Community Archaeology Continues

Christy holding a ground slate point

Nora and Stuey digging with their dad for the first time

Jill and her brand new, squeaky clean screen

A photo of me taken by Patrick

Patrick describing stratigraphy from the 2005 test pit to the field school students and interns

The first week of community archaeology is almost done and we have had nearly perfect weather. It has been sprinkling off and on, but it hasn't rained for long and the temperature has been perfect for digging. The bugs have also mellowed out. Or maybe we're just using more Deet.

We're still figuring out what people did at this site in the past, but we have already learned a few important things. We've uncovered a house that was built after 3800 years ago - we know that because it was built on top of a volcanic ash that fell around that date. However, it probably wasn't much later than 3800 years ago because the sea level was dropping at that time and thus the ocean was moving away from the Amak Site and closer to where it is today. In other parts of the site, we are digging in a layer that is from the Ocean Bay II time period (between 5500 and 3800 years ago). One of the coolest artifacts found today was a ground slate point (top photo). These tools are known from other sites to have been used during Ocean Bay II.

In general, we have found few artifacts so far. Most of them are chipped stone and a surprising large portion of them are finished tools. This leads us to believe that people were making their chipped stone tools elsewhere and bringing them to the Amak Site already completed. If they had been flaking them at the site, we would be finding many more chipped stone flakes.

We have also uncovered a bunch of large rocks that were definitely moved to the site by people - you can see a couple of them in the last photo. We don't know yet if they are part of a structure or something else. We'll have to move a lot more dirt to find out!