home stretch?

29 June 2007

Well, it feels like the home stretch to me. Carrie left on Thursday and Xue and Ronny arrived early in the week, so we now have the “permanent” field crew in place. We excavated and sieved this week. We are down to Level VIIb, which is where we found the horse tooth in the main deposit. We haven’t found anything quite so flashy again- in fact, we’re not finding many large animal teeth at all. Tomorrow, we will probably go back to the pit and see if we can hit bottom. After that, it’s time for all of the little details necessary to finish up the summer (with the possibility of additional excavation)- vegetation surveys, mapping the floor of the pit and the cave, characterizing the stratigraphy of the pit, etc (with breaks for 4th of July and my friend Nicole’s wedding!).

lots of help!!

23 June 2007










Well, I had quite a week and lots of help. We hit the floor in a large part of the pit, so we decided to extend the pit east about 50 cm and start anew from the top. I had four wonderful field assistants to help me do this: Bob Feranec, Carrie Glenney, and my parents (Steve and Barbara Blois). Bob and Carrie excavated with me in the beginning and the end of the week, and my parents got into the cave on Thursday. By yesterday, we were about 50 cm deep and seemed to be glimpsing the top of the floor in the new location. I am hopeful that we can get another 20 cm down before we hit the floor again.


The sediment is really interesting- it’s very dry and loose, and very easy to excavate. Sometimes it’s so easy, it makes it difficult to avoid going to deep! We found quite a few intact jaws as we were excavating on Friday- a Lepus (probably the black-tailed jackrabbit), a Sylvilagus (a bunny rabbit), and a sciurid, probably Spermophilus beecheyi (California ground squirrel). It will be interesting to see if we find more stuff while sieving. I head up on Sunday or Monday with Carrie and Xue, a Stanford undergrad who will be helping me the rest of the summer. And Ronny, another Stanford undergrad, will join us on Wednesday. It will be great to have so much help to finish the excavation and the other small little details of wrapping up!

Pleistocene??

15 June 2007

I was up in the field earlier this week with Liz. We started sorting through some teeth and found...a horse tooth! This is really significant because it means we have transitioned into the Pleistocene! We may have found some other things- a bovid and an extinct pig- but those ID's are more tentative. I am very excited and can't wait to get back into the field on Monday to excavate some more!!!

New blog element

9 June 2007

Well, I'm back home for 2 days and have been organizing things. I added a link to this blog in the upper left corner that takes you to my Picasa photo gallery. I'll try to post photos from each trip on Picasa so everyone can access the photos.

busy week and weird teeth

5 June 2007

I'm back up in Shasta with two wonderful assistants from UC Berkeley (Kelly (left) and Lauren). We have been busy excavating and sieving. I am past the 1/2 m mark in the pit and may have just hit the floor. There is a very large rock ~20 cm wide that spans the pit, though there is still sediment on either side of the rock. So, we'll see how much farther I can go down! On the sieving front, Lauren and Kelly found some interesting things yesterday- a large deer tooth, something that looks like a worm cast, a carnivore canine, and a completely unknown piece of bone/tooth. So, things are getting busy up here!

It poured down rain last night, but we were nice and dry in the cabin. Today, we're in Redding resupplying our groceries and checking our e-mail. More soon!