>Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 23:39:48 -0400
>To: Anita Cohen-Williams <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
>Subject: Re: archaeology isn't 'real' work... ?
>
>
>On Saturday, September 6, 2003, at 04:13 AM, Ron May wrote:
>
>>Everyone who has worked on Spanish and Mexican adobe buildings in
>>California developed an intimate understanding for how hard backed clay
>>soil can be for digging with a hand pick mattox and how almost inpossible
>>it can be to use a trowel. I recall the 1969 Royal Presidio de San Diego
>>field class watching a training film at San Diego State University and
>>the film showed people digging a prehistoric site along a river in the
>>East. The entire class howled with laughter when the field hands in the
>>movie used 10-inch trowels to strip soft, black, midden away like cutting
>>butter with a hot knife. Clearly, working conditions out here in the Far
>>West can be a tad rougher than in Virginia or Ohio. I think this is what
>>got Carol Serr's dander up a few posts back.
>
>I can tell you without equivocation that our eastern soils are every bit
>as hard as the western concrete versions. There's nothing like working in
>blazing sun, in humidity so high fish are confused and listening to the
>"ying, ying" noise that the trowel makes as it loses more steel than dirt
>is removed on each swipe. I just got finished with a site on a million
>year old river terrace of red clay with gravels that a trackhoe could
>penetrate at full throttle only an inch at a swipe. The original patentees
>dug a cellar into that stuff which lost water faster to evaporation than
>percolation. There may be a few sites with midden and soils like those in
>the film, but they're few and far between.
>
>I did have a volunteer show up one day on a canal boat dig with one of
>those 10" masonry Claymores stuck in her back pocket. Not terribly
>effective, even if the mud could be cut like butter.
>
>Lyle Browning
>
>
>Without stratigraphy, there is no archaeology.