Hello Friends and Family!

Today we woke up after a good night's sleep. Colter talked in his sleep and dreamed about being in a cooking competition and running out of ingredients. "We need more mushrooms for the chicken dish!"yelled Chef Colter at 2:00AM.

We woke up dark and early and went to breakfast. After that Katie brought us to the classroom and we learned more about the different periods of the Ancestral Puebloans. It was neat how much we already had learned in Boulder and how much more we learned in the Crow Canyon classroom.

After lunch we went to a big room with a box of dirt. We thought we were going to play in a sand box! But it turned out to be a simulated dig for an excavation set up especially for us. We learned the tools and technique how the real archaeologists would dig. Maryn found a whole pot with no cracks. She also found some charcoal and part of a hearth. Colter found an animal bone that was used as a tool and a spear head. We both found pretty big pot sherds on the surface. We found out that we were digging in the Pueblo I time period.  See the photo below.

After our buckets got full of sand, dirt and rocks, we put it in a big screen to sift it. We shook it vigorously, and we found two pot sherds that we had missed.

As the dig went on, we found new and amazing artifacts. The coolest thing Colter found was the bone tool and the spear point. The most amazing artifact Maryn found was a unbroken corrugated pot.

The last, but definitely not the least thing that we did today was that we washed REAL artifacts that had been recently excavated. It felt magical to touch artifacts that were thousands of years old. The sensation was so beautiful to hold these special pieces of peoples' lives. Colter felt that each sherd had it's own story to tell if you listened closely. We used high-tech tools to wash the sherds…..called toothbrushes!