Day 1.

Got all the first day jitters out today. Normal nervousness. It's something new, I'm not expecting to walk through the door and know what's what.

We do get breaks, though. I don't recall having a break during my work day. And if I did have one, it's been a while. I don't know what to do with a break, so I sit there. Other people get up and stretch their legs, smoke. I sit there and stop doing what I was just doing, listen to the music I was listening to before the magic time and wait. I'll find something else better to do with that time later.

But, the work. We're "pickin' flots" this week. This is pretty much taking a little jar(prescription bottles) full of stuff(sand, dirt, rocks, historic things, etc) running the contents through a 2 tiered sifter, and setting those tiers aside. The top tier will contain "sherds" or fragments of clay pots, rocks, bone fragments, "chert" or pieces of rock shards(not sherds) that were chiseled away from a rock that would be used as a tool, or "B.C." or burned clay or fired pieces of clay that aren't really as shaped as a "sherd" they generally look like rocks, but they're soft and break apart and are clay colored.

So, we sort these things into their own respective piles: bones over here, rocks(limestone and other "rough rock" seperate), "sherds," "chert," "B.C.," etc.

Then these things get their own bags w/ special labels: site #, feature #, what it is, "picked from heavy." (the "picked from heavy" refers to the "fraction" from which these samples are taken. "Flots" are samples that are floated in a drum of water allowing dirt and the like to settle to the bottm and letting the rest of these goodies to stay where they are. This is a generalized explanation and is not a professional take on the process.) These bags are compiled together and put into bags for lithics (rocks, L.S., chert), ceramics (sherds, B.C.), and faunals (bones, scales). The 2 bottles (yes 2, heavy and light) are put into a bag labeled site #, feature #, "picked from heavy."

That was my day. The first day was long, tedious, monotonous. By 430 I was praying to just go. But hey, somebody was paying me to do that. And OH! I found this bone, well part of a bone, that i could only recognize to be one of 2 things: 1) The end of a chicken leg or some other fowl, or 2) The end of a human finger bone. Of all the bones I sifted through today, none of the bird type bones were big enough to accomodate the size of this bone. I might just be trying to get my own hopes up, but man it was neat.