Field School Wrap-up - Block 6

Of all the blocks investigated, Block 6 yielded, perhaps, the greatest amount of physical artifacts found during the entire field school. Too bad we didn’t have more time to explore this area.

Work on this block wasn’t started until the fifth week. Here’s a shot of it early into the excavation.

As with Blocks 4 and 5, this started out as a 4m x 4m block composed of four 1m-square units. In the photo above, only 2 of those units had been worked on so far. That’s Sona in the background working on one of them. And Misty and Dr. Bob are picking away at the nearest unit. You can see the flags in their unit where they have marked several large pieces of pottery. They are gently scraping the dirt away to see if there is more that need to be documented. As they have reached their given target depth at this point, those pottery sherds were left in place for the time being while the other, untouched units were excavated down to the same depth. In addition, another unit was opened up on the southern side of the block.

This is how Block 6 looked at the start of the final week.

You can’t make it out clearly in that photo, but quite a bit of stuff was being uncovered. The pottery sherds that Misty had previously flagged turned out to be the start of a large concentration. This became more and more apparent as she slowly moved the dirt from around them to see how extensive the concentration actually was.

Here’s a view of what she was finding as she brushed off the soil.

And here’s a shot, taken the next day, after most of it had been exposed.

That is the way pottery will generally look when it is unearthed; flattened and broken. Intact pieces are rare. Each of those fragments has to be removed individually, cleaned, and catalogued. If the sherds haven’t become too degraded or damaged, they can be put back together in the lab (a process called “refitting”). A good deal of that has been done already. Maybe I can come back later and post a couple of photos of some of the pottery refits that have been completed.

While this pottery concentration was being dealt with, work progressed on the other units within the block. As the final week was nearing an end, another concentration of comparable size was discovered along the eastern wall of the block. So, as was the case with other blocks, the last couple of days were a scramble to extract as much of the last minute finds as we could. Here’s a shot of the Block 6 on our last morning as the crew was finishing up; a task that took them right up to the end of the final day.