June 5th: The Garden Mystery

Today a few people (Spencer M, Evan, Rebecca) were working from home, Alexis, Dini, Spencer K and myself were in the lab. Alexis is plugging away on her level bag assignment, accounting for several pounds of tin can and nail fragments (as well as pieces of glass and ceramic). Dini was organizing artifacts from past years as well as some from this season's finds to use for public education events. 

This is a video of Dini talking about her public education project:

Dini mentioned in this video that the next event that we will be featuring artifacts from the SVAP is:

SPLASH! BC Family Fishing Day & Watershed Tours Kick-Off

• It's on Sunday, June 17th 2012 (Father's Day) from 10am - 3pm at the Lower Seymour Conservation Rerserve
• There will be booths and information at the gazebo (near the parking lot at the end of Lillooet Road, three kilometers north of Capilano University.

There's even going to be free fishing at Rice Lake for Rainbow Trout for the day!

We had some visitors to the field site today: 

Anthropologist Tad Mcilwraith from Douglas College in New Westminster and Coquitlam, and anthropologist/archaeologist Doug Hudson from the University of the Fraser Valley. Three members of Andrew's family also came to have a look....it seems that we are developing quite the fan base.

Following up on the garden project that Willow and Jasmin are working on, we have some interesting developments. Yesterday's lab work showed that the soil samples from the areas we think may have been gardens had higher PH levels than the control samples. This is good evidence to support the hypothesis that these were once gardening zones but as the excavations began, both units turned up dozens of metal nails (which is very confusing).

Here is a photo of the rock feature that Jasmin is currently excavating (right next to the creek on the north side of the site):

Willow and Spencer getting to work on the other "garden" area:

There were lots of nails found in this unit along with some pieces of animal bone, which would make sense if it was once a garden (adding bone to a garden would raise the PH level, thus making the soil better to grow plants in). Maybe the nails were part of a structure that once held the garden in place? We hope to get more clues as we excavate further.

Here we have Lindsay and Nathan continuing excavation work on the "industrial/cabin" units. Nathan found a very large saw blade just under the surface of the moss which would support the idea that this zone was more of an industrial section of the camp rather than residential, but we're still not certain.