By Michael Birt

Another sweltering, hot day in a hole, unless you are water screening, which allows you to cool off. Fortunately for the excavation partners, Evan and Jennifer, we had so many buckets to water screen from yesterday it kept us cool for the first hour or so. Then it was back to the hole and the heat. We finished leveling out the floor of our unit N5014 E5023 and found a strip of what appeared to be daub. Andrea helped us use a trowel to scrap off the top layer of dirt to “clean up” the floor of the unit so we could photograph it after lunch. Although it does not seem very exciting we learned a great deal today. Being that our unit was the first unit opened at the Martin/de Soto site for this summer’s field school, Andrea is able to use it as a model for all other units opened this season. Today we learned about mapping the floor of a unit. Mapping is when you use two tape measures and a plum bob to make a scale drawing on graph paper. Today we used this method to map our floor. When mapping a floor it is called a plan map, a map from a bird’s eye view. The clumping of the daub in the middle of the unit was designated as Area 1. We did not have enough evidence to call it a feature, but it was distinctly different. We took Area-1 down another five centimeters by itself because we determined it was intrusive to the soil matrix around it. Unfortunately this area only held a thin layer of daub imbedded in the soil matrix. Inside Area 1, however, we did find a rather large piece of metal, a wire nail, and Spanish pottery.

Elsewhere around the site, Paul had his hands full all day over at the water screening area. Luckily Moe was there to help Paul. Paul was in charge of handing out all the Field Specimen numbers so that all artifacts could keep their provenience. Paul was also in charge of making sure the soil from all the units was placed in the proper screens so that artifacts from one unit do not get mixed up with those from another. Erin and Juan finished their final shovel test and moved onto opening up the third unit this afternoon. Michelle, Mercedes, and Sam opened up the second excavation unit this morning and worked throughout the day to get through their first arbitrary level of ten centimeters. All in all it was a productive and knowledgeable day.