Surveying, Tumbling, and Really Old Bugs!

The plague is upon us! Last week poor Elle was miserable with pink eye and a cold. Today Natalie was diagnosed with an ear infection. Hopefully they will both be back to 100% by the end of the week and the Fort Tombecbe crew will be together in the field. We certainly missed our team members during their respective sick days.

                Boone, BJ, and I took our turn surveying and working with the mapping station – completely cool. We continued the work started by Team Palisade at the beginning of week 2 by locating several more points in the barracks area.  As it turns out BJ is a numbers genius and Boone has a natural ability to hold completely still, which is necessary for accuracy, and as I have said in a previous post, accuracy is KING. This turned out to be a difficult task for me. Periodically my dyslexia gets the better of me and numbers and graph coordinates fail to make logical sense. In addition to being somewhat baffled by numbers and words, I managed to trip over an unidentified object (it may have been my own feet) and went feet over head in a rather comical trip and fall. Laurel and Hardy could not have done better, neither could Gerald Ford. Fortunately tomorrow Team Bakery is continuing survey work and I will have a chance to redeem myself (and hopefully manage to remain upright all day).

                The new Team Barracks continued work and turned up an impressive amount of artifacts. Tori’s excavation efforts revealed 26 nails, 19 of which are complete. To be defined as complete, the nail must have both the head and shaft still connected. She is using a system called piece plotting which attempts to place the location of the find within the graphic drawing of the unit. This method allows archaeologists to study the distribution of artifacts within a unit. In this case the nails occurred in a straight(ish) pattern which could possibly indicate a wall. Additional evidence that there may have been a wall in this area is the discovery of 300 year old Mud Dauber nests.  These nests had been attached to the barracks wall and still had the impression of the wood on them. It is both creepy and delightful to ponder the discovery of an almost 300 year old bug den.

The rest of my day was fairly uneventful (certainly less so than my spectacular tumble in the morning) and we returned home to discover that Rosa put together pizza fixings for dinner with frosted brownies for dessert. I genuinely love this site, but Rosa’s kitchen magic is by far the thing I look most forward to in the evenings. This mom is going to cry when I have to go home and cook again.