Well, I am no longer shoveling. Today, I was in PC34, Liz's trench. We were working on peeling back the humus layer, the top layer of soil that is not an archaeological layer.

The way that excavation works is that you peel back individual layers of soil one at a time through the whole trench before moving on to what is below it. It was a lot of slow scraping with the trowel and a lot of asking "Is this a rock ... or is it a something?" It was nice not to be moving huge amounts of dirt at a time and to get down to the real excavating!

We also got to look through Liz's field notebook and see what kinds of thing we will be taking notes about in our own field notebooks. And then tonight Dr. Robert Vander Poppen gave a lecture on how to set up our field notebooks and what type of notes to take in the field.