I also like the typo in your comment - for ‘wet’ you put ‘wept’. I often feel our community volunteers are weeping when we force them to dig in the rain. I am not a big believer in covering digs with tarps - the light for digging is terrible, photographs are ugly, and the wind always blows the things apart anyway. One year it rained so hard we had to bale the housepit every couple of hours. We used the water to wet screen!

Patrick

Great analogy about digging and pixels. As you know, I’m one of those “high resolution” archaeologists. I may not zoom down to the micromorphology level, but I do like analyzing the little stuff. You’re absolutely right, though, that we need the big picture or the details have no meaning.

We need a big dig at the church site just so we can deal with our unstable walls. I think we could relatively easily open up a large block - maybe even use a backhoe to remove the fill. I’d really like to have another chance to see what’s left inside the church.

Must say I like big holes myself. I always equate a dig to a digital picture. You only have so many pixels - all you can do is change the resolution and size of the picture. Fine scale, high resolution and you can only look at part of the picture (say the tip of a nose on a face). Low res and you can examine the whole face, but it looks like an impressionist painting. But at least with the low res you can see that you got a face. Too often archaeologists dig so fine they have
no idea what they got. Dig big and you see the houses!

Finally - it is pretty cool that the basement is still undisturbed. I’d say that is a HUGE discovery.

Patrick