The Fort Tombecbe Archaeological Project: Tacky T-shirt Tuesday

At the beginning of the day, the lovely Jean Louise came up with a fantastic idea. To wear the tackiest shirt you own on Tuesday. Thus began the Tacky T-Shirt Tuesday.

Look at the wild sky goat!!!

When I last informed you of the going-ons of Fort Tomb Ecbe, I was struggling with the hated roots. I unfortunately am still struggling with those vile pieces of wood. It goes to show the slow process archaeology really is. I have removed from my one meter squared unit, nine buckets of dirt and I’ve only descended 10-12 centimeters. In those 10 to 12 centimeters I’ve found six nails, a hinge, pieces of brick and glass, six pottery sherds, numerous bones, small charcoal deposits, and lots of mineral inclusions. Just to fill you readers in, a mineral inclusion is a ferrous deposit that forms inside the chalk that looks like metal, sounds like metal, and is completely useless. It forms in irregular shapes that might make you think rusted nail? But no, it is only a mineral inclusion. Team Bakery has been disappointed on several accounts similar to these.

Team Bakery has, however, had many triumphant successes. Napoleon (BJ) found three giant pot sherds in his unit.

Careful now.

We also discovered a line of nails along the southern area of my unit that stretched into both Napoleon’s and Boon’s unit. This would suggest that either a wall or a floorboard of the bakery fell into that area and rotted. The nails were left behind without disturbance. We did find a hinge in the line with the nails, but this artifact was disturbed by colonial activity. The reason we could tell this is because instead of lying flat on the ground, the hinge was standing vertically in the dirt.

Today after a long, grueling first half of the day working in the shade, wind, and dirt we retreated to lunch. After lunch we took a walk to see Trader Jones’ house. There was white chalk everywhere which reflected the intense sunlight and made us appreciate the shady grotto in which we are currently working in. As we were leaving I picked up a piece of gun furniture (the decorative iron on the gun). It was on the surface because a previous owner had bulldozed the area which turned all of the artifacts lying underneath out of context. This is the worst possible occurrence for an archaeologist. Think of it this way, yes, it’s a piece of gun furniture, but what does it tell us? How can we use this artifact to relate to the people of the past? Archaeologists use an artifacts position, and relation to other artifacts to learn these things. For example, I found six nails in my unit. They were in a line, had I not marked this line down, then I would have just found six nails in my unit. The information I received was that a wall or a wooden piece of flooring fell down. I would never have been able to infer that idea without it. Context is heavily important in archaeology.