The K-T Boundary

Guys. I have nineteenth-century fingerprints in my living room.



I don't know what these things are, these little pinched bits of clay, maybe just toys or wasters; but there's two of them, and an obvious chip off a third (maybe more chips that I put in a different pile before I noticed), but there's something oddly familiar about them, like I've seen them before and I should know their purpose.

Maybe it's just that I've done that myself when playing with clay, which I have. Hmm.

So, this is what I'm doing for the artifact analysis part of my internship: describing and inventorying potsherds collected from a local site in 2002. This mostly consists of taking notes on every piece and putting them in a spreadsheet. (I also have another pile from a different site in 2007 (which I actually helped excavate), and I would dearly love to do both and make some comparisons, but as I need to return the artifacts on Tuesday - and I have many other things to do - I doubt I'll have the time, alas.)

This particular site is a brick kiln and pottery near Morrisonville, attributed to a free black potter named Ned Davis. I have conflicting reports about whether this was in the 1790s or ~1860s, or possibly there were potters there at both times. Davis though is pretty definitely from the later estimate.

But anyway: I have his fingerprints in my living room. How awesome is that?

( a couple more pictures )

I tried to meet people in Waterford today, but got there too late (or else they were invisible). Oh well; I had a nice drive through the town and along Old Waterford Road anyway! I saw lots and lots of baby (well, teenage) geese, some deer, a cat, and lots of birds and cows and horses.

OMG LOCO I AM GOING TO MISS YOU.

Tonight was Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship Holler (as in down-in-the) Abandoned House Tour Night with the summer archaeology class. I tagged along to take GPS points (and pictures)! I was last there almost exactly two years ago, when I was taking the class. Not a whole lot had changed .. but I may post some side-by-side pictures tomorrow, a couple of the changes are definitely interesting. (That qualifies as internship work, right? Maybe I'll post it to the LAF blog, too.) To whet your appetite, here's my photo gallery from May 31, 2007.

So then I came home and took a shower and realized that I'd had a dead gnat in my eye for half the night and no one told me. D: No ticks, though!

And then I used my brand-new GPS interface cord to pull the location data off my eTrex! OMG. DNR Garmin can save data as Google Earth shapefiles! IT IS AWESOME AND IT IS MY NEW BEST FRIEND. Because I do have ArcGIS but I don't have any shapefiles to project the data onto for *context* unless I go to Reston and get on the county network to grab some. (Although it does make it pretty obvious that either my margin of error is bigger than I thought or I need to fiddle with the coordinate system in DNR Garmin and redownload. My money's on both, actually.)

Anyway, watch for an actual update on my Real Life at some point .. later.