DEET is the super-strong bug repellant we use. You can get 30 percent DEET, which works well, but 100 percent DEET is the strongest. It will melt the plastic off your Swiss Army knife! Usually we have to apply DEET every few hours but not today. There were no mosquitoes bothering us this entire day - it was wonderful. The trade-off was the cold windy drizzle that blew them away. Well, we were well prepared with green Helly Hansen rain suits and layers of cozy fleece underneath.
Up on the ridge the archaeologists braved the wet wind to continue their relentless search for ancient history. On their knees in square holes, they would carefully scrape into the soil with trowels and hand brooms. If they found something, they would rinse it in a bucket and bag it as either "lithics," (stone) or "bone." The soil was then put in a bucket to be screened. For this, you stand at a wooden screener which is like a two-legged table about waist high with a wire-mesh top. You dump the bucket of soil into the screen and shake it back and forth, letting tiny particulate drop through and catching larger items at the top. Many small flakes of red, brown and gray chert left by ancient tool makers were collected.
The researchers carefully note what unit it was found in and in what quarter of the unit (for example, the north west, south east). They also measure the depth below the surface. Today Stephan and Ines were digging between 60-70 centimeters below the surface. This area was previously dated at being from about 12,000 years ago.
Ines found another tooth form an herbivore - maybe a caribou? Stephan found a microblade which everyone was very excited about. It is tiny but an important technology from that time. Microblades are thin strips of razor-sharp stone. The one Stephan found was greenish chert less than one quarter-inch thick and less than a half an inch long.
Today's drizzle was enough to leak into one of the researcher's tents. We all pitched in to help him set up one of the backup tents in the rain after lunch.
Early this morning Ian saw a musk ox grazing south of camp. These fascinating beast were extinct in Alaska, but have been reintroduced from herds in Greenland.
I spoke on the phone this morning with the two native girls from Kivalina village who will be coming to visit the day after tomorrow. It will be great to have them in camp! I reminded them to bring plenty of rain gear.
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