June 11th 2019 - Packing Up.

Today has been a productive day for many. Just over half of the students worked in the lab to try and get as much of their project done as they could. The other students spent the day in the field, breaking camp and finishing up measurements for sketches and final reports.

In the field, students dissembled both of the tents, the picnic tables and moved all of our project supplies back to lab with two trips in Bob's car. Some also helped backfill the excavation units that we closed last week.

Angus, Aza and Mitch deconstructing the tent. Photo by Bob.

Phoenix and Kirsten taking apart the picnic tables. Photo by Bob.

Alyssa, Aza and Mitch filling our excavation units back up with dirt. Photo by Bob.

In the lab, Ali spent the day working on line drawings of artifacts. She spent the first two hours working on sketching the bottle that Mitch found last Thursday, which we now know is most likely not a toothpaste tube. It has "Bauer and Black" and "Toronto" engraved on the lid which lead us to believe that it was some type of medical ointment made by the Kendall Company in the 1920s or 1930s. Allyah is researching more in depth about the tube, so hopefully we can narrow down the date. Ali has also started a sketch of a teapot from the Hastings Seymour camp.

Line drawings done by Ali of the Bauer and Black tube.

Yesterday I mentioned that Ali has been working hard on sketches from the field as well, so I thought I would share one of her favourites with all of you. This is a drawing of Mitch working at the Rock Feature from a few weeks back. Everyone is excited to see more sketches from her!

Ali's sketch of Mitch.

Fazila finished measuring, recording and taking pictures of all of the ceramics from the McKenzie Creek site today. Allyah helped her take the pictures while she focused on measuring the diameter of each rice bowl with callipers.

Fazila recording and measuring ceramics.

Nikki spent all day with her camera, and artifacts from McKenzie Creek. She worked on getting pictures of ponds jars and ceramics on the white and black backgrounds she created. Sepideh also wants to add images of buttons and toothbrushes to the video she is creating, so Nikki also worked on taking those this afternoon.

Nikki taking pictures on black and white backgrounds. 

A collection of ponds cold cream jars from McKenzie Creek.

I focused on looking through level bags that we created in the 2019 field season. We had bags from each of the 7 open units, and also a few bags from test pits done around the site. I managed to go through over half of the bags, removing all of the contents of each, recording them, and weighing the flat sheets of metal that were found. When I finish going through all of the bags, I will put all of the information into one document so it will be easy to see the contents of each level bag without looking through them.

Recording the contents of 2019 level bags.

Siobhan spent the day researching a few artifacts that Bob assigned for her to look into. She did a lot of research on Colgate toothpaste, because previous field seasons found some tubes on the site. She narrowed down the date of the toothpaste tubes to have been manufactured between 1914-1928 from the broader date of 1857-1928. In the afternoon she also started researching ponds cold cream jars. 

Siobhan researching ponds cold cream jars.

Overall the day went very well, and many students were very productive! Tomorrow most students will be working from home or in the lab, but there is the chance that Bob could take a few students to another site in the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve. Check out tomorrow's post to see what happens!