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Tracking Elfshot Artifact Reproductions, Part 2
Harpoon headsIn an earlier post, I showed a set of artifact reproductions that I was commissioned to make by a design and fabrication company in British Columbia for installation in Nunavut. The...
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Groswater Palaeoeskimo Endblades
Sample of Groswater Palaeoeskimo endblades from the Peat Garden site in Bird Cove on Newfoundland's northern peninsula. In each pair, the dorsal surface is on the left and the ventral surface is on...
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Groswater Palaeoeskimo Lithic Artifacts
In this colour plate, take the bluish tinge in the quartz microblades (A,B) with a grain of salt. They are actually clear, but they were photographed against a blue background which I removed and...
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Seal Breathing hole drains
As the sea ice starts to melt under the 24 hour sunlight in Nunavut, fresh water starts to pool and flow on the surface of the snow and ice. In places where seals maintain breathing holes, the...
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Purple Saxifrage
Purple Saxifrage provides one of the first bursts of colour on the tundra once the snow begins to melt.Photo Credits: Tim Rast
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Scruffy time of year
Its a scruffy time of year. The northern animals are losing their shaggy winter coats.While the southern ones are starting to grow their's. Photo Credits: Tim Rast
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Shed Antlers
When we spot bones or antlers on the tundra, we tend to take a look at them. Many are natural, like this shed caribou antler. Some are still attached to skulls and may come from animals that died of...
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Digging
We're back to digging. Its a good time of year for excavating in Nunavut. The snow is mostly gone, its cool, and there are no mosquitoes yet.Photo Credit: Tim Rast
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A River Site
Here's a little site in Nunavut on a terrace overlooking a river. The two people in the foreground are each excavating a tent ring and the person in the back middle is excavating a lithic scatter...
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Popping out of the ground
Hey, Lori!Look, a biface fragment made from the same slate as all those flakes we've been finding...Photo Credits: Tim Rast
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Tiny Bird Carving
We found this little bird carving today in a cache associated with a Palaeoeskimo house feature. We see lots of loons on the river below the site,so we've been calling it a loon, but it could be a...
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Another River Site
We finished excavating this house and moved on to our next site today. We'll miss the scenery.Photo Credit: Tim Rast
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Rain Days
The job doesn't stop when the weather won't let us work outdoors. There's cataloguing, data entry, and mapping to keep us busy in the office.Photo Credit: Tim Rast
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Bone Dry
Drying out caribou bones in the lab. Its important to dry the bones out slowly or they'll crack and crumble.Photo Credit: Tim Rast
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Moving sites
Taking the final photos before flipping the rocks and backfilling the excavation. Photo Credits: Tim Rast
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Backfilling
The final step before we leave a site and move to the next one, is backfilling. We pull up the grid pins and strings and all the soil and moss that we removed during the excavation gets tossed back...
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A Broken Trowel
It was kind of a solemn day yesterday for me. I broke my first trowel. I bought it at the Home Hardware in Vulcan when I started volunteering on digs in High School. Many years ago, I started...
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Last Day Find
There is a tradition in archaeology of finding something good, but complicating, on the final day of digging. Lori found a point with a drilled hole in the last tent ring on the last site on the last...
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Overhead photo mosaics with a monopod
We take photos of all the tent rings and features that we dig before, during, and after excavation. There's a constant record of all the work done on an archaeological site. One of my favourite...
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