Catching up...

Day 20
We started the day by going to a farm field with Tom to dig another pollen core. Before using the pollen corer we used the auger to begin the hole and make sure the location was acceptable for digging the core. Although the auger is usually a one person job Erin and I were using it together because the nasty, horrible-smelling, thick mud we were digging out was pretty challenging. It looked like black goop and smelled like sulfur. MMM. Tom was loving it and Caroline was really into it because she loves to learn new things but the rest of us were a bit grossed out. After a couple meters of the nasty stuff we hit sand, which was not what we were looking for. We packed up our stuff and moved onto the next site without digging the core.
We returned to the big orchard/farm field site we first visited on 6/2. It’s one of the areas around the big orchard that is a natural resource for chert. We surveyed a couple fields and ate lunch before taking Tom to a beach area where the Mikes were working. It was nice to have a little afternoon break from the field area. It’s high up on a mountain, which makes it feel like you’re standing right in front of the surface of the sun. (Not very fun in the heat of the afternoon with a cloudless sky, even if it is pretty!) We returned to the area and finished surveying all the fields there. They included baby vineyards, olive groves, peach, plum, and apple orchards, freshly plowed fields, and fields overgrown with weeds. We found flakes almost everywhere which was pretty exciting. We ended the day a little early because it was too hot to keep working and we were all feeling beaten up by the sun.

Day 21
This was a great day. We went south of the region we usually survey to a beach near a town called Obdios (pronounced Oh-buh-doshe). We spent most of the day actually on the beach, not high up on the dunes like we normally are. It was a really nice change of pace considering we got to go swimming in the cold side of the Atlantic and have imperials (tap beer) at the beach bar after work.
In the morning we hiked around an area of cliffs above the beach. The location held the potential for rock shelters and had not been surveyed by our team yet. Most of the area had been looked at by archaeologists in the early 1980s, which is how the PhDs decided they wanted to revisit it. We did not find any rock shelters but I had a lot of fun that morning. The cliffs had tons of crevices and columns carved out by water pouring down their sides, creating lots of texture and interesting patterns. I was moving as quickly as I could across the thin trails to get out to the edges overlooking the ocean. It was incredibly foggy that morning so anything past a few meters into the ocean including the horizon was invisible but it was a great sight to look straight down the steep cliffs to the beach. I freaked Caroline out by getting too close at one point. She yelled to me from a distance behind, “Come on man, back up!” After we played on the cliffs for a while and the Mikes and Tom took some soil samples we got back in the van and headed towards the beach of interest.
As we ate lunch sitting on the beach the fog started to clear a little bit and it began to get sunnier. It’s strange to watch the Atlantic from this side, especially since Portugal is pretty much lined up with Jersey. The ocean is rougher here, the waves are larger, and it’s colder than the Jersey Atlantic. After lunch we walked down the beach to survey.
The beach had been surveyed by the team last year. They had taken soil samples and had them dated. One dated to 34,000 years ago, which is close to the beginning of the Paleolithic. When we returned to this area they found it to be drastically different than the previous year. The dunes had been reworked either by man or nature which exposed new features along the beach line. One of the features was a layer of sediments and organic material completely burned. This layer was within our Paleolithic layer – it’s a Paleolithic forest fire. This is really exciting for reconstruction of the landscape because there were whole pieces of bark they were able to pull out and bag for analysis. Kevin and Erin worked with Tom as he took a ton of samples out of the layer.
Jonathan and Caroline had sent the Mikes further down the beach to check out another area. The Mikes hacked into the side of the dune with the enxada exposing a black sediment layer they believed to be a bog. They returned to say that Jonathan and Caroline should go look at it. Tim and I followed along. We found a quartzite flake sticking out of the side of the profile that was similar to those they found at their Neanderthal site that I have mentioned before, Mira Nascente. Caroline and Jonathan were saying they thought the black layer could be a hearth (fireplace) but were unsure because it was really large and were only viewing it from the side profile because we had not yet exposed the top. They were enthused about the layers and flake because it was similar to their other site but it was heading towards the end of the day so we wrapped up, took a quick swim, and hit the beach bar before heading home.

Day 22
We had off and visited the town of Bathalia where there is a large cathedral. The cathedral was extremely beautiful and had really cool architecture because it was built during three different time periods. It was fun to do some touristy things on our day off :)

Day 23
We went back to the same beach area, which has been named Praia Rei Cortico. We dug out a large portion of the dune in order to expose the top of the black sediment layer. It was really difficult because a section of it was dense orange sandstone that had to be pick axed through. Even though it was hard work I liked using the pick ax because it was really rewarding when you knocked off a large chunk. This part of the work was also exciting/dangerous because Jonathan was working above me and I had to jump down off the dune a few times to avoid falling rock (it was really just solid sand but it felt just as hard as a rock since it was so dense). I was only hit once and it was pretty funny. I tried to avoid the piece which was a little smaller than a football but it took a weird bounce, hit me below the knee, and knocked me down the dune. There was a little bleeding, easily covered with a band-aid and secured with duct tape, and I now have a scabbed up scrape about 2 inches long right below my knee. It had been my worst wound of the season, not bad considering we hike through sticker bushes and thorns almost daily. After breaking though the orange stuff we started using trowels and hand shovels to dig out 4 test units of looser sand for screening.
Our test units ended up being pretty small because we hit the layer of dense orange sand again. For those interested, the layers were on an angle because it was stuff that had slumped down the dune. We hit it twice because we first broke through the top but then went below that area and further into the dune, hitting it again. We had only found 2 or 3 flakes in the loose stuff. Jonathan decided to hack through the orange stuff in his unit and said if we didn’t find anything we would quit the site because it’s a pain to break apart dense sand looking for flakes. Of course, we found a large quartzite flake in his unit. We proceeded to hack through and sift the other 2 units of orange sand as well. We found more, including some chert flakes. After screening or breaking apart that stuff we had the black layer exposed that the Mikes brought to our attention the day before. We found that the black layer did not extend through all 4 test units, only the first one closest to the edge and maybe a little bit into the second. We were finding tons of charcoal in the black, so they thought it was just another portion of the forest fire further up the beach. But then (this is the really exciting part I said to wait for in the last blog) we found 2 burned chert flakes! We photographed them in the place we found them because burned chert is a big deal. Why, you ask? I’ll tell you. Burned chert, when found in the context we found them in (with lots of charcoal, in a dark sediment layer that pinches off on either side) means there was probably a hearth there! To the untrained eye (mine) it looks nothing like a fireplace. But after Jonathan and Caroline explained the feature I could see what they were talking about. A hearth right on the beach is great news for their research because it shows that Neanderthals occupied and lived in the area for some extended time. It is unusual to find a hearth on the beach because most should be washed away, but this one was protected by the dense orange sand we had to hack through to expose it.
Note: this next part is just my knowledge and speculation of what the feature means, not necessarily the PhDs, but will help you guys to understand things a little more. A hearth would have been located anywhere Neanderthals stayed long enough to need to create a fire for warmth or to cook food. The hearth we found could be part of a temporary camp, for example, an area they would have stayed only when it was time to fish. They may have gone there for a few days to retrieve fish before returning to a larger base camp where they actually lived. They PhDs have found evidence that Paleolithic peoples traveled up to 40 km inland after fishing. Neanderthals never stayed in one place for long because they would use up the resources around them and head on to the next area (hunter/gatherer/forager lifestyle), but if there was a fresh water location near the area we found the hearth at it could be different. If there was fresh water that would have given them their drinking water. Since the sea is unlimited with fish they may have lived on that area of the beach for an extended period of time because they would have had the resources to do so. Now that you’ve heard a little of my speculation about the beach site, I’ll tell you what the PhDs do know about the Neanderthals they’re researching.
Neanderthals were the last evolution before the modern human. They were pushed out of northern Europe by modern man and kept moving south until they became extinct. Portugal was the last place they existed, so all Neanderthal sites found in Portugal are the youngest in Europe. Their site at Mira Nascente is Middle Paleolithic, dated to about 36,000 years ago. There is very little known about their living conditions and cultural life in Portugal but there are some things that have been determined by bone analysis. Through analyzing Neanderthal bones and the breaks among them they have determined that their societies were most likely gender equal. Women and men have some of the same breaks and fractures in their bones, indicating that they did the same types of labor.
Dann had sent me an email asking me several questions in response to my blog. One thing he wanted to know is why we are doing research in the coastal region. Here are some of the reasons: Like I just said before, there is very little known about these people. There is in general very little known about the entire Paleolithic in Portugal because no one has ever thoroughly researched it before. The doctors I’m working with are trying to figure out how the landscape was used, by whom, and what it looked like. It is very exciting for them (and me) because they are breaking through with things that no one knows anything about, but can also be very frustrating at the same time because sometimes the data they want isn’t there or turns out to be the wrong date. Many of the areas prime for Paleolithic occupation have also been covered or destroyed by construction.
Dann had also asked if we were working on the beach because the coastline is raised, like most areas, which is why the field of underwater archaeology is growing. The answer is yes. Portugal’s coastline has a complicated history, it used to be up to 140 m lower than it is now but over time fluctuated back and forth between its current level and that lower level. Portugal’s tectonic history is also very complicated. There has been a great deal of what is considered rapid uplift for a passive continental margin (about 3.5 mm/year), which is why we find Paleolithic beach deposits in dunes 35 m+ above the current sea level. One of the goals of the research here is to understand the geomorphic evolution of the landscape.

Ok. I am done blogging for now. I am almost up to date, there are only 4 days (including today) missing in time now. I only have 6 days left in Portugal. I’m pretty sure this will be our last day off, so I might not get the chance to throw other blogs up until after I get home. See everyone soon :) hope you enjoy the reading!