Day 6: Wednesday May 13 2009

DISCOVERY OF A TRAGIC TRUTH: NEAR DESTRUCTION OF A PREHISTORIC SITE

Today, while the team working at The Thing was opening up two new Geological trenches, Andre was checking out a nearby known Neolithic dwelling depression by the side of the road.


To everyone's dismay, he discovered that a sand pit that had been dug in years past for road gravel was encroaching dangerously near to this depression.

So what he has had us do is clean up the stratigraphy in the cut that was made by the bulldozer. This was done in order to see if it had actually destroyed part of the site.

And what do we find? A storage pit had been partially removed and we could see the large organic mass that was formerly the contents of the pit. We do not know yet what it is, we have to wait to remove it. Andre wants to take it out in one large chunk and transport it to the lab so it can properly be analyzed. A possibility is to use apoxi and do thin slices to be viewed under the microscope!!!! (Which by the way is really freaking cool!) Now this is so interesting because: we normally would not see these things from this angle, in an excavation one would be removing very carefully, very slowly, and very evenly in flat layers from the top. Right now, we have a huge in-tact storage pit sticking out from the side of a wall. Nuts!