Good to be back home again!

I did not - as previously promised - keep up with the blog as I meant to. Last year's field school blog (bodkinsscuppetsandsilverhalfgroats.blogspot.com) turned into my field journal, which meant I was pretty motivated to keep up with posts. I also didn't anticipate the amount of work I'd be doing at this year's field school. Not only did we have readings for discussion group, we also had to create a posted based on original research to present at Cherokee, NC (location of the Cherokee Reservation) for the local Cherokee community (Eastern Band). On top of all of that, I am also taking an independent study this summer to get in a 400-level course I need for graduation (grrrrr . . . . more on that some other day, maybe). And Dogwood, the party cabin, proved enticing on more than one night. :D

Long story short, I'm a lame-ass, and I didn't post. I don't know how often I will post here - I can only promise that I will try to make any posts interesting to someone. I may post archaeological things, I may post parenty-things, I may post geek-girl things, or I may just post nonsense. I'm not sure yet. I guess -- in lieu of interesting field school posts -- I will at least post some interesting field school pictures to close. Here you go, world. Enjoy:

Steve S. and I on a final trowel-down of the unit. I have to admit, I was pretty chuffed that not only were we the first to find a feature (postmold), we also were the first to hit subsoil and the first to do our trowel-down--and this after losing 2-3 days to the rain. When we came back to the field on Wednesday, June 22nd, our unit had 6 inches of standing water in it. We bailed it, did what we could in the waterscreen with the sloppy muck we were left with that day, and then returned the following day (after lots more rain) to find another pond where our unit should be. (I'd post a picture, but I was so devastated by the mess of it all that I didn't even think to record the lake in our unit for posterity). We lost a LOT of time that week--I was so pleased to be ahead of everyone else by Friday, June 24th, when the above picture was taken!!

This is my unit just before digging features (actually, I think the two sandbags cover postmolds we'd bisected the day before, so perhaps this is just after we started digging features). I would show you the full "after" picture, but we encountered two burials by accident as we excavated what we believed to be middens. We very respectfully replaced all associated bone and feature fill and closed up those particular features immediately. We also contacted the Eastern Band Cherokee archaeologist and representatives, who were well pleased with the steps we had taken (one of them even offered us "medicine" if we wanted - which I totally would have taken him up on if we'd stayed long enough!) But I will respectfully decline from posting any pictures from after.

And this is our intrepid field crew. There are four grad students, my professor (on the far right), and the rest are undergrads or recent grads (I'm talkin' about you, Neil!)