Today turned out rather nice, with a breeze from the south and few clouds. It made for good digging.

I worked in one end of our long trench here at Holar, taking out midden material to find out the depth of the garbage deposit. I also deepened the trench around the outside stones that probably compose a wall, in order to find out whether they cover any tephra layers, and in order to find out the extent of the wall.

These tasks took almost all day, but in the end did provide us with a lot more information about the stone walls through our trench. We still don't have a definite idea of how many walls there are, because some of the stones may have been in interior structures.

Some of our people used the Syscal Kid (its actual name) to see beneath the ground surface near our trench, so we should be getting some high-resolution read-outs from them soon. These charts and graphs will allow us to see where the walls continue, and will allow us wider perspective on the stones in order to make better sense of all of them.

In the late afternoon I moved up to the other end of the trench and worked on removing deteriorating turf that seems to have fallen onto a floor layer. A number of these turves have a dark grey tephra in them, probably that which fell in 1766. Therefore they built this structure after then. Indeed, the turves still smelled mouldy so probably have not been there all that long.

While working in the midden I found numerous pieces of bone, some slag, some rock broken by fire, and some kind of broken bone tool. Given the size and high density of the bone used in the tool, it seems to be a whale bone. No one here can be sure what the artifact is, but it seems likely that it used to be some sort of agricultural tool.