I clean dirt for a living?

Today we arrived at the site to find massive amounts of water held in the bamboo, string, and tarp structure that covers our unit as well as quite a bit of mud on the floors and walls of the excavation from the runoff of the massive rain the night before. I think that rain, second only to looters, is an archaeologists worst enemy, although I guess that burrowing animals, insects and plant roots need to be included in there somewhere as well. The rain has been extremely frustrating though, because you do all this work the day before excavating and cleaning the floors for pictures and then the rain just cancels out all that effort. And yes, I clean dirt for a living. I think about the absurdity of this often while working, but what can I say, I love it!

So anyway, Ricardo has been with us for a few days here in Pereira, he is a geologist from Manizales that works in the volcanic and seismic activity observatory there. Martha and Carlos had him visit to interpret the soils at our site and others in the area like Cuba, etc. It is interesting having him in the field to explain what he thinks about the different patterns in the soil profiles of the excavations since it is his specialty. Also, because we are really getting down to the end of the large excavation, I decided to go ahead and really clean the bottommost unit floor which was excavated in years prior and has accumulated quite a bit of other soil buildup/runoff. This turned out to be a bit more of a difficult task than I had intended because the soil in the lowest part of the excavation is extremely dense and humid, like wet, really compact sand. So that was a bit of a workout in and of itself, but the photographs of the unit with the entire thing cleaned up, walls and all looked really nice and will hopefully be useful for future analysis of the site.