Just arrived at Washington Dulles from Tanzania this morning, and I'm waiting around for my flight back to North Carolina. By all accounts, the 2013 field season was a great success. At our excavations in the DK area, we piece-plotted several hundred bone specimens, not to mention the hundreds of fragments that were recovered from the screens. There are a handful of
possible stone artifacts, although we can't say for sure as of yet. The real key will be to fully analyze the faunal material to identify butchery marks that will confirm that hominins were using stone tools to process animal carcasses. My research assistant, Victoria, and I have washed most of the faunal material from this year's and last year's excavations, and we will return to Tanzania at some future date to do the analysis (we leave all the materials in-country for analysis rather than shipping them back to the states). Best of all, our resident group of giraffes was around again. Goodbye for this year, Olduvai!
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| Jerry and Nicholas removing backfill at the beginning of the field season. |
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| View of trench before 2013 excavation. |
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| My research assistant, Victoria Johnson, happy to be at her first Paleolithic excavation. |
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| Member of our resident giraffe group in the morning on the way to the site. |
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| Concentration of faunal material in Unit K10. |
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| Tori Johnson at the total station looking on as a Maasai goat herd passes by the site. |
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| View of the trench at the end of the 2013 excavation season. |
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