Wednesday, June 10, 2009
What I found today. Out at the sewage plant I spent the morning completing and checking paperwork. We fill out forms for everything we excavate, since this is the way we preserve information on the features. Each pit gets at least one form, sometimes more if it is deep or large. We also take digital photographs, along with black/white negative and color slide images.
I spent much of the day excavating the dirt sitting on top of the floor of a 3,000-year-old pit structure. Luckily, in most areas the dirt just popped off the floor (which was burned in many places). After break, I sat down and literally the first scrape of my trowel I found the San Pedro style spearhead (right below). I held it up for Kevin, who was digging nearby, to see and it came over and admired it, and I scraped with my trowel and I looked down and saw the rounded edge of a stone item.
Almost all of the stone on the site was brought in by people, and because it was so round I knew it was manufactured by someone thousands of years ago. "Look at that!" I said and pulled it out. When I flipped it over, Kevin and I could see that it had a scratched design and a hole through it. I am very lucky to find these interesting things- some people have been working at the site for months and haven't found anything like this.
Carved stone disk and spear point (click picture to see bigger image).
A disk had been found nearby in a pit several weeks earlier- that one had a design of dots on one side and lines on the other, with red pigment pushed into the incised patterns. As far as I know, these are extremely rare.
The disk could have been used as a pendant or perhaps as a spindle whorl (used to spin plant fiber or dog hair into yarn). Our ground stone analyst will eventually look at it to see if their are clues to how it was used.
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I spent much of the day excavating the dirt sitting on top of the floor of a 3,000-year-old pit structure. Luckily, in most areas the dirt just popped off the floor (which was burned in many places). After break, I sat down and literally the first scrape of my trowel I found the San Pedro style spearhead (right below). I held it up for Kevin, who was digging nearby, to see and it came over and admired it, and I scraped with my trowel and I looked down and saw the rounded edge of a stone item.
Almost all of the stone on the site was brought in by people, and because it was so round I knew it was manufactured by someone thousands of years ago. "Look at that!" I said and pulled it out. When I flipped it over, Kevin and I could see that it had a scratched design and a hole through it. I am very lucky to find these interesting things- some people have been working at the site for months and haven't found anything like this.
Carved stone disk and spear point (click picture to see bigger image).
A disk had been found nearby in a pit several weeks earlier- that one had a design of dots on one side and lines on the other, with red pigment pushed into the incised patterns. As far as I know, these are extremely rare.
The disk could have been used as a pendant or perhaps as a spindle whorl (used to spin plant fiber or dog hair into yarn). Our ground stone analyst will eventually look at it to see if their are clues to how it was used.
