Ruins at Lyons Turning Mill near sunset, view from the north

[The following was mostly written yesterday evening.]

This morning I clung to the side of a cliff like Spider-Man and troweled away at an exposed tephra sequence. After lunch I sat in a pit that was overrun with tiny, annoyed flies. This afternoon I dug a hole in a bog, and helped take samples from the side wall before the whole thing filled with water.

Iceland is still awesome.

And I've been ill with the Ox Flu, the dread disease that has decimated our entire house over the last week. It is named for the huge (probably not ox) bones that have come out of our main site. Luckily, the Ox presents only as a rather bad head cold. Yesterday I stayed home and learned how to float, and last night the NyQuil Fairy paid me a visit (it works so much better than the Sudafed I brought). In another day or so I should have completely kicked the Ox.

I'm sorry I haven't posted recently; I haven't been to the lab much, and when I have, I've mostly been entering data. Since the last time I posted we've been joined by two more people from UMass - the pollen people, who I'll probably be working with in the fall. So we've switched from systematically coring lots of fields in search of cultural markers, to coring two specific fields in search of good tephra so we can dig 1x1s at the right place for well-dated pollen sample extraction. We should be finished with that by Monday - and then there's only a few more days left till we fly out! I can't believe the summer has gone by so fast.

At one of our sites, our cars are regularly licked by a herd of cows. They bit one of the bumpers. We've had to ask if our insurance covers bovine intervention. One of the cows in the field next door leapt halfway over the barbed-wire fence trying to get to the bull in our field. It was awful. She was just sort of ... hanging there, with the bull licking all over her face, until finally she managed to back off the fence. It was very Pyramus and Thisby. The farm where I was this morning has two wonderful dogs that like to come visit us. The border collie is so desperate to play fetch that he'll bring us rocks, hoping we'll throw them for him. And Buckets the cats has still been visiting regularly - a couple people went to see his family, and they seem nice, so we hope he won't be too sad and lonely when we leave him behind!

I'm not too informed about what's been happening at the other sites. At the main site, they've finally gotten through the medieval barn that's sitting on top of the Viking-age stuff we're more interested in (this involved moving lots of gigantic rocks), and a couple of churchyards have been excavated. There's been some exciting GPR going on at a few places, and at the site with the cows they've found a whole lot of really cool textiles (fairly recent, but still awesome).

I've also had a lot of fun side trips, and there are two more left (well, three, if you count England). This weekend we're going to Reykjavik - I'll do the Golden Circle (Thingvellir, Geysir, Gullfoss, etc) and some museums, and it's also Pride weekend, so I might check out some of that. Also I think Friday we might be taking a field trip to climb to the top of Drengey, the huge, flat island with puffins on that we can see from town. I'm not sure how that will work with Reykjavik, since I'm in the car that's planning to leave Friday evening, so I might have to skip Drengey. That would make me sad, but Reykjavik will be fun too.

The summer's almost over. It's starting to get dark at night now. There are school supplies on display at the KS. The chalkboard says our trip is 77.08% over. It's so sad.

[Written tonight: Today I took the place of someone with worse Ox than mine, and worked on one of our midden excavations. It was the first real down-in-the-dirt trowel-and-screening that I've done all summer, so that was great. Lots of bones and iron slag, one thing that could be a nail, and we exposed a whole lot of turf.

The weather has been pretty crappy for the last few weeks, but yesterday and today it's started to turn nice again. Horribly windy, but warm. So windy that I used my dust goggles for the first time ... and so windy that my plumb bob wouldn't hang straight.]

Now let's catch up with side trips and pictures ...

(Very image heavy, because I can't not.)

( Akureyri, Siglufjodur, Blonduos, and lots of scenery )

There are (or will soon be) even more photos on Facebook, and also I sent out a second batch of postcards on Sunday, so if you haven't got one yet, watch the mail!

That's all for now! I'll be back before you know it! Time to go hang some more laundry! I'll be posting this (and the pictures) tomorrow night! [Which is now tonight. Anyway.]

Today it suddenly started getting cold - really, really cold. And windy. Apparently this is "real Iceland weather." I'm going to freeze my butt off in the field tomorrow! D:

( Waterfalls, volcanoes, and kittens, oh my )

Otherwise -- I'm uploading photos to Facebook, because that seems to be the easiest way to share them with other people here (so if you want to see pictures of people other than me, or ALL my pictures, friend me and look there). And I've sent off a few postcards, so watch the mail -- I'll probably send out another batch in a couple of weeks.

Today's our day off! Some people have taken the cars off to various other towns, but I'm wandering Sauðarkrokur. I climbed up the hill behind the town and I've found a picnic table where I can sit and write about Viking archaeology!

I haven't decided yet if I'll post this on the official blog. Hmm.

Icelandic dating is easy, in some ways, because of the tephra layers. If we can find tephra, we always know how old things are - or at least what dates they fall between. In some ways this is unfortunate, though, because diagnostic artifacts such as a dated coins are rare in Iceland, so there is no good way to date finds if we can't find tephra to place them in context. Iceland is volcanic - formed by volcanoes and plagued by volcanoes - and with each major eruption, the island was blanketed in a distinctive layer of ash. When we're out in the field taking soil cores, we're looking for anything cultural, of course, and we're also looking for tephra. I'm not wonderful at distinguishing them, but I'm getting to the point where I can make a reasonable guess. Sometimes they're obvious, and sometimes not so much.

The most recent layer that we usually see is from 1766, and before that, 1300. Both of those are usually characterized by thin black lines in a stratigraphic profile. Next are eruptions at 1104 and around 1000, also called H1 and H2, represented usually by thin white lines. Below those we'll find the landnam layer - landnam is the Icelandic word for land-taking, corresponding to sometime in the late 800s, when Vikings were first beginning to colonize the island - there's an obvious change in soil color and texture before vs. after landnam. Landnam tephra is a layer of greenish-black, usually found with several centimeters of really colorful stripy soil. Finally, H3 and H4 are prehistoric tephra layers, and are very thick and white. Full sequences are really pretty - I'll try to get a picture before the end of the summer.

( more about tephra, cores, and turf )


Unrelatedly, if you guys would like pictures of anything in particular from Iceland, let me know and I'll do my best!

melannen, your map from the UMD library is a huge hit! It's Danish, and it's dated 1914 and 1934 - it was also updated in 1964, and we only have a digital version of the 1964 edition. So I think it'll get scanned and added to our GIS library. So thanks for that! *g*

Today we were out coring in the þufurs (thufers: small little tuffets of grassy earth that are formed by the frost in land that isn't artificially drained) and in the cow pastures. Didn't find much, but it's awesome. It is so much more fun than aerospace engineering, omg. The þufurs are covered in really tall weeds and grass - anywhere but Iceland we'd have been worried about ticks and worse. Not here though! There are still no bugs but crazy Icelandic flies that like to mate while sitting on my hand. But they'd don't bite.

Anyway, I typed up the rest of this post yesterday, and wrote it the day before. I'm not having a whole lot of time for internets. And I'm helping update the official blog, which is here.


( Read more... )

I have to run back to the house because I have a feeling I may be hogging the washer. In the meantime, enjoy.

Today we were at Stóra-Seyla, a Viking-era farmstead a few miles outside of Sauðárkrókur. SASS has worked it for several years in a row, so the site was under a layer of "geotextile," which was under a thick layer of turf. Also, we want to do ground-penetrating radar on another part of the site, so another huge area needed to be cleared of turf and smoothed before we can start that.

( click here for pictures and stuff )

Tomorrow we're going to finish shovel scraping and probably also finish shoveling off the previously excavated walls. And for a big chunk of the day we're going on a Turf Tour, to learn how to recognize various types of turf houses in varying states of decay. I'm looking forward to the tour!

(I know. I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've had time and internet-access issues.)

I'm in Boston! We've been camping up here since Tuesday. melannen and I are currrently sitting in the library at UMass using the free internets. It's been raining a lot, though right now the sun in shining, and we managed to find two geocaches.

I've done a little bit of apartment hunting. The chocolate factory would be perfect, but they didn't have anything available to show me, and it's just a little bit more expensive than I was hoping to go. I found one that I can afford that I sort of liked, but the more I think about it the less I like it - I can see myself holing up in there and never coming out, which is not what I want to do for next two years. No one on craigslist wants to rent to someone two months ahead of their move-in date. I'll do a little bit more looking after I post this, but I'm pretty much resigned to not getting a place until I come home at the end of the summer.

Yesterday we went down to Newport, RI and visited the UMass field school there, behind a couple of 18th-century commercial/residences. The stratigraphy was very clear and the GPR plots were much less ambiguous than I've usually seen. Dr. Landon was very nice showing me all around, and so were the students; hopefully they didn't think I was as much of an idiot as I felt!

The UMass campus is small and pretty, the buildings are expansive, the T seems like it will be very workable (I just need to find myself a place near a stop!). We've stopped by the department twice now and no profs or grad students have been around. I chatted with the office admin, though, and she seems very nice! I'll check in again in a few minutes in case anyone has stopped by; otherwise I guess I'll be meeting everyone for the first time at the airport tomorrow evening. I did check on blogging, and I'm allowed to post about everything we do, without restrictions like waiting for publication or worrying about proprietary data, so I'm really excited about that - that was one of the more annoying things about working for $Giant_Aerospace_Corporation. Now I just have to make sure I make time to post ... ! (They might also want me to keep an official department blog starting in the fall, which should also be exciting - I'll let you know about that when it happens.)

Oh, speaking of school -- I bailed out on finishing my internship before leaving. I needed to pack more than I needed to write it, and I do technically have until the end of the semester to turn it in. I'm hoping to find some time in Iceland -- I have all the data with me, and I *am* taking my laptop after all. I should be able to turn it in over email.

( lots of pictures! )

Tomorrow: beach, reorganize luggage (again. I am obsessive), and then ICELAND!

(OMG, people. I have about 100 emails from just Dreamwidth since Friday night! I'll try to get through them this evening sometime ... Also, I decided to indiscriminately give everyone access at this journal. I don't forsee making locked posts, but you never know, and it's easier to keep track. .. bear with me please. I am still kind of getting a headache from managing access/subscription lists for two journals.)

Anyway, here are some pictures from yesterday at Sully.

( Sully Historic Site )

After Sully, I went over to my friend's place, and I ended up drinking too much to drive and spending the night. (I'm constantly torn, right now, between wanting to get into school mode as much and as quickly as possible, and wanting to make the most of the time I have left with people around here before I leave. Because the latter involves other people and I'm highly suggestible, it tends to win out!) But at least, today I got the paper done, pictures posted, projectiles sorted, one bag of ceramics investigated, and some website things updated - I think I'll have dinner and relax a bit before I tackle everything I've been missing on DW!