This was our first week of archaeological excavation at El Polín Spring, although the staff of the project arrived the week before to set up the laboratory and prepare the site for excavation. On Sunday night the students began to arrive. By Monday morning everybody was on the site for a full day of orientation. After learning the ropes, we were ready to begin fieldwork Tuesday morning.

Throughout the week we learned that no matter how much we prepare for a dig, unexpected situations always arise. El Polín Spring is a hotbed of gopher activity. These gophers dig tunnels through our excavation units and move artifacts around underground. Maria, one of our undergraduate researchers, was the first victim of a gopher actually putting dirt back into her unit while she was still digging! Despite this, and other surprises, we managed to move a lot of dirt, and by Friday everyone felt that it had been a successful week of excavation.

Our first “artifacts of the week” are these fragments of clay roof tile. We found hundreds of tile fragments in our surface survey on Tuesday morning, when we systematically walked the site collecting any artifacts lying on the ground. Although these tiles may seem mundane, they are actually very useful for identifying where adobe houses once stood. This kind of tile was primarily used from around 1790-1840, and was used to roof Spanish-colonial period buildings. Finding all this tile tells us that we are on the right track!