Last Saturday, ten people got together to begin screening 10 cubic yards of sediment from the Mission Spit site. Most of us are professional archaeologists, and the avocational crowd included people who have worked on sites ranging from nearby Fort Nisqually to a bastle in England. Working with people who bring such knowledge to the screening table was nice, and even better is the fact they were willing to give up a big chunk of a pretty Saturday. Thanks!
We had enough hoses and screens to keep everyone busy, and we made defintite progress. But what some of us thought looked like a not-so-big pile at the beginning of the day turned out to be actually-pretty-big at the end of the day. On the other hand, the crew worked hard, and most will be back next week. Rumor has it that there will be more help this coming Saturday, when weather may again be decent. Even if it rains, as someone pointed out, it only helps with wet screening. Speaking of which, I love wet screening--with the dirt washed away, even the tiniest artifacts reveal themselves, and since we had incredible water pressure, there was not much need for shaking the screens (which is easier on delicate artifacts and old backs).
We began the day working on a part of the pile that had more clay overburden and fewer artifacts than I'd seen during testing at the site, but we did find some good stuff. Sherds and shards, mostly, some of them nicely diagnostic, a couple or three beads (two glass, one dentalium), as well as fire-cracked rocks, a few lithics, and a few fragments of deer bone. Sounds like the mixed deposit we expected, but I'll come back to the issue of just how mixed in a later post.
I'm very grateful that people showed up to try and glean something from this site, and look forward to a few more rounds of this work. We may not change history, but we're keeping a little of it from being dumped, unexamined, as fill. There's no contract, no grant, not even an organization. Just a swarm of interested people. It's happening during Archaeology Month, but it wasn't planned as part of it (I'd say it is Underground Archaeology Month, but the pile is totally on top of the ground).
OK. Gotta run, but I'll keep posting if people keep reading.
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