Archaeologists Dig for Clues

Archaeologists Dig for Clues

On our summer vacation we got to go n a dig with our friend Sophie. She's a scientist-an archaeologist. She hunts for places where people once lived. Over time these places have gotten buried. Sophie digs them up. It's called excavating. She found a good place to excavate near where we lived.

The dig was in a cornfield. The farmers ho owned the field had uncovered some prehistoric spear points with their plow. When she saw the points, Sophie asked for permission to hunt for more clues.

Sophie showed us the test pits she had dug to test the ground for other interesting buried stuff. In some of the pits she had found more spear points. They were in a layer of dirt that was darker than the dirt above it. The dark earth was important. It was a sign that people had lived on that spot long ago.

Sophie needed to know how old the dig site was. So she sent some pieces of burned wood from the dark-dirt layer to the archaeology lab. A carbon-dating test, which measured chemicals in the wood, showed that it was six thousand years old! That meant the people who had burned the wood in their campfires had lived in the Archaic Era. We didn't know too much about that time period, but we figured we'd find out once we got to the dig.

A lot of people were helping Sophie excavate. Some were archaeologists. Some were volunteers, like us. They'd really made a big hole! It wasn't just an ordinary round hole, either. It had smooth, straight sides, and it was all divided up with string into squares.