The Closing of One Unit and the Opening of Another

Unit C is done!

…Well, mostly done, anyway.

After four ten-centimeter levels, a good ten or so probe tests, and our final two levels only producing about seven nails and two tiny glass shards its been determined that unit C is now sterile (that means we’ve gone through all the cultural material and it’s just undisturbed sand now). So now we’re going to be finishing up our final tasks for this last level and the things we need to do to close a unit before we’ll be switching to a new unit, unit D, on the far side of units A and B from where we are now.

Some of our final tasks for closing the unit involve cleaning up the floor of any loose dirt one more time and giving our North and West walls a very thorough clean (trimming roots, making sure it is as smooth and vertical as possible, etc) so we can take pictures and make profile maps of the stratigraphy of the walls.

Closing a unit also often includes back-filling the opening but we won’t be doing that this time. IPF has been kind enough to offer to back-fill the entire site when we’re finished since there are so few of us on such a short project and such a large area needs to be backfilled. Since the placement of unit C is conveniently close to the other units we will screening into it instead once it’s finished. This means that the excess dirt that would just go to the back-fill piles for IPF to deal with (after we’ve carefully removed any artifacts) will fall into the unit itself instead which should make a little less work for the back-filling crew. It also means that we won’t be carrying buckets of dirt up and down the stairs around the edges of the excavations to the screens which should make screening the dirt a little faster (not to mention easier in this heat we’ve been having).

It’s only been about two weeks but closing unit C still seems a little bitter sweet. The new unit should be inside the actual Station Terrace building, based on what was found during last year’s excavations, and should hopefully have a greater wealth of information for us to find, after all, the field crew found a really cool cow scapula just while removing the three feet of overburden to bring it down to the same level as the rest of the site.

On the other hand, unit C has been Jerica and I’s primary focus since the beginning and to leave behind the very visible progress we’ve made for a whole, untouched (apart from when the field crew removed the majority of the overburden) unit seems like a bit of a set back but it should be fun nonetheless and with the amount of trouble we had getting to grips with the way the unit borders need to be laid out initially, I’m sure it will be helpful for us to get to go through the process of setting the unit up from start to finish again (hopefully in fewer than five tries this time).

Author: Alex