Tomorrow the backhoe comes to fill in our trenches, and we don't have them all profiled yet, so we're hopping around trying to get them all drawn and interpreted once and for all. We have some disagreements about what appears in the various walls of the various trenches, but not enough time to settle things in the field, so we will have to go with our drawings later on.

Nature gave us a gorgeous day today, with a warm morning following by a rather breezy afternoon, with a BRISK northwind coming in from over the Arctic Ocean. Brrr. I spent the whole day in and around the different trenches at Reynistadur seeing that the people working on the drawings had things under control, while also working on my own drawings at the same time.

We had a third tephra expert visit us today, but instead of siding with one or the other of the previous ones, he just said that he could not be sure of some of the layers we showed him, and so he suggested we send them off to a lab for analysis. No one makes a home kit for tephra testing, so we won't have answers for some of our trenches until much later in the future.

Right at the end of the day we had a big discussion about one particular trench, and futher scraping on it resulted in a completely new interpretation, meaning that in addition to finishing up two trenches in the morning before hte backhoe arrives at 9:00 am, we now have to draw another profile from scratch. I expect that we will be in the field early and doing things faster than ever so that we can move on to the next farm, just over the hill.

Wish us luck!