Field dispatch: back from the gorge

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!

Jerry and Nicholas removing backfill at the beginning of the field season.

View of trench before 2013 excavation.

My research assistant, Victoria Johnson, happy to be at her first Paleolithic excavation.

Member of our resident giraffe group in the morning on the way to the site.

Concentration of faunal material in Unit K10.

Tori Johnson at the total station looking on as a Maasai goat herd passes by the site.

View of the trench at the end of the 2013 excavation season.

Field dispatch: update from Olduvai Gorge

University of Colorado-Denver fieldschool student Tracy Lancaster preparing to piece-plot materials in Unit L10.

I'm sitting here at the Sundown Restaurant in Karatu with my first real internet connection in about two weeks. The work at the gorge has been going very well; our excavations at DK have now exposed nearly four square meters of deposit, and faunal material is very common. Importantly, most of it appears to be very well preserved. Unfortunately, we have not come across any definitive stone tools as of yet, although a few pieces that were excavated yesterday may have been produced by hominins. I'll provide a more detailed summary of this year's field season next week when I get another stable internet connection...

View of our excavation trench in the DK area. The thick deposit at the top of the sequence is Tuff IB, which is dated to approximately 1.85 million years ago.