Photos from the Archaeological Dig

For scale; the flattened skull, beside the trowel blade, has been partially sliced away and lost in by previous digging; you can see the edge highlighted above dark shadow. The rest of the body curves away upweard toward the top right of the image, with the two femurs set against the edge of the burial pit, top right.

Suzy, in Paddington Bear hat, prodding just exposed baby bones with her trowel. The blue thing is a scarf: it was cool and wet that morning. I had gloves with me, but none of us wore gloves after the first day or so, as you need the full sensitivity of your hand on the trowel to control it enough to scrape off just the very thin soil layer that you have to remove at each stage. Here, of course, I needed very fine control to work on the bones (though soon with finer tools than the trowel) so as not to move them out of their original alignment, which had to be recorded in photos and a drawing before they could be removed.

The bones seen at the angle at which I worked on them, after initial cleaning out to make them more visible. The skull, flatteneed an partially lost, is at the upper right. The confusion below the flat skull is the collar bones and some ribs, with the long bones of the arms spreading to the right margin of the picture. The spine curls down and around, the pelvis being still mostly buried, at the bottom of the configuration of bones and the femurs rising along the lower left margin of the picture, one parly obscured. One of the sets of lower leg bones, of the right leg, was buried pushing vertically down into the soil; the others angle up left to point out of the picture.

--SMC
September, 2001

Baby Bones

Copyright © 2001 by Suzy McKee Charnas