Sun, Sea, and Sugar Cane

Today we carried on working on the foreshore and, due to my random photo snapping from the previous day, I got promoted to official movie maker. I have never operated a camcorder in my life, I hasten to add. So a lot of today was somewhat experimental for me. Since I wanted to share with you all as much of my experiences out here as possible, I also took some film footage with my little digi-camera. I have to say, I think I have a lot to learn about making movies. Having looked back at some of the footage, I need to stand still more, but I'll let you guys make up your own minds about my newly developing skills.

It was another really hot day today, but very overcast, so some of us are glowing a slightly brighter pink than usual. I'm quite glad that we are currently on the foreshore, because we have a nice sea breeze. I think it will be a bit of a shock to the system when we have to work on the site proper. So, in the film you can see the team cleaning all the loose soil from the sections. This is an important thing to do so that we can clearly see the different levels in the sections. Every time we find an artefact (ceramic fragment, shell, bone, coral etc) we have to put it in the relevant sample bag/bucket, this is so that we know from which layer and wall section the find came. All this information, allows us to interpret how the site formed and we can begin to piece together the relationships between the objects and the site. Later, during the afternoon, when it is really too hot to be shovelling earth, we clean and record all the finds from earlier in the day.

We welcomed some new Grenadian students to the site today, they will be living and working with us for the next couple of weeks. Then, late in the afternoon we all had a nice treat when we were given some raw sugar cane to try.

You cut the tough outer layers off the cane and then just bite a piece off and chew it. The chewing action releases the sweet, sugary juices, and you spit out the stalk when you're done. It's really refreshing, although I don't think my dentist will be too pleased with me.