Day 15 Friday May 22

UKKO SPEAKS

Today at The Thing started by Katie and Loretta lowing the geologic unit T309, Jen drew the stratigraphy of T209's walls, and Brendan and Keegan took a great many soil samples.

In the morning there was more field walking at Hiidankangas. We found lots more quartz flakes, debitage, and fire cracked rock (fcr).

Sam made the interesting observation that quartz flakes found unassociated with fcr and other debitage tend to be used while other clusters with debitage and fcr tend to be unused and associated with manufacture. This is something we would never have discovered if we hadn't been doing a full survey of this area!

We gathered at the museum for lunch and coffee It's lucky for us that Andre has a sixth sense, seeing that as soon as we stepped inside the museum Ukko (the Finnish mythological god of the sky who specializes in storms and lightning) showed up and massive rain showers poured down around us! Fortunately as we were about to head back to work, the skies cleared and we were off.

After lunch the whole crew came to lend assistance at The Thing. The large organic mass at the SPW was finally removed to the lab, but not without much contemplation over exactly how it might be done.

Continuing on T309 were Loretta, Max, Hunter, with alternating supervision by Colin and Sam.

Andre took Jenn, Greg, Dustin, Eva, and Sarah to check out the platforms found in Survey the day before. What is interesting about these platforms is that they are not continuous along the shoreline and it's only one spot in this area. A series of round dunes lined up next to each other and when you look at them they are clearly little hills as opposed to long continuous dunes. It is not clear what made them, they are not in an estuary environment so we need to look into the processes that may have created them. There is a row of already known structural depressions nearby, as well as a cairn (possibly more). The houses themselves seem to have one high side and one low side, which is contiguous of other dwelling finds in the area.

Sam taught Katie how to use his mobile (and incredibly accurate) GPS unit. She then mapped in the roads intersecting The Thing, as the earlier DEM's (Digital Elevation Model's) did not signify these modern intrusions. Next was mapping the drainage trench through the Sand Pit Wall (SPW) which had grown exponentially since last year. Then through the dense trees Sam's GPS unit proved quite successful in keeping strong satellite signals to map the Neolithic depression and high ridge that encompasses the SPW.

As the day was coming to a close and Katie was taking the last few possible points with the GPS unit, Ukko, riding in on his dark black ominous cloud, spoke to us and told us to vacate his forest!!!!! Luckily, just as that happened Andre's van returned from Survey and we hightailed it out of there!