We have really enjoyed the opportunity to bring a bit of our research at Olorgesailie to you through this web site. While the dispatches for this field season stop today, excavations are going to continue through the last week of August. By the end…
Several teams of three were assigned to dig geologic trenches today as part of our continuing effort to understand in detail the structural and sedimentary history of the Olorgesailie Basin. While our excavation trenches tend not to be very deep (we…
Today we decided that a trip to Magadi was in order; every so often it is nice to get out of camp and take an afternoon trip. Magadi is a town roughly 45 km to the south and west of our site. It is located on the shores of Lake Magadi, a "soda lake,"…
We have temporarily closed down site B7/8-1, pending investigation by our stratigraphy team.
Continued excavation at Site A11-10 is showing that the site is as productive as we had hoped. The crew is digging through the "C" sand layer, carefully…
Site B7/8-1 certainly looks like a place where early humans butchered a large animal, probably a rhinoceros. We have about 25 bones from the animal, including some of the ribs and vertebrae arranged in roughly the correct anatomical order. This means…
This morning, we decided to take advantage of the continuing lack of dust from the rain of two days ago. The fossils on the surface of the ground were much more easily visible than the last time we did a survey on July 2. Today's survey concentrated…
At Site B7/8-1, our improvised plastic coverings held up, and we were able to extract the last of the bones from the second lift without any problems. We decided to take the excavation down one more spit (the ninth at this site) in order to ensure…
We lifted artifacts and fossils today at Site 15 (the Elephant Site). Roughly thirty stone tools and bones were taken from the site. The fragmented skeleton of an antelope was identified, although an exact identification of the species will have to…
Today, we closed down the A11-20 site, after finishing the last spit. In its place two new sites were opened, A11-15 and A11-30. A11-15 is a new site that is roughly halfway between the A11-20 site that we just completed and A11-10 (the site that is…
Sundays are liberty for the crew, giving people the opportunity to go into town, write letters to loved ones back home or to simply sleep in a bit later than normal. For me, it was a day of preparing notes for two talks to be given at a meeting of…