Today Shelley and I worked together, profiling 51 meters of trenches at Hof, in the cold fog and mist. She has never participated on an archaeology project before, but quickly picked up our system of taking measurements of soil deposits, and learned how we deal with recording them. Shelley soon began interpreting the differences in soil color and texture herself.

One can tell the difference between tephra, diatomaceous clay and sand by sight sometimes, texture most of the time and the sound a trowel dragged over it makes almost always. She now knows what the various tephra layers look and sound like, but has declined to taste the tephra.

In the near future you may see a newswire article carrying news of a discovery our project has made at Glaumbaer. I'm not going to spoil it here, so keep an eye out for pieces about an American archaeology team in Iceland. We expect a number of TV crews at our site tomorrow, and, as typically of most archaeology projects, we're closing with a bang on the last day.

I expect that tomorrow will be my last entry in this journal for this project, although there may be one on Sunday - it depends on work load as we wrap up, and on the availability of computers, and on when Shelley and I take off on our vacation (either Sunday some time or on Monday morning.)