work continues

work has been continuing steadily but we are making some very good progress. essentially what we are doing are going back through some of the first test units dug at the site and recording what we find through drawing and through notes. occassionally we also find a context with a good integrity which we get to analyze, and here´s what that means. most of the time when you dig a site you find what is called a mixed context, in essense it is a group of artifacts that span different time periods and are all mixed up. basically it is like finding a bag of coins with dates ranging from 2008 to 1937 while trying to study coins from the 1960s. it´s not totally useless, but you don´t want to spend too much time on it either. what you really want is a bag of coins all from the 1960´s and you want to find them in a good location, like say a cash register or a piggy bank. getting back from what may be a bad metaphor, as archaeologists with our project in mind we want to find pottery all from a single phase in a place like a trash dump, a house floor, or a storage pit. once we have one of those we can begin to analyze it. the analysis we are doing involves taking each piece from a good context, no matter how small, and recording things like the clay it is composed of, the form the vessel took, any decoration used, and any marks that indicate a production or finishing technique all using a numerical code, basically it´s like the matrix without laurence fishbourne. using this data in a spread sheet we can then observe larger trends across time periods. for example we can see how decoration decreases from one phase to another, but vessel uniformity increases. this tells us that people were putting greater emphasis on standardized manufacture and less on aesthetic values, and interesting shift in society to be sure, like the shift from hand made fabrics to mass produced ones in the united states, it represented a time of industrialization, decrease of individuality, and great societal change. pretty neat stuff to tell from a tiny little pottery fragment.