Good morning folks. Sorry, this post is going to be without pictures this week. It turns out that I split the back of my hand open on Thursday and cut the knuckle almost all the way off my hand. You could actually see the finger bones. I had to get nine stitches to sew the thing back on. I was thinking about putting the picture of that up but it is pretty gnarly. But the doctor seems to have gotten it sewn back on and the bleeding stopped sometime yesterday.

I cut my hand fixing a trailer to load up a UTV to go out into the back country. We had actually gotten quite a bit of rain early this week and were concerned about how passable the roads were. Nick was there to help me get the bleeding stopped and drive me into Holbrook.

But I would like to note, that even though I missed 2 hours of work getting my hand stitched up, we still managed to get the trailer fixed, and went out into the field. We found two new archaeology sites, including a six or so room pueblo, and helped with a property inspection on some lands that should be a part of the park soon.

But archaeology can be dangerous work. I hope that you are always prepared for the worst.

Sorry, for the lack of posts last week. I gave a lecture in Springerville Monday night and never really caught up with my work. Our new GIS intern has started, but as we still  haven't gotten our new computer, so there are four of us sharing two computers. And the GIS intern is using one of them pretty much full time...
But I did get out into the expansion lands Friday:

This is a huge glyph site with panels on both sides of a narrow sandstone gap, including another animal trap glyph. I think that I am going to work up a paper on animal trapping on the Colorado Plateau.

Here is a shot from further down, with Nick's head.

It has been a busy week. Two Fridays ago we had a group of hoods steal the tool box out of the back of the archaeology truck. Fortunately they didn't steal anything, but it took us a while to find all the tools and repair the tool box. Unfortunately we we getting ready for a weekend in the field with the friends group and didn't have much time in the morning. On Saturday we had a rock art recording trip and while we were out there found this:

It appears to be a Pueblo I canteen that we are in the process of restoring. It was really a fun weekend. But to bracket the week in time we stopped to look at this yesterday...

I think that it is an old railroad tank car used as a stock tank. That is what is great about this job, the archaeological record is very diverse, you never know when you'll be gluing a pot together or studying a rail car.

I know it is early in the week, but the intern and I managed to get out of the office for an entire day in the field. We came across four previously unrecorded sites on a high ridge scarp in the park. Three of the sites were small sand stone structures and the fourth was a larger 4-5 room pueblo.

Here is a shot of an intact wall as it erodes off the edge of the scarp. There appears to be just a small sliver of a room remaining on the top of the bluff.