Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Market Master's house backlot, Day 7: "Unit 15 Update"










Today we have an update from University of Maryland student Jen Allen who spent the day working on Unit 15 where they have been point proveniencing all the flakes coming out of the unit. This means they mapped in the location, including depth of each piece of prehistoric stone tool-making waste for later analysis. Jen had this to say:


"It’s been an exciting day today at the Market Master’s House. I have been helping Frank excavate TU 15, the unit directly west of TU 12, which yielded so many rhyolite flakes last week. TU 15 has not disappointed as the concentration of rhyolite flakes clearly continues. In one level alone 100 rhyolite flakes were recovered along with 2 sherds of Native American ceramics and a large quartzite cutting or chopping tool. (see picture below, left) The plan for the next level was to take a pollen sample and after only a few trowel cuts into the soil what we think could be an archaic bifurcate quartz point was found. (picture below, right) I’m looking forward to see what else this unit has to offer and how far back in Bladensburg’s past we’ll go."

No comments:

Post a Comment