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

IS labwork time

So sorry to those of you that looked for a new blog post in the past month or so, I had some technical difficulties

So far the things that were missed :

Close of the second unit

Move into school with all of the equipment and artifacts delivered to the lab

Preliminary washing and sorting being done

New finds after washing:

Fire cracked rock

Ochre

The fire cracked rock and charcoal were found in unit number one and in the same context layer, these could mean that cooking was going on but could also indicate that chert was being heat treated. The large chunk of chert that was found on the surface of the second unit, pictured in an earlier post, that has the bright reds and blues, has been heat treated. Some types of chert are easier to knap once they have been heat treated. Cherts may have a glossier surface and brighter colors.

So far I have been focusing on the washing and preliminary sorting of the chert as well as getting the charcoal that was collected ready to be sent out for carbon dating. Unfortunately there is not a large enough sample to perform carbon dating but there is enough to perform AMS dating. AMS dating allows dating samples with only a few milligrams of carbon. I currently have 4.6 grams, which is plenty for AMS, I would have needed 20 grams for carbon-14 dating.

All in all IS is in full swing and I am already beginning to write up the field methods