Although our last day of excavation was this past Friday, August 15, our work in the field and at the lab is far from over. Because we stopped excavating last week, this week we have been able to focus on project shutdown. In the field, this means first completing documentation – including drawing plan profiles, finalizing various forms, and taking final photographs – of all of our excavation units, and then backfilling the holes. The dirt we use to backfill is actually ground up granite, which doesn’t contaminate the archaeological record. After laying down landscaping fabric – a biodegradable material that will allow us to easily reopen units in future field seasons – and backfilling the units, we will lay down approximately 10 cm of sod to allow vegetation to grow over our areas of excavation.

In the lab, shutting down means finishing up wetscreening, sorting, and cataloging artifacts. It also means packing up all of our equipment and transporting it to various storage locations through the Bay area. All of the boxes of recovered material will go back to Stanford University for the 2003/2004 academic year for further analysis. Eventually they will be permanently stored here at the park for future research use. We also just completed an artifact display case which presents information about our project and exhibits some of the Spanish-colonial material we’ve uncovered this past field season. The display case can be seen at the Presidio Archaeology Lab throughout the year.

This past summer of 2003 has been a such wonderful field season. It has been full of surprises – from the hardness of some of the soil layers to the discovery of the foundation – but the summer season has consistently exceeded our expectations as researchers, as students, and as educators. We thoroughly enjoyed all of our wonderfully curious and enthusiastic visitors who were able to come out and visit us as we dug into this important part of early California history. We hope to see many of you next Summer 2004 when we return to El Polín Spring for our second season of excavation!