This week I continued my habit of trench hopping and worked in several different areas on the site. I started off the week in Brad’s trench, which had still not been officially opened. With various numbers of people coming in and out of the trench our goal was to remove enough fill and rocks from his room to make it level. We used picks to loosen the dirt so that we could shovel it into endless buckets we dumped over the cliff. While I was helping Brad, I also worked on cleaning out one side of a doorway that was found in Claire’s trench. Throughout the day I was also pulled away to help take survey points around the walls of the acropolis so that we can make a more complete site map in that area. Because Jason had left by then we used a much more accurate, though certainly old fashioned triangulation system which works by having one person at a fixed point use a viewer to locate the people climbing around the walls with a measuring pole so that the different heights can be taken and calculated out.
On Wednesday I started at the Acropolis, but later in the day joined Mary and Andrea and helped them destroy the balk in their trench because we to find out what is going on with the bedrock in that area. We didn’t find too much, but we did learn all about the difficulties of distinguishing bed rock from unattached bed rock chips. I ended the week helping clear the area for aerial photos, and starting to help a bit in Philip and Wayne’s trench, which I think I will continue next week.