More Helicopter

Friday afternoon I spent another glorious day 'doing' archaeology in a helicopter. However, unlike the past few helicopter surveys this was not a petroglyph survey.  

On this trip I was returning to places I had already surveyed and showing the landowner the locations of sites on their land.  So instead of a new notebook with blank pages I brought along my old survey notebook from 2009.  The notebook had all the village maps I drew when I first surveyed the area.  Instead of looking for old house pits and then drawing them onto a sketch map in a new notebook - I was matching the housepits with the ones I drew on my 2009 sketch maps.  I was very happy with the accuracy of all my old maps.

I also checked on the condition of the archaeological sites, and found that some of them are eroding severely.  By carefully inspecting my old notes I was able to determine that around 3 to 4 meters of one particular site has fallen into the river since 2009.  On my 2009 map I drew a house depression with a hearth in the middle.  Today only the back edge of the house depression remains.  Wow!

Then on the way home we crossed over a bay I surveyed last year by kayak.  There are some islands out in the middle that were too difficult to reach by kayak with steep sides that would have been impossible to climb.  But I had suspected they may have house depressions on top, and so on Friday I had the helicopter swing by them for a quick aerial view - and they did have house depressions on top! 

Patrick

In 2009 the bank extended a full 3 meters out to the right

Black birch - a pretty substantial tree for a part of the island people often consider 'treeless'

The sea stack on right has an old house depression on top - the inhabitants would have had to use ropes to climb up and down the cliffs