At the time I am writing this, I am safely back at my home in Bellingham. All the other team members have also either returned home or moved on to their next field season (Jody, Bre, and Andy are now in Sicily!). And most of us, by now, should have about recovered from jet lag and the 18 hour time difference!First, I wanted to apologize to all the "Ask the Team" askers: sorry it took me so long to get to your responses. Our final few days in Y-S were pretty hectic getting all of our samples ready to ship home. And then, once we started on our return trip, I didn't have the time and energy to focus on anymore computer work for awhile.
Next I wanted to share with you some of the details of what we were doing while we were working those last several days, plus a bit about how we spent our one day off!
I think I have mentioned before that we do not take all of the various and sundry things we recover in our excavations back to Seattle for analysis. All of the "formal" artifacts such as pottery fragments, stone tools, and bone tools stay in Russia, and are curated and studied by our colleague Dr. Shubin at the Sakhalin Regional Museum (SRM) in Y-S. We bring with us all the charcoal, sediment samples (tephra, tsunami sand), unmodified bones, and flakes (debris from stone tool production).
Before we left Y-S we had two main tasks. First, because we are unsure of if or when we will be able to return to the SRM, we wanted to photograph all of the formal artifacts. That will allow us to conduct some analyses of the artifacts (e.g., pottery design types, raw material use in stone tool production, etc.) without actually having them directly in front of us. Each artifact has to be clean and dry, and then photographed with a cm scale bar, on a piece of black velvet cloth, under certain lighting conditions (just like the set-up I used to photograph the albatross bone tools). Even though we were often able to put multiple artifacts in a single exposure, we took over 1000 photos!
The second main task we had was to get all of the other materials inventoried, packed, and ready to bring back home with us. This year we had 12 large containers (coolers, duffles, and crates) filled with samples. And every one of those containers had to have a detailed inventory of its contents, down to the number of bags of samples for each material class (charcoal, bones, etc.). That level of detail is required both for our Russian export paperwork and the American import paperwork. That inventory included almost 1000 separate sample bags. So you can imagine how much time and effort it took to make sure we knew where everything had been packed!
Towards the end, there were only three of us left (me, Erik Gjesfeld, and Douglas Querl) to finish up the work, and we were pretty wiped out. So we decided we really needed (and deserved!) a good day off. We were able to get Kolya Illarianov (our boat driver and good friend) to take us out into the mountains near Y-S for a little field trip! After a summer of working on volcanic islands, digging up bones, what do you think we might choose for the focus of a "day off"? We went to visit another volcano and a fossil deposit, of course!
Now, lest you think we are totally crazy to take such a trip after spending two months doing what *appears *to be the same basic thing, I should point out that the volcano and the fossils are ***very ***different from what any of us had ever seen before.
The volcano, for instance, is called a "mud volcano," and consists of mud and gasses bubbling up through the crust of the earth (if you haven't already, check out the audio and video clips from the "Mystery Sound #2"). This volcano had a large eruption back in 2002 which sent cold, wet, slippery mud bubbling out over a fairly large hillside (maybe 200-300 m across--see photo).
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The volcano has settled down quite a bit since then, but it still has a dozen or so "mud pots" that are contentedly bubbling and burbling and blurping away. My understanding of the way it works is that there is a deeply buried mud deposit (mostly clay) that has both a supply of water and a supply of gasses. As the gas bubbles work their way up to the surface, they pull some of the mud and water up with them (see photos).
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They are sort of like mineral springs, such as you might see at Yellowstone. But instead of dissolved minerals, the water is full of mud. But we were surprised to find out that these mud springs aren't hot at all-in fact they are quite cold.
After our trip to the mud volcano, Kolya took us on a hike up a small creek bed in search of some very ancient fossils. Except in very rare cases, the materials we work with from archaeological sites in the Kurils are not fossils because none of the bone material has been replaced by other minerals. They are just old bones. But the critters we were looking for are fully fossilized in limestone bedrock 65-90 million years old (dating to the upper Cretaceous Period, within the Mesozoic Era). The critters in question are ammonites, which are ancient relatives of cephalopods. The creek is slowly cutting through the limestone fossil deposit and releasing large cobbles and boulders that contain ammonite shells (see photo).
**Ammonite fossils **
Dr. E's hand rests on a rock containing fossil ammonites. These fossils date to the Upper Cretaceous (65-90 million years ago).
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It was a lot of work hiking up the creek bed. But it was really cool to find these fossils! Some of the fossil ammonites were a large as basketballs! If you have a chance, do an internet search for images of "fossil" "ammonite" and "cretaceous." You will find hundreds of images that are much higher quality that the photos I was able to take on our field trip.
That was pretty much it for our field trip. We were really just happy to be out seeing some of the beautiful countryside around Y-S. Getting to see the mud volcanoes and the ammonite fossils was a great bonus!
After that, we spent another full day working in the museum getting things packed up. We had a pretty uneventful trip through Seoul (good sight-seeing), and then back to Seattle. We are still missing one piece of baggage, but hopefully it will turn up soon-we worked really hard to get those samples, and it would be a shame if they got lost!
Now that we're home, we've got to clean, sort, identify and analyze all the various samples we brought back with us. It will probably be a full year before we have our results from this field season, and another several months to a year after that before we will be able to synthesize all the data from the full project.
We will continue to post information on the project website:
http://depts.washington.edu/ikip/index.shtml
But this will be my last journal posting, since our field season is now all finished. Thanks for following our progress through the summer! It has been nice knowing that people were out there interested in keeping up with the project!
---Dr. E
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