Day 12 - "Snakes... Why Did it Have to be Snakes?"

What would an archaeology blog be without at least one Indiana Jones reference? Albeit an obscure one... The title for today's entry was inspired by our encounter with this impressive-sized black racer snake below:

Is it turning its nose up at us?

The snake eyed us suspiciously for a bit, and after it decided we were (mostly) harmless, lived up to its name and made a dash for the tree line.

The snake was not the only animal encounter today of note. The crew was also visited by some rather bold butterflies, who insisted on landing on us for long periods of time, presumably to consume salt off of our sweaty clothes.

This butterfly sat on Dr. Jeb Card for quite a long time.

Animal encounters aside, today was an unusual field day. The rumbling of thunder early in the morning set us packing out of the field before 11am, only to have us return again after 2pm to work until well after 4pm. Despite this peculiar schedule, and the by-now-to-be-expected heat and humidity, excavation still progressed nicely.

Students, especially those in the southern units, have begun encountering increasingly larger and more impressive artifacts - particularly lithic flakes. Some of the nicer samples from today can be seen below:



We also found our first piece of unaltered bone of the season today (we found pieces of calcined bone late last week). It looks to be a shaft fragment of a long bone of a cow or deer, thought cow is probably the likely candidate as we are excavating near a pasture.

We will continue to post more interesting finds as they are unearthed.