Today, a group of us returned to the brick site to continue working on our units. Most of the bricks lie between 20 and 30 meters on the baseline, approximately, so the buddy teams assigned to these two units were required to complete a large amount of detailed drawing. We (Katie and Emily) have been working on the units in the 25-30 meter range for three days. On the first day, we mapped the east side of the baseline. On day two, we began mapping the west side, but underestimated the amount of bricks on this half of the unit. After working for over an hour on the second day, we had only recorded about a meter and a half.
This morning we revisited the same location, determined to make more progress. After two days of working together, we developed a system for more efficient recording. Katie handled the drawing, while Emily held the “dummy end” of the tape measure, to ensure that all measurements were made at a right angle from the baseline. If the bricks Katie needed to draw were within about a meter of the baseline, Emily held both ends of the tape so that Katie could look down over the site and get a more accurate measurement. We moved systematically along the baseline at about three centimeters at a time, making sure to count every brick. Although we have a better idea of what we are doing by this point, we still faced some challenges. The current was stronger today, which made holding the tape in place on the baseline without pulling on it difficult. Additionally, the baseline had shifted slightly, making Katie’s job of accurately drawing bricks a little more problematic.
Despite these minor obstacles, we managed to complete most of our unit today. We mapped to about 3.6 meters west of the baseline, which is where our Mylar sheet and scaled grid ended, and drew over one hundred bricks. At the end of the day, we added our unit to the master site plan and it was rewarding to see all of our work contributing to the larger group effort. Despite putting three days of work into the unit, we are not quite done. On Thursday, we plan to return to the same location and finish the bricks more than 3.6 meters off the baseline to make sure that we capture all of the scattered artifacts as accurately as possible.
– Emily and Katie