finland and archaeology. It will take some time, of course, before all the things we've found can be fully understood and contextualized, but we all know that it's been an incredibly successful and fulfilling experience. That much, at least, we can guarantee.

That's all,
The Field School