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GEOPARK BLOG

The Origins Dig Diary

9th September

Hi its Jenny here again. Progress was slow in the morning as the cave earth was still not completely dry. Once the earth was dry this was then moved down to the finds tent to be processed and bagged up. We've all been rushing today to get everything dry and processed by tomorrow lunchtime when our faunal specialist is coming down from London to collect the dried sieved residues. She will take all of the material from the cave back to London where it will be painstaking sorted and all the bones identified and catalogued!
The cave earth has to be dried and sieved into fractions of 10mm, 4mm, 2mm, and 1mm. Everything in the sieve gets placed into tubs and then a bag is written with the site code and context number  and  every bag is double labelled. It's really important that everything is labelled and bagged correctly, as this allows us to trace every bucket of mud directly back to its place in the cave! The stone and bone is separated from the rest of the cave earth after it has been sieved and then put into bags with the same information on, such as site code etc. We have to write a bag for the residue which all the fractions get put into and then the stone bag gets put in the stone box and the residue gets put in the residue box. Our tame geologist then takes the stone box away to study the cave geology.
As explained in my previous blog this is a very important task as, it helps the archaeologists understand what the climate was like by looking at all the different species of small rodents and any small seeds that may have come through the sieve when all of the cave earth was being processed.   
 

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