Pictures: Week 4

Blogger is being problematic at the moment, so I wasn't able to put up all the pictures I wanted to. I'll post the rest later.

Above: When we got to the site, it was so wet that the watusi pit had become this guy's private swimming pool.

Above: Liz bucketing litres and litres of water out of one of the pits.

Above: This picture provides a good layout of the watusi pit (drained, in the middle), and the possible elephant pit in the back (where all the people are).

Above: Magic may very well be somewhere down there. This is before we found any decomposing flesh, although we could definitely smell it.

Above: The watusi pit. Note the line, just right of the horn, that distinguishes the natural deposition from the more disturbed soil where the watusi is. That line was probably the edge of the pit they dumped the cow in.

Above: What we assume to be magic. The white is probably skin, and while there isn't a lot visible in this picture, it stretched to cover most of the bottom of pit M-9.

Above: Giles, the only one of us brave enough to dip their head below the surface of M-9 and excavate. The methane was so strong that it eventually became too difficult for him to breathe.

Above: Chris and his perpetual companion, the total station.

That's all now, hopefully more later.
The Watusi (?) Team

EXCITING UPDATE: You've seen the best, now for the rest (I kid, they're all good):

Above: You can see some of the watusi skull here, as well as the base of the horn.

Above: A good view of the ribs (at the back) in position with the watusi horn. There's a solid chance that we're going to find most (if not all, knock on wood) of the watusi skeleton.

Above: A better picture of the partially exposed ribs.

Above: Ben working with the total station prism. To get measurements, the total station fires a laser into the lens in the middle of the X and records the distance in three dimensions from the prism to the station itself.

Above: Extending the possible Magic pit into a possible Magic trench.

Above: Working away at the watusi pit and doing some total station measurements.

Above: Another nice day out at the dig. Hopefully we'll keep having them, although something makes me doubt it.

Pictures: Week 2

Better late than never, pictures from Week 2.

Above: Taking a look into a pit. Obviously, something in there is pretty interesting, although I can't remember what.

Above: Working away in the mud. Buckets were necessary to drain the pits of groundwater.

Above: Professor Costopoulos examining something. Once again, there's no doubt that it was deeply fascinating.

Above: Dario, his hat, and a large, muddy vertebra.

Above: Sue and a different large, muddy vertebra.

Above: More intense examination, this time of something Cameron found.

Above: Ben digging a test pit. Already, the hole had filled to the brim with water.

Above: The partial maxilla that we found near the watusi. We don't know for sure whether it's associated with the horn yet or not.

Above: The watusi horn, just as we were uncovering it. It's quite large, and so at first we weren't sure whether it was a tusk or not.

Above: Professor Costopoulos talking with the Parc Safari representative. He seemed about as surprised as we were about everything we found, which is not particularly reassuring.

Above: The site. Not bad for an graveyard/dung pit.

Week 4: Paydirt

Four weeks in, and not a moment too soon, we've finally struck paydirt. Greasy, black, partially decomposed paydirt.

We were beginning to have our doubts. We found houses, cows, rhinos, monkey jaws, garbage, a hypodermic needle, and a significant quantity of feces, but our quarry, Magic, had remained elusive as ever. We wondered what would happen if we couldn't find it. Would we move on to the house? Try elsewhere? Go back to the rotting rhino? Naturally, conversation turned mutinous. Some spoke of trying to make a break for the American border, where, we've been told, they remember where they bury their elephants. Others conspired quietly to sneak back at night with a backhoe. There was little that could be done to quell this nascent uprising, and we knew only a miracle could ever bring us back.

Fortunately, the archaeological gods were watching, and they heard our cries of despair. After emptying buckets and buckets of water out of our test pits, we got to work, fearful of what may come if we didn't discover something. Our trepidation, however, was quickly replaced with joy. Magic! Our white whale! Buried a metre and a half deep, in test pit M-9, we found what appeared to be a very large and solid chunk of decomposed fat and skin. Professor Costopoulos quickly realized that M-9 was very similar to the pit that uncovered the rhino in the first week: the soil was highly disturbed, the groundwater was greasy (known, delectably, as adiopocere), and the dirt near the corpse was darker and somewhat more enriched than its surroundings.

And then came the smell. Many of us, all of us, were by now used to the odor of dung. That said, we were definitely not prepared for the smell of unearthed feces combined with the scent of decomposing animal. The air in M-9 was thick with methane, seeping out of its muddy, greasy walls and floor. Deep and narrow "like a chimney" (Professor Costopoulos' words, and a useful simile to describe how the smell billowed out of it), we were unable to conclusively identify what we found as an elephant, so we set about to widen the 1x.5 m square to 2.5x1. Hopefully, we'll know for sure whether to celebrate or not by next week (please don't forsake us, O Gods of Archaeology!).

In much more definitive and exciting, but much less elephantine, news, it appears that the watusi skeleton is lying in a relatively undisturbed position. As buckets of mud were hauled out of the ever-widening watusi pit, it became clear that the horn was still connected to a skull, and that the skull may very well be connected to the rest of the skeleton (some ribs have been exposed that look to be in the right place so far). As we are unable yet to all dig out Magic (assuming, knock on wood, that it really is Magic down there), we may be able to uncover the watusi over the next couple of weeks. We know that it doesn't overlap in any way with the elephant (there's a great picture, which will be made available shortly, of the exact limits of the watusi pit in the soil), and that ensures that we don't have to rush to get it out.

Finally, pictures will be up tomorrow of the last few weeks worth of digging. We have some good shots of what we assume is Magic (it might not look like much, but you luckily can't smell it through the internet), as well as the watusi skeleton, the site, and everybody looking busy.

That's all for now,
The Watusi (?) Team

Week 3 Pictures!

We've finally got some pictures up! I've included a good number of them to give those of you who aren't part of the dig and reading this blog (hopefully there are a few of you!) a visual account so that you may live vicariously through us, or just have an idea of what excavating "Elephant Station" is like.

Above: The middle of Elephant Station ( pits M5 and M9)

Above: Looking into Team Tiny's pit (M4)

Above: Losing half of the aptly named Team Tiny into the recesses of their test pit (M4)

Above: Chris Ames working on mapping the site with the temperamental total station

Above: Team Pterodactyl working on test pit M9

Above: Working away

Above: Expanding the Watusi pit (M5)

Above: The Watusi horn in test pit M5

Above: A phalange from the articulated Watusi toe found in test pit M5

Above: Monkey Mandible in (I believe) test pit M12 found by Team Funky Monkey (formerly known as loser)

Above: This picture had to be included for obvious reasons

Above: Here you can sort-of see the edge of the house (where the grass is no longer flat!) and also a bit of the wooden "floor"

That's it for now, next time site pictures should be included in the initial post.

Cheers, Team Rhinocer-Awesome

Week 3: garbage, bone, garbage...HOUSE?!

Friday was another nice sunny dig day for team Rhinocer-Awesome (clever, no?) and overall the dig went well.

We continued excavating several of team Wah-Watusi's test pits (including the Watusi pit) and put down a few more. The biggest finds this week were a small monkey mandible, courtesy of "team formerly known as team loser" (they now prefer "team funky monkey"), an articulated toe with a shard of the hoof shell from the watusi pit, and last but not least, a house.

After bailing out the pits, which were full up with water, we got down to business. Team tiny proceeded to dig test pit M4 until they were almost literally neck deep in their hole and came across what seems to be glacially deposited sediment, which is good because once we hit undisturbed soil the likely-hood of finding our good friend the elephant in there is extremely slim. The watusi pit (M5) gave us the articulated toe, and upon that find the job was to expand the pit from about 1m x 0.5m to 2m x 2m and bring it down to the same level as the find, 0.6m. Because of the location of the watusi toe (next to the horn) we believe that if the remains are in fact still relatively together that the watusi is in a sort-of fetal position with it's front limbs up by it's face. To be noted as well is the substantial amount of the ominous red rope we keep finding around remains, which obviously points to some sort of connection, though our Parc Safari representatives deny this connection. Next pit was M9, that of team pterodactyl, who found a bone, which they claim is that of a pterodactyl, the verdict is still very out on that one. This pit did lead to some interesting smells deeper down, smells that were vaguely reminiscent of rotting rhino...maybe this is where Magic is hiding, but that will have to wait until next dig day.

We seem to find mostly garbage in the first pits, then higher concentration of bones, then more garbage, except for the anomalous monkey jaw find. Here is an artist's representation, being my own, on the equivalent of microsoft paint.

Above: g = garbage, b = bone & garbage, n = negative test pit

Thankfully the mapping of the site will be completed very soon, the total station has been acquired (however temperamental it may be) so we won't have to rely on my awesome microsoft paint jobs much longer!

As stated above you can see that the greatest concentration of finds are in the middle of the line of test pits, save for the monkey jaw, which was found in a pit on the far right. So the remains seem to interrupt what looks to be a continuous spread of garbage.

Now for the house. This was found by Prof. Costopoulos and Chris Ames while scoping out the area behind the line of test pits. It's very rectangular and there are remnants of wood floors. Now this house could possibly predate the use of the field as Parc Safari's cemetery but we will have to do a little Historical Archaeology to figure that one out, whose up for a trip to Hemmingford's public land archives?

Still no Magic. That clever, clever...dead elephant. Where is he hiding? Well, we don't know, and it could possibly be that our "informants" may be mistaken as well. Though there are 2 spots where he could be hiding , those being right next to the road by the first elephant station test pits (or not because hopefully reverse psychology works on dead elephants) or in the large area behind the house. Hopefully team Wah-Watusi will get lucky on Friday. That's it for today.

Cheers, Team Rhinocer-Awesome

Week 2: The Wah-Watusi!

Above: They wrote the song, but we found the cow.

No archaeological dig ever progresses quite the way it was originally intended, and of course, digging up Magic has been no exception. In a perfect example of this hard and fast rule, we began our day Friday afternoon by looking for an elephant skeleton, and by the evening, we were looking for a Watusi skeleton.

We got the green light from the farmer to dig up the elephant on his property, which we took to be a good sign. However, getting permission to dig up an elephant and finding it are two different things. We were directed to the general area where the elephant was, told how deep it was buried, and left to it: the only real guideline we had to work with was that it was "somewhere near the road".

Fortunately, a decomposing elephant leaves a sizable depression in the ground, one that someone with a trained eye can spot with little effort. Despite the thick vegetation that had taken over the area, we were soon able to estimate where the elephant should be, and planned our test pits accordingly. Unfortunately, any test pit we placed within the depression quickly filled with water, which mixed with the dung that the area had previously been used to store. As a result, we weren't able to get any deeper than maybe a foot and a half in any of the lower test pits, a problem considering Magic is supposedly under three or four feet of soil (and dung). So until we can solve the water table problem (or the water goes away on its own), we probably won't be able to get at the elephant skeleton.

That said, virtually every test pit we dug uncovered something. Phalanges, vertebrae, ribs, all kinds of different bones were strewn across the field, some of them hardly below the surface (we even found bones above ground on the road and under roadside vegetation). On top of all that, red string was found in at least three of the pits, seemingly connecting them together. The theory at the moment is that this string might define the boundaries of the hole into which magic was tossed; however, that doesn't square up well with the fact that the soil in each test pit appears to be highly disturbed. Finding bones out of context suggests that during the process of burying Magic, Parc Safari dug up the bones and dirt that were there beforehand and then redeposited them, throwing them all over the place and separating them from the rest of their skeletons. If the soil all around the string is disturbed and there appears to be no rhyme or reason to what we find where, then the string probably hasn't stayed in its original context either. In any case, hopefully over the next few weeks we can figure out what, if anything, the string is supposed to tell us.

But the big find of the day was not the red string (thankfully), but the horn and maxilla of a Watusi cow, an animal I had never heard of prior to this dig. When we first uncovered it, we all excitedly assumed that the horn was actually one of the tusks of our elusive quarry (horns and tusks look mighty similar when you've been digging all day). Luckily, one of the zoologists from Parc Safari was there to remind us that Magic's tusks had been removed before he was buried, and to help us identify the species. We weren't able to get the horn fully excavated before we had to leave (they're huge), but we're making plans to try and dig out the rest of it as we continue onwards in our search for Magic. Something tells me, judging by how many non-elephant bones we've found so far, that there'll be even more detours before we get down to what we were originally digging to find.

Above: You can see why we thought we'd found a tusk.

So the rhino group will pick up where we left off this week, and hopefully they'll have more luck locating the elephant (or at least they'll find some other goofy-looking animals to dig up). We'll have to think up new group names: maybe whatever they find this week can be theirs, and we can be the Watusi group.

That's all for now,
The (tentatively named) Watusi Group

Week 1: Rotting Rhino

Have you ever smelled decomposing rhinoceros? We have, and believe me, it's pretty cool... also pretty smelly. Let's start from the beginning.

Last Friday (Sept. 21st) was the rhino team's first day out to Parc Safari. It was also the first time any students had been out there to start the excavation, so it was pretty exciting. Due to an interesting turn of events, being that Parc Safari have not asked the farmer who owns the land where the elephant is buried which they sold to him a few years back if we can dig up a corner of his field, yet, we were sent to the plot where the two rhino's were buried about 2 years ago. Enter Team Rhino (cue catchy polyphonic theme tune).

Upon our arrival at the supposed "rhino graveyard" we threw down an initial 4 test pits. These were all approximately 50cm x 50cm and reached varying depths (some were more lucky than others in receiving a particularly rocky soil matrix, thus severely impeding their progress). Also the mapping of the site was started.

Test pits 1,2 & 3 showed some interesting mineral content so we took some samples, but we didn't find exactly what we were looking for in those specific holes, that being a rhinoceros carcass. It was test pit 4 which led to the jackpot, a very smelly and decomposed jackpot I might add, but nonetheless, a jackpot.

Test pit 4 was situated in the back of the "graveyard" next to what seemed to be the remnants of a miniature golf course, therefore we can infer that a past society of "mini-putt people" once inhabited the area until relatively recently...interesting, but I'm getting off topic. The area in which test pit 4 was located was a rectangular plot with little vegetation compared to it's surroundings, which means that it was filled relatively recently, leaving not much time for vegetation to regrow. The most noticeable thing about the plot of test pit 4 was that it had a large depression and a matching large, for lack of a better word, bump. Prof. Costopoulos believed that this depression and "bump" could be collapsed ribcage and skull (respectively) of one of the rhinos. cool. The pit was dug in what was believed to be the collapsed ribcage depression. Initially the soil was like that of the other test pits, quite rocky, but between 40cm and 50cm down we noticed that the soil matrix had changed to be a relatively uniform very wet, gray, clay. Enter a not so intoxicating scent we now know to be rotting rhinoceros. This is where we start to notice that this smell is coming from bits of blackish stain in the clay, which Tabitha (a graduate student working on the dig) notes looks like decomposing fat, and she was right. very cool.

At about 55cm we found a white material that was mysteriously both solid and spongy at the same time. I believe it was described in the following way: "When you poke it it pokes back...cool!". So at this point the other test pit crews abandoned their pits to come help expand test pit 4 and lay down another test pit where the skull is believed to be. Test pit 4 was expanded on two sides to form an "L" shape and the skull test pit was dug down to about initial
height of test pit 4's start point before having to pack up and head home for the day. So we need to dig the skull test pit down a bit more before we hope find anything skull related.

The bone that was found (which is believed to be the top of a vertebrae) was still quite wet, though the muscle and fat was decomposed there was still some skin, which was very elastic. A sample was taken to be analyzed in the lab. Unfortunately we did not have time to go further so all that was found was the tip of the bone, which is being left in the pit until next time when we can further excavate it.

So how do we deal with this rotting rhino you may ask? Well, there are a few things to consider before we decide. First is that if we have unearthed only the top of the find and it is this wet, that could mean that there is literally a pool of rhino goo near the bottom, which may be something we don't want to deal with. However the Parc Safari representative informed Prof. Costopoulos that when Alice (The name of the rhino we found) was buried she was rolled into the pit and landed sort of on her back/side with her legs more or less facing upwards, this means that if what we have found is in fact a vertebrae than there may not but this ominous pool of rhino goo that we are all dreading. This however seems a bit strange as well because when we expanded test pit 4 we didn't find any other bone, which may mean that we are at the top and the lovely rhino goo IS waiting for us. And if we do continue with the excavation of Alice the rhino we will have to bring in the back-hoe to take off the extremely rocky top layer of soil, as it would be hell to dig through. This would significantly alter our initial plans of observing insect/small animal activity, soil chemistry and taphonomic processes in a relatively large excavation site.

What's the plan? Well we don't know yet, it depends on if the elephant team finds the elephant. If they do then we can move all our efforts to the elephant site and continue with our initial plans rather than actually dealing with Alice the rotting rhino, although this depends on how decomposed Magic the elephant is, he was buried about 7 years ago, but an African Bull elephant is more than double the size of a rhino, which means a lot more meat to decompose. Good luck elephant team!

That's all for now, pictures for week 1 will be posted as soon as I receive them. Until next time.

Cheers, The Rhino Team