Needing a good rain and wind suit, Shelley let me borrow her Maine lobsterman suit, which definitely does the job. Hopefully being on the knees and hopping in and out of trenches won't overstress it and cause it to rip or wear through. It keeps out the wind, for sure. Today stayed around 7 degrees C today, but the wind made it feel a lot colder.

I spent the morning cleaning the side of a trench and trying to draw the rather complicated strata appearing therein. We have an Icelandic tephrologist coming on Friday to help us learn more about interpreting such things.

In the afternoon I joined Steve in working on our second trench, where we battled tons of stones. We really hope to get a pick to deal with them, because the large stones packed by smaller ones resist the shovel a great deal. Picking away all day with trowels results in enough stones and soil popping out that the shovel can be used to get them out of the trench, but it makes for sore wrists.

The amazing thing about our two trenches is that the lower one contained only about three stones, whereas the higher one contains so many stones that we can hardly deal with them. And the trenches lie only 18m apart! Tomorrow we will be extending both of them further toward the supposed Viking longhouse.

A number of us are currently trying to figure out what the stone-filled trench has come down on. Maybe we have come smack-dab down on a wall, the long way. The small stones amongst the large ones, though, argue against that. The material seems like the same kind as would result from a land slide, but we are far from anywhere that would provide the material for a slide, and let it get to where it is now. And why wouldn't the stones be in the lower trench if that were the case? Have we hit some sort of burial mound? They wouldn't put it next to the house. Perhaps we will know more after we extend our trenches.