more on my trip

After the weekend in Aspen, I headed on to Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado for a week of excavating and other work.
The first thing I found out was that my roommate in the cabin was the same person I shared a cabin with two years ago. This was pure luck, the people who assign cabins had no idea. That evening at introductions I found that two ladies there for the week were from the quad cities,only an hour or so away from me. And one of them was a nun!
There were also a couple of other people I had been there with before, but then there usually are.
The next day, monday, those of us who had experience at Crow Canyon (alumni) went out to the area of the dig to work. Instead of digging, though, we did cross section mapping of prehistoric trails, or what we hope were prehistoric trails. This consisted of setting lines across the trail at regular intervals and measuring from the line down to the ground every couple of inches (10 centimeters to be exact).
This gave us a cross section of the trail all along it, probably a quarter of a mile or more. By putting these measures from a number of trails into a database, the archaeologists hope to develop a method of determining if a trail is an old human trail, or a new or animal trail.
Actually, a lot of modern archaeology is like this, studying the landscape and area of use of ancient people. It's not Indiana Jones, but we learn a lot.
Next time I'll get to my actual excavation, but be forewarned, I didn't dig up a lot of artifacts, just a lot of rocks.