Gallivanting in the river!!

This weekend was my Fall break so Mom and I went back out to Highbanks!! Debbie and Elizabeth were nice enough to give me a ride out to the river (Olentangy) on the tram/trolly car thingy. It was a short hike out to the river and Mom and I got to work right away. We were hunting for chert.
I was looking specifically for chert chunks large enough to do a little experimental archaeology on. I also wanted to know what kinds of chert were weathering out and into the river locally. Mom and I were out about an hour and a half and collected four large zip-lock bags full of chert. They have yet to be washed or looked over but that will be done tomorrow, along with A LOT of labeling. This new batch of chert is simply a sampling that will not be included in the final collection for OHS and is merely a way for me to get a better idea of local cherts and to do some flint knapping.
In the lab tomorrow I will have a few Intro students washing and labeling chert. There is still about 3/4 of the collection to be labeled. It is a tedious process but one of the most important.
I will try and take a few photos tomorrow of everything that is happening and post them later in the week. Other than the lab work I am writing feverishly to try and get my literature review completed and my first chapter polished.

Little update

In the past week or so I have been working on writing on my IS. I have done a little bit of lab work but right now I am waiting on the arrival of my labeling materials/supplies. I ordered them today, hopefully they should be here by early next week!
We identified two pieces of fired clay in the collection, one piece has a chert flake embedded in it. This further supports the idea that these pieces of clay were fired accidentally in a fire, possibly one used for heat treating chert.
My radio carbon/AMS dates came back from Beta Analytic, it turns out that the charcoal from unit 1 is less than 100 years old, sad but not terrible. It would have been nice to have a really old date to correlate to the site but we figure this was from a lightening struck tree or something of that nature.
Prof. Kardulias and I discussed how I am going to analysis the chert and I plan on doing some calibrations and measurements of a sample of pieces, perhaps separated by chert type. This data can later be inputed into SPSS (a statistics software).
Labeling will come first however so I am just waiting on the shipment!
Stay tuned for more updates