About midnight last night, the 14-ton lorry arrived in our camp. The drivers didn't want to wake anybody, so they slept inside the truck. Now it's about to be loaded with all our camping gear to take back to Nairobi. Although there's much to organize…
Whew! The last day of work for the season. It was tense, but all the sieving of sediment, closing down of excavations, recording of measurements, and packing of specimens has been completed. We're ready to roll to Nairobi tomorrow morning.
My last…
It's after dinner; everyone else has turned out their kerosene lamps and has gone to bed. I'll stay up a little longer, and since I have a tent large enough to fit a small table (along with my mattress and a couple cases of clothing and papers on the…
Today, the excavators, transit fundis, and I completed our final lift of the season at Site 15. This last haul of about 100 fossil bones and stone tools helped a lot in figuring out exactly what happened at this site, about 990,000 years ago. We…
It's the last week of the field season. We'll be breaking camp on Saturday, the 14th, and there's much to do to complete our work by the end of Friday afternoon. One of my goals every season is to look around and figure out a plan for our next…
We had a really interesting surprise today. At least once or twice each summer, we find something really neat in our digs we didn't know about before.
Today's big job was to carefully remove the hundreds of stones found in excavation Site CL1-1. You…
It's the last Sunday of the field season, and we're certainly enjoying our day off. Amanda leaves tomorrow, and today she, John, Alison, and I spent some time reflecting on the season. We talked about the work, the artifacts, and what kept us busy,…
Alison has started her own excavations in Locality B, across the river and nearer the foothills of Mt. Olorgesailie than either Site 15 or DE 89. Like Locality G, where John has been working, Locality B has exposures of the New Formation and the…
The National Museums of Kenya is one of the finest museums (actually a combination of many different museums) in all of Africa. They do a good job of trying to preserve many outdoor museums, including the one at Olorgesailie. During our excavation…
It's important to plan the last week of our excavations with great care. I've also begun to take stock of what we've uncovered so far this season, and how it compares to what we thought we might find. I remember thinking when we started this year's…