cyclopaedia.org

COMPARATIVE IMPLEMENTOLOGY

ATIAHARA - Excavations

click on this photo to see an enlargement


The ATIAHARA Trench - April 1995

Richard Shutler and his party arrived in Tubuai in early April 1995, by that time Gilbert Doom had already filled in the trench with tree trunks and cleared material in the hopes that it would someday turn to compost. With the limited amount of time alloted to the profile it was decided to clear away the tree trunks and garbage to allow an access to the part of the wall where I recovered artifacts, and from there to strip the wall clean for about 10 or so meters.



click on this photo to see an enlargement

The main part of the clearing was done by a back-hoe, we then squared up the collapsed walls and cleared away the slump. This gave us an irregular wall at best and so we decided to cut back one meter from the original trench wall, for a length of approximately 11 meters. Here we employed standard excavation methods. The squares were excavated in arbitrary 10 centimeter levels, all the excavated material was screened and bagged by level. Once the excavation was completed the bagged material was washed, dried and sorted.



click on this photo to see an enlargement

The Shutler Profile

After two weeks of systematic and careful excavation we can now see the profile clearly. The complex nature of the layers and their inter-relationship a maze of features and events that stretch back in time to the first settlements at ATIAHARA.



Richard Shutler


Dr. Shutler at work, even at 73 he was still ever keen to excavate in yet another remote corner of the world, in search of the traces of man's past.



Richard Shutler


While some of us were worn out with all the work of the excavation, in his spare time Richard wanted to hike up the mountain to get photos!


the next page ATIAHARA - Layers




Go to Comparative Implementology go to ATIAHARA.ORG

l.a.miller@mail.pf