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dig it!

So why am I in Kenya? To dig! So here are some photos and notes about digging.

First, here are some tools of the trade. In this pile are brushes; hammers; chisels; dustpans; karais (the Swahili name for the metal basins we use to transport the sediment to piles to be screened, which I'll talk about in another post); plastic bags; toilet paper (no, not for *that*, for wrapping delicate specimens in!); gardening pads for kneeling or sitting on; and in the top left hand part of the photo, there is bone glue and bone hardener. The flip-flops are not excavation tools -- they're there because we have a no-shoes-in-the-excavation rule, so someone doesn't accidentally step on something and break it!



Sometimes we dig with picks, especially at the start of an excavation to quickly get down to the layer where fossils or bones are coming from,



and then we dig more carefully, with chisels, hammers, brushes, and even dental picks.



What do we find? Fossils and stone tools! Here's one square with several stone tools in it. When we dig here, we leave bones and artifacts on pedestals so we can see their spatial distribution before we plot their 3D coordinates with a laser transit and remove them for analysis. (More on that later, hopefully).



Sometimes, to figure out how far the distribution of bones and artifacts in an excavation extends, we dig several holes until we start to find nothing in some of them. Finding nothing is data, too.

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