a new round of books!

hello all! I have been to the library yet again and acquired a new set of books for IS. This brings the total of books so far to 26 books! I am writing up a bibliography for Monday and I am sure the list will grow with time. The girl who was checking out my books at the desk today just laughed when she watched me struggle down the steps and up to the counter with my duffel bag full of books. They were super heavy and I contemplated buying one of those metal carts that bag ladies use for my future library trips.

A few updates:

• washing and preliminary sorting of artifacts and debitage is complete
• the fist phase of sorting all of the chert flakes is complete
• We found a piece of baked clay, this is not a piece of pottery, perhaps it is from clay that was too close to a fire or something else that is yet to be determined.
• Copeland Fund proposal was filled out and submitted last week!!
• Beta Analytic lab received my sample and the results should be in around the middle or end of October.
• Writing continues with the methods chapter, problem statement, bibliography. I have outlined pretty much all of the IS, now it is a matter of filling in

Stay tuned or more updates!!! 

Books!

In the past few days I have been working on getting sources for my IS, which means going to the library with a large duffel bag and filling it with books until I can almost not carry it. I procured a selection of books for the first round of research:

All of these will hopefully be helpful in getting me on the right track. All of these have to do with chert and I am going to try and teach myself about the different stages of making a tool are and what flakes are associated with those. My advisor Prof. Nick Kardulias has looked at some of my chert material and believes that some kind of reduction was going on at the site. This means that people were taking large chunks/cores of chert and knapping them into blanks to then be made into specific tools. Today we have a meeting where he will examine my artifacts some more to see what kinds of things I have. We will be going through my 'rocks'.
I also wanted to draw everyone's attention to a certain book.

I found this book at work (Olentangy Indian Caverns) this summer and really wanted to use it. My other advisor, Prof. Mark Wilson, in our meeting on Monday, did some searching and is allowing me to use this source. It has really great descriptions and photos of chert types in the area so I was looking at it as being good for comparing the chert I am trying to identify.

Well there is still a lot of work to be done, I am filling out funding applications for AMS dating expenses and proposals and writing chapters. Busy, busy, busy!