A Great Day for Archaeology

I was watching the backhoe this morning. We had to start out by moving our back dirt pile from the first round of backhoe work at the site, since of course we put the dirt right where we ended up wanting to do more digging. While the driver shoved dirt piles around, I realized that I was almost trembling with excitement for what we would find once those dirt piles were out of the way.

And we did find great things. In our first unit under the old dirt pile we dug into a layer of prehistoric pottery, likely around a thousand years old but maybe older. In one 0.3-foot (10 cm) layer of our 3x3-foot (0.9x0.9 m) test unit we found more than 400 potsherds, many of them as big as the palm of my hand. We had pieces of at least three different pots -- likely we had most of three different pots.

By the end of the day we had found a clear edge to our pile of potsherds -- this lovely big piece of a pot was at the end of it, and there wasn't much above and to the left. No idea how this stuff ended up here. I suggested that an Indian boy got really mad at his mother, threw three of her pots on the ground and jumped up and down on them until there was nothing left but a pile of potsherds. This is the most prehistoric pottery I have ever found at once, in 28 years of archaeology.

And we found an arrowhead and this little spear point, besides lots of other stone tools. It was also a perfectly beautiful day.