Hot lava!

Things are coming along well, it's normal to have a week or so go by before site-permission goes through and excavations start in earnest. On Sunday I spent time with an old friend of mine Wiz. For those of you who know him, he's doing great and still doing tattoos across the globe, good times. He got a new puppy named Topsy, the little guy is a lot of fun to play with.

I started excavations at Pava'ia'i, near the Tongan village on the west side of the Island. This is a really special spot for archaeology on the Island. About 2,400 years ago a volcano erupted and covered most of the surrounding area for miles with super-heated ash called a pyroclastic flow (That's a link to a little wikipedia thing). Ok...So this ash destroyed everything on that part of the Island, we typically find artifacts and imprints of foliage fused into the laminated compact cinder layer directly above the old activity surface.

The picture below shows earlier excavations by the crew at ASPA (the archaeology division). The exposed a 5x1 meter strip earlier in the year. I've set out a 3x1 m trench perpendicular the theirs and will be doing my work next to theirs for the next week or so. The rocks in the trench are pyroclasts, lava bombs that were thrown from the volcano and landed on the site before the ash plume settled. Needless to say, things got a little ugly 2,400 years ago on Tutuila Island.

This is a cluster of mushrooms that popped up in Matu'u at Wilson's place, cool huh!