By: Sarah Healy

For the past few days, we have been working to close down the site, and I thought it was an interesting enough process to discuss. To begin, the process started on Tuesday, four days ago. Everyone else at the dig site left around noon; however, my group (about four students), accompanied by Olson and Tom, stayed back to wait for the ‘fence guy’. After about ten minutes of waiting, Tom got a phone call. The ‘fence guy’ had taken a wrong turn and somehow managed to get the truck stuck in a field just below the hill where the dig site is located. All of us piled into the van and went down the hill to dig out the truck. Olson and Tom took some shovels with them and worked on digging out the tires of the truck. The field the truck had gotten stuck in was full of thick, soft dirt that had buried about half of the tire. After Olson and Tom had dug deep enough, Olson hopped into the truck and had everyone else push the truck from the back. It didn’t take much pushing, and the truck was free. Olson drove the truck up to the dig site, and the very kind ‘fence guy’ got a ride with us in the van.

Once there, we helped the ‘fence guy’ unload all the materials for the fence from the back of the truck, and we were on our way. A few days later, all the trenches were finished being dug. My trench was nearly complete by Thursday morning. The first thing we did was clean the trench immediately, as the lighting was ideal for doing photogrammetry. We spent about fifteen to twenty minutes sweeping up dirt, then Olson laid out little orange circles, whose significance I’m still unsure of, and took several photos of the trench from various angles and spots around the trench. After the photos were taken, the group started to clean up around the northern trenches, which hadn’t been touched all season. We worked on cleaning up any loose dirt inside the trenches, removing free-standing rocks, and removing any plants and weeds that had begun to grow around the trenches. We then used any free-standing rocks we removed from the trenches to redo the rock lining around the trenches.

We did all of this so that the supervisors could take drone shots of the entire dig site. Once the trench I was working on was clean enough for pictures, I started filling dirt bags with Teddy. Teddy and I filled up about fifty bags on our own, and then did fifty more with others’ help. Then, on Friday, we arrived at the dig site around 6. We all took group photos and then started to close up the dig site for the season. We all got split up into different groups. Some people were instructed to lay a green tarp on the walls of the dig site to protect them until next season. Once the green tarp was laid out, we placed the dirt bags around it to ensure it wouldn’t blow away and to help stabilize the walls. The others started to build the fence. Two people would grab a piece of the fence, while others would grab black support blocks that the fence pieces would be inserted into. We then secured the fence with little bolts and weighed down the black support blocks with more sandbags. The entire process took a little bit more than an hour to do. Once that was done, we all said our farewells to the dig site and went back down the hill.