Day 4 - May 15th: Hark! a Hearth calleth!

Back so soon? Good thing, because we've got another post up and ready for you.

Again we will start with trench T108 at KKN. More quartz flakes were found as well as decaying ceramics but the real excitement of the day was finding that the enriched soil makes a very distinguishable hearth pattern in the west end of the trench. Pretty cool. This is supported by the finding of a small piece of bone within the hearth structure; burnt bone is well preserved in this soil and, depending on its species, could support the home-hearth theory. If this site follows the coastal residence pattern as seen in previous years this bone is most likely a seal bone, as seal was one of the primary resources in the area. We also had the Total Station at KKN today which dramatically sped up the mapping of finds process.

Over in T208 at the Thing is more charcoal. It seems that the pit was reused several times as there seems to be several separate layers of charcoal. This could possibly indicate that this particular pit was reused for cooking over the passage of time, a cooking pit palimpsest. We will have to see how far it goes down and carbon 14 date all the levels to see how early it started being used. And now for an update on the Thing's slag piece....(drum roll please)....not slag, turns out it was a particularly compressed and frozen piece of charcoal. it took some serious scientific analysis (using a microscope!) to figure this out.

Moving on to T308 at the Pits. Twas a half day there today as Sam had to do a presentation in the afternoon. A double stratigraphy was found in the trench though which is very cool. This means that the particular pit being excavated is the result of at least two separate occupations. This means that trench T308 at the Pits will be staying open for a few more days (instead of being closed up on Friday as previously thought) to see how far down these multiple occupations go.

More news from the survey team; they found another site. This one is 8 dwelling depressions that run along the 55 meter shore line, which dates to about 5000 years BP. Pretty cool. And apparently that's not the only thing they found, whilst trekking through a muddy field they learned that mud + rubber boots = stuck. Some foot excavations had to happen to remove some students who were stuck in the mud.

Picture time!

Making a wall of shade over trench T108 for picture taking purposes...also warmth.

Trench T108 at the end of the day.

Mapping finds with the Total Station at KKN.

Carrying the Total Station equipment back to the vans at the end of the day.

Tomorrow is Friday. This was just a statement. It doesn't really mean anything. Until next post!

Cheers,
The Field School

Day 3 - May 14th: Makkara Wednesday!

I'll just jump right into it today, not a significantly large amount to report, except some interesting van and mud issues.

Over in trench T108 at KKN quartz flakes were still coming up all over the place in addition to signs of decaying pottery. Some good charcoal samples were also located to be removed tomorrow for carbon 14 dating purposes.

Trench T208 over at the Thing didn't really yield a whole lot today, but that seems to be the trend at the Thing unless you find what could be palimpsest fire pits interesting....wait, that is pretty interesting. Today, as with every Wednesday, Katie Grundtisch (an undergrad from University of Buffalo) got to get in some practice guiding procedures at the site, as Jen is occupied on Wednesdays. This is Katie's second year attending the Nocuso Field School here at Oulu University. She expedited the drawing of surface feature maps and there was a complete lack of mutiny at the site...this is a good sign. As far as the slag goes, it is still hanging out in the lab, we will know soon. Moving on.

Now for an update on the business over in trench T308 at the Pits with dear old Sam. The interesting feature from yesterday was pretty much confirmed to just be a coincidental pattern of charcoal as it was deposited. Other than that there seems to be a large similarity between the pits of charcoal here as at the one being excavated over at the Thing. Coincidence? I honestly don't know yet, we will let you know of any possibly important relationships as they pop up.

Some interesting news came our way from the survey team as well today, they found a small site along the 60 meter coast line, which can be dated to roughly 5500 years BP.

We had to do some rescuing today. While Dr. Ezra Zubrow and Eva Hulse (a University of Buffalo PhD student) were driving around looking for good roads to use for survey, they somehow managed to get the van stuck in the mud. Very stuck. Tires all the way down to the water table stuck. It took a few strong bodies, a lot of digging, and some strategic gas pedaling, but eventually we rescued the property-of-Oulu-University van.

Today was also makkara Wednesday as indicated in the title of the post. This has become somewhat of a tradition here at the Nocuso Field School. Every Wednesday we get some campfires going and throw some makkara (Finnish sausages) on some sticks and eat them for lunch. Very tasty. I think I like this tradition!

On a much sadder note, Dr. Andre Costopoulos (the man with the Heavy Metal plan), spent his last day on site with us today. He has to head back to Montreal to deal with other professorial work. We wish him well and his presence will be missed.

Here are some pictures from the day.

The epic rescue of Eva and Dr. Zubrow's van from the Yli-Ii river quicksand.

Dustin Keeler (A PhD student from University of Buffalo) and Panu (an Oulu University student) roasting Makkara over an open fire.

WWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYY!!!!!????

Trench T308 over at the Pits.

That's it for this post!

Cheers,
The Field School

Day 2 - May 13th: Ceramics, Quartz...Slag?

Hey All. Here we go again. The weather today was the opposite of yesterday, twas beautiful and sunny in the morning and it started to snow and rain in the afternoon...my dearest Finland, I never tire of your remarkably unpredictable weather patterns.

Starting with the trench T108 at KKN (finally found out what this abbreviation stands for - Kotikangas North) we had several more quartz flakes found in the leeched layer, about 61 in total. The best find of the day at KKN was definitely two ceramic sherds which were also in the leeched layer at the east end of the trench, which is where the midden (garbage pile for all you non-archaeologists) should be located in the dwelling. These pieces are Comb ware, which is a ceramic tradition that spanned from Northern Finland all the way down to Lithuania and appeared from roughly 6000 to 4000 years BP. I'm including a picture of one of the sherds (a rim) that we took in the lab with this post, it's pretty cool if you ask me. It's called comb wear because a comb was scraped along the wet clay as these ceramics were drying which leaves a very distinctive decorative pattern. This could be evidence of this dwelling being a generalized site, meaning one with little economic specialization, but as I said yesterday we can't really figure this out for sure until the excavation is complete. That's really it for KKN today, everything was mapped, bagged, and tagged as per usual.

Things were still a good deal frozen at the Thing today, but we finally got down through that organic layer and started hitting an interesting mixed leeched and charcoal layer. Turns out trench T208 is just loaded with charcoal, with a large concentration in the middle of the trench, you'll get the idea from the picture I'm including. Another interesting find at the Thing was what could possibly be some slag, I'll update you later on whether this is true after the find has been adequately analyzed in the lab. Other happenings from the thing included the drawing of a scaled Elevation Sketch Map and a scaled Soil Map of the trench.

Moving on to a very exciting day over in trench T308 at the Pits. Maybe I lie. Depends on how much you like charcoal. We found a quite interesting charcoal pattern in the east side of the trench which is shaped like a square with a spherical tail. We don't know what this is, the most likely explanation is that this just happened to be the pattern that the burnt logs were sitting in as they decayed. Other than that we've reached the bottom of T308 in most parts of the trench which means that we will most likely be wrapping up this site by the end of the week and moving the extra person power over to KKN where another trench will be opened up.

That's really all for the day, now revel in our photographic prowess. BEHOLD, US...frozen in carbonite!

A picture of the whole Nocuso 2008 field team at the big ball. Two things to point out, first is the shear number of people involved in the project this year, second is that very few people are actually looking at the camera in this picture, that's because Dr. Ezra Zubrow is taking the same piture from a different angle at the same time here, 10 points to those of you who can identify the people who are actually looking at the camera.

Clayton, a Nucuso student from Australia, poses at the end of trench T108 at KKN.

Everyone working away in trench T308 at the Pits, both mapping and excavation are occurring in this one.

The interesting charcoal feature at trench T308.

Trench T208 at the Thing.

One of the Comb ware ceramic sherds from trench T108 at KKN.

Hope you enjoy the pretty pictures, until next time!

Cheers,
The Field School

Day 1 - May 12th: Quartz Flakes and Frozen Soil

Day 1 of the excavation started off with a bang, this particular bang being snow, which meant some awfully frozen organic layers to our trenches.

I'll start with the day's happenings in trench T108 at KKN (what this stands for still to come!). The first job was to clear off the organic layer in the trench. This was done relatively quickly, though there were some frozen patches that took a little longer to get through. There was one small quartz flake found near the bottom of the organic layer, but that was only a glimpse of what was to come. Once we got to the leeched layer we started finding quartz flakes left, right and center! I believe the total was about 55 separate flakes by the end of the day, very cool! All the finds were mapped, bagged, and tagged by the end of the day. This large amount of quartz flake finds could be early evidence of economic specialization which matches the shore line this dwelling is associated with, but not the dwelling type, that being a one hearthed dwelling. However it's really too early to be able to interpret this data fully, seeing as flakes are usually found in the leeched layer and other finds, such as ceramics, are usually found further down. Other interesting goings on at the KKN trench include a friendly little competition that myself and Andrius (A Lithuanian student doing his Master's degree here at Oulu University) have started. You see, whoever has the most finds turn up when screening their back dirt (which means they missed the find in its actual archaeological context) loses. We will have to decide a prize for the winner of this competition, perhaps our readers could provide some suggestions?

Moving onto trench T208 at the Thing. It was frozen. Very frozen. So frozen in fact that chiseling away at the organic layer took all day long. And this entire day of slaving over the frozen trench didn't even remove all of the organic layer! Thus a primary goal for tomorrow will be to get all of that organic layer removed!

Last but not least is the news from trench T308 over at the Pits site. This is the trench which will hopefully yield few finds, as that would support the suggested model of social evolution for the Yli-Ii river area outlined in the last post. It turns out that a piece of ceramic was found there, which seems to be older ceramic with very thick walls, which could still support the model.

Other exciting news was brought to us by the survey team. They found a very large, well, mysterious structure. It is a large U shaped mound, roughly 15 by 15 meters and 2 meters high with a another long mound in the middle, of about the same height. Overall it looks kind of like a giant trident or pitch fork (but the middle prong isn't attached) if that helps you visualize it better. It is located right along the 5500 years BP coast line and there is an interesting rock located near it which looks to have been worked somehow as it has various markings on it and perhaps even some pigment. Very cool. More updates will come as we learn more about what I'm going to call the mysterious structure for the time being.

And now for some pictures!

Snow. Something one must deal with when excavating in Finland.

The trench T108 at KKN, complete with snow.

Working away at T108...Andrius is "supervising".

Down to the leeched layer at T108

Mapping finds (ie. billions of quartz flakes) at T108

Chiseling through the frozen organic layer in trench T208 at the Thing

Jen Bracewell (McGill PhD Student) looks at the interesting rock near the mysterious structure with a look of what seems to be disgust...

Yours truly riding Andrius' bicycle before heading to the lab...maybe that's why I'm making a face.

That's all for now, should be posts most days now.

Cheers,
The Field School

The NOCUSO Archaeological Field School: 2008 Edition

Welcome Back! In the brilliant tradition started by a certain Mr. David Groves, the blog documenting all the thrilling ups and downs of the 2007 NOCUSO Field School excavations at the Yli-Ii river near Oulu, Finland, will be continued this year.

The main goal of excavations this year is to test a proposed model of social evolution for the Yli-Ii river area. This model was covered in the very first post of this blog last year, so if you haven't already read the blog several times over, you should get on that, it will help, but for you lazy people who want to keep the reading to a minimum, here's the story in a nutshell. From 7000 to 3500 years BP (and even up to 1500 years BP at the Thing's smelting pit) in the Yli-Ii river area the land was rising (because of isostatic rebound) faster than the sea level was rising, so the sea level lowered and the coast got further and further out over time. These coast lines correspond very well with settlement patterns throughout the time period in question. So the model thus far is of increasing economic specialization, social complexity, and an increasingly integrated community, over time throughout the area.

The first week here at Oulu University (May 3rd to May 10th) included lectures and several visits to the site. The lectures provided us with some essential background information pertaining to the prehistory of the Yli-Ii river, and the model of temporal social evolution throughout the area as theorized by Dr. Andre Costopoulos (the most metal of all archaeologists). The visits to the site were to determine what was going to be excavated this year, to orient us, and give us a crash course in locating dwelling depressions. It was decided that three separate excavations were to occur at the site this year!

The first trench to be thrown down is at a dwelling depression at KKN (what this abbreviation actually means will be in a later post, simply because I don't remember what it is right now). The purpose of this trench is to provide more evidence to support the model, as it sits in the middle of the chronology of the area (around 5500 years BP) and thus should be a one hearthed dwelling with a wide range of finds, as in no economic specialization yet. The second is at the Thing, which as you may remember from last year contained what seemed to an iron smelting pit, complete with piles of slag! Now there were two depressions on top of the platform at the thing and only one was excavated last year, so the second one will be excavated this year. The third trench is at a higher elevation, and remember in this context that means older (though carbon dates will still be needed to prove the dates of finds). This third trench is of several small depressions along the road which were originally recorded as iron age cooking pits. Dr. Costopoulos believes that these are actually the remains of early, very transient, settlement of the area by highly mobile hunter-gatherers. If this is true it would support the model of increasing social complexity and economic specialization in the area, and thus the hope is to find very little in the Pits, because highly mobile hunter-gatherers would not leave very much behind.

So that's the plan.

On Saturday May 10th (yes, archaeologists are hardcore, we work on Saturdays.), we headed up to take off the turf layer of the trenches so that the top layer of humus would be thawed for excavation on Monday the 12th. This was all done pretty easily, we only had to deal with a little bit of turf frozen to the top layer of soil, but that's a reality archaeologists must face when working in northern settings! Here is a single picture (Edit: there are two pictures now, and who knows a whole post dedicated pictures may or may not occur at some point in the future!) I realize that this is a little lame for the moment, but I promise more will follow, once picture coordination between all three trenches is figured out for this year.

The trench T108 at the Thing once the turf was removed

The trench T308 at the Pits being cleaned up after removal of the top soil

That's all for this post, you can look forward to more pictures and more posts, all coming soon!

Cheers,
The Field School

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

Day 13 and 14: Site Clean-up and Mapping

After our failed attempt to finish up all the digging on Tuesday, it took us until today to get all of our finds out of the trench. That meant that as we excavated one end of the trench (the east end, where the big clay feature continued much, much further than we expected), we were mapping the other end and filling it back up with the sand we've accumulated over the last three weeks. Of course, that got a little complicated, as the sand gradually encroached upon those still digging. In the end, we managed to completely fill the trench back up again and get all our finds out, although we did have to take all the ceramics left in the sand out in one big chunk and bring them back to lab. As always with archaeology, we found ourselves trapped between trying to do as thorough a job as possible and getting the dig done on time. The mapping process is fairly slow, and while it isn't stressful or difficult, it does require that we have about a day to record all the changes and peculiarities in the stratigraphy of our trench. Hopefully, the maps we make will tell us how much the area had been altered by humans, and how much of it was deposited or moved around by any number of natural forms of disturbance. Like everything, we'll need some lab time to work it all out, and we'll try to post our thoughts or insights on what we find.

As for the Thing, we finally reached the bottom of the last layer of charcoal, which is great, and that means that tomorrow we will take some time to map its profile and then fill it up again. It's a very strange sensation refilling a trench that you've excavated: after all the work you've done, all you want to do is make it look like you were never there. We dig out a mountain of sand, take a couple of kilograms of stuff from it, then put it all back in and roll the vegetation and organic matter back on top. However, we found a very exciting couple of kilograms, and over the next week or so (excluding tomorrow), we'll spend some time in the lab looking over them, preparing charcoal samples to be dated, and thinking about how the artifacts we've gathered change the way we think about Neolithic Finland. What can we infer from what we've found? What have we found that contradicts or reinforces what we already assumed? How does the Thing factor into all this? Of course, many of these questions hinge on some sort of date range to work with, but the ultimate goal of the field school, to paint an accurate picture of life in the Iijoki region a very long time ago, is all about trying to tackle these difficult problems, and doing so with only a small amount of information.

In any event, tomorrow will likely be uneventful, so unless something unexpected happens, we'll just do an update in the next few days with some pictures of the week and a description of the kinds of things we've been putting together and picking apart in the lab.

That's all for now,
The Field School