First excavation day

27 April 2007

My first day of excavation! We had a great day. Paula (my labmate), Liz (my advisor), and Gail (a Stanford art professor) are up here to help me get started. Gail and Liz are collaborating on a project that combines art and science, so Gail is video and audio-taping small vignettes associated with the excavation. It will be great to see the results of that project. One thing I will do is take a picture each day of the excavation pit from the same location, so at the end we can make a time-lapse video of the excavation.

Today, we set the datum for the excavation, staked out the corners and started excavating. The datum is a fixed point on the rocks from which we can measure the height and distance of any point in the pit. Once we had the datum set, we staked out the four corners of the pit, and then started excavating! We took off the top layer of the pit (~3 cm) and then started excavating in 10cm depths. We got down through part of the second layer and then quit for the day. We are all really sore this evening and we’ll see where our bruises pop up!