Last Week at Mossel Bay and Return To Boomplaas

 Week 4 & 5: Last Week at Mossel Bay and Return To Boomplaas

 

The last week I spent at the Mossel Bay lab was an incredible experience. The weekend ended with a hike along the Kingfisher trail in Wilderness where our group was surrounded by vervet monkeys after a short river crossing. 

 


The rain that came in Sunday night wound up washing a juvenile cape seal as well as a juvenile cormorant. As zooarchaeologists it was important that we collected their remains to bulk out our reference collection. So, they now sit in labelled garbage bags within the lab freezer. Both Tuesday and Wednesday were rainy, leading to another dead seal washing up on the beach.


 Luckily, by Saturday the rain had stopped, and the temperature had picked up significantly. Celebrating this we took a 20 km hike along the Cape St. Blaize trail. Between watching scores of dolphins swimming and the beautiful South African coast, it was the perfect ending to a great time doing faunal analysis in the Mossel Bay lab.
Returning to Boomplaas was a welcome change of pace from lab work. While some of the most important work we do as archaeologists is in the lab, few things beat the satisfaction of returning from a site at the end of the day. For the past week I've been one of three gunners on site. Shooting in plotted finds all day may not sound like the most exciting work, but we kept it interesting with a bit of competition. My first day on the Total Station may not have been stellar, thankfully I caught my mistakes. The healthy competition for shot numbers certainly lit a fire under me to improve.

Gunning on site wasn't the only highlight of the week. One of the best parts of returning to the field has been being around the other students who have been diligently working on site the past two weeks. Mossel bay was a fantastic lab experience with a lot of good people, but the Boomplaas crew is just as fantastic. We're now going into the final week and spirits are still high, it'll be a sad 'see you later' for many of us.

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