Final Blog

Here is what happened over the last few days of my summer in Portugal.

We finished digging through the site at Praia Rei Cortico. We spent about two days exposing and excavating the feature that could be a hearth. We first exposed the feature by carefully digging out the sand all around the dense black area. We took several pictures of it and mapped the area by drawing a sketch and taking measurements. When we were finished we had excavated the entire black feature, slowly troweling through in attempt to not disturb any other artifacts found so we could take pictures of them in place. We collected more charcoal samples and found more chert. After the feature was completely excavated Jonathan and Caroline were unsure if it was definately a hearth or not. They will have to wait for the charcoal samples to be analyzed in order to determine what items were burnt there. If, for example, the charcoal analysis finds that there was any food burned in the feature then it is a hearth.

For the last days we spent some time around their other significant site, Mira Nascente. We excavated an area that was on the other side of a large rock outcrop on on the beach next to Mira Nascente. It was very high up in the dunes which were incredibly steep. We had to be very careful excavating in the area because if you slipped you would have fallen straight down the dunes. There was a lot of brush covering them that would have broken your fall so you probably would not have gotten hurt, but it was still worth being careful in order not to find out. I really enjoyed working so high up. We had to create all our own footholds and dig areas for us to stand on in order to excavate. We dug several test pits in this location. All of them were sterile but one - we found one artifact, a really well-preserved chert tool, on the last day of the field work. It was great to find that because it was difficult to dig so high in the dunes since we had to be completely comfortable with heights. It was also nice because it was our last day in the field, one last artifact was a good way to end our time there.

A few comments on doing field work...
I really enjoyed my time working in the field this summer. It was very exciting to be part of a research team that is breaking new ground in the field of Archaeology. It is hard to believe that doing something so tedious as digging a test pit could be exciting but it was to me because of what could have possibly lay beneath the next layer of soil. I enjoyed discovering things and it was really cool to think that some of the things we were discovering may not have been touched by another person for over 30,000 years. The work was physically and mentally challenging and the days were long and exhausting but I would love to go back and do it over again. After this summer I look forward to more opportunities I may have to go out in the field and research.