Look at Beth's excited face--you can sure tell that she's missed being in school this summer!! So far, the kids have been in school about two weeks, and both are doing very well (Stephen has only just started his preschool). Last weekend we drove up to one of our favorite Arkansas locations, Petite Jean Mountain, so I could attend an archeology meeting. Hope took the kids on one of their favorite trails at the nearby state park:
This park is full of neat rock formations, including the narrow "slot canyon" below:
We didn't have the luxury of lingering, because we needed to get back to Monticello by suppertime that evening so we could participate in the send-off party being thrown for Father Pius, our parish priest for the last 14 months. Here's a picture of us with Father Pius:
Father Pius has been reassigned to another parish in Arkansas as a part of a restructuring. We are getting a new priest, Father Raj (he's from India) and the restructuring is because they needed to send Father Pius to this other parish because he speaks Spanish (and there's a large Hispanic population in this farming area), whereas Father Raj does not... We were sad to see Father Pius move on, as his passion for his faith and his role as our priest was quite evident, and he really helped to revitalize our church community.
Today (Wednesday) I took a day off of work to help a different sort of archeology project at Toltec Mounds State Park near Little Rock. You may recall that the Arkansas Archeological Society's 2010 summer dig was at this state park, and I was working in an area known as Mound P. Below, fellow society volunteer Don Higgins looks down the eroding slope of Mound P towards an oxbow lake in the background:
Mound P has been significantly eroded over the years by wave action from the lake, and the plan was to try to conserve this small but artifact rich mound with the installation of some erosion proof fiber matting and some large logs wired to the ground to serve as a "breakwater" when the lake is higher. Below, you can see some of the matting in place, and the three gents in the middle are using an impact drill to pound a wire cable into the ground to help anchor the logs:
I also helped lay matting, wire the logs down, and surface collect any artifacts that may be exposed in the area we were working in. Below is the neatest thing I found today, a part of a prehistoric Indian pipe drilled into a stone (the channel in the middle of this broken piece is where they drilled into the soft stone):
We also found a lot of potsherds, including some fairly large ones, as well as animal bone and chipped stone:
It took most of the day to put in about a half-dozen logs and a large area of this matting, which we locked into place with wooden stakes:
The matting is fairly temporary--it will protect the surface for a few years until it rots away (it is mostly coconut fibers held in place by a plastic mesh). During this time, vegetation should grow over the area, providing a more permanent source of protection. This kind of conservation effort is vital to the protection of the park's resources, which preserve a very important archeological site.
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