Day 8: Friday May 15 2009

ENDANGERED SITES: A REOCCURRING THEME
(BUT LUCKILY HIRVI IS WATCHING OVER US!!)

Today at The Thing, excavation on the Geological trenches resumed.

The Sand Pit Wall was as exciting as ever, more of the stratigraphy was cleaned up for mapping. Lead by Andre, students took points in the beginning processes of map creation.


More mapping was done on the South wall of the SPW- this time from the top! A top view map was painstaikingly created by Brenden and Katie of the large organic mass that sits at the bottom of the storage pit discovered earlier this week. Unfortunately because of the time-consuming detail of this type of hand drawn map, it was not done to completion, but not to worry, there's always Monday!



The Survey team (Greg, Dustin, Mike, Loretta, Sabi, Lisa, Max, and Colin) explored the 60 meter contour today with the aid of their handheld GPS unit. They walked along the contour just North of the row house depressions that were found on the second day of Survey (Day 5: Tuesday). Unfortunately today provided negative results for those particular transects. But one cannot forget: negative results are just as informative as positive results, all the information is necessary.

As opposed to the usual Makkara Wednesday, turn of events pushed it back until today. All of the teams gathered at the Kierikki Museum's reconstructed row house for the traditional weekly Makkara lunch around the campfire!!

It is not only a good morale booster in the middle of what is usually a very cold and wet week, but it is also a traditional experience that everyone visiting Finland should have! Even our vegetarian team members enjoyed soy Makkara!

It may also seem as fate had more in store for the team, as they quickly jumped up to help one of the museum's workers. This young man was painstaikingly rolling a very large log (by himself!) along the boardwalk in front of the reconstruction, removing each of the small logs in succession and replacing it in the front of the line.... slow going if you can imagine! You may ask yourself what he was doing dragging this immense log across a beach- he was building a new row house reconstruction... BY HIMSELF!!!

So after a quite relaxing lunch on the beach we were headed on a tour of two sites. The first of which was an impressive site (the one reffered to earlier) which Andre explained may either be three small dwelling structures, or one very massive one all lined in the East-West orientation. This correlates to almost all dwelling structures found in this area.

Then the whole team headed over to the site we would begin work on for Monday, an endangered area already disturbed greatly by logging. On the way we saw two Hirvi, or moose, good omens according to Andre (backed up by early Finnish mythology!!)!!!

The team split up and scoured the ground for scatters of artifacts on the surface and depressions which were in all stages of disturbance. The surface finds were marked for further investigations that would resume on Monday, and the team headed home.