Today draws an end to our field school experience. The day began with us finishing our excavating and mapping of the few various features we had yet to complete in the unit. This included excavating post holes and middens, or trash pits.  In order to do this, we had to keep digging until we hit a type of soil termed subsoil.  Subsoil does not contain any artifacts and, therefore, is a good stopping point.  Excavating post holes is important because the post holes can tell us if a structure actually once stood here and how Native Americans built the structure.  Middens are important because middens contain trash such as animal bones and ceramics, which can inform us what the people ate and what kind of tools they were building.

After we finished excavating the features, we continued packing up by taking down the tripods we had created from rope and tree limbs, and we loaded up the sifting screens into the truck. All of our work had come close to an end. As we covered the unit with a large tarp, we began to back fill the seemingly limitless piles of dirt back into the pit. We did our best to beat the impending weather quickly approaching from over the mountains. So it was an endeavor only lasting a few hours. We left the unit and the site as we rode off into the sunset, or rather, the dark rain clouds and overcast sky; feeling as though we had accomplished something, and learned quite a lot along the way.