Day 10

Today, Shelby and I were joined by Jeanette in the field. It was nice to have a new set of eyes and another pair of hands to help identify and geolocate possible archaeological features. We started off heading to the most eastward point of the north wall of the Ka’a’awa Valley in search of a strange rock feature that was pointed out to us by the UAV team the day before. By the time we found the location we had jumped a few fenced and made friends with a few dogs. The feature itself was located pretty high up on a steep hill, however, upon inspection we determined that it was a natural formation and not anthropogenic in nature.

On our way back across the valley, Jeanette pointed out a rock wall that she had identified previously with the Geology team. After taking the coordinates, we made our way towards ‘The Temple of Doom’ in an attempt to find the linear feature that we had spotted from the hill the day before.

Temple of Doom

Although our search did not turn out as expected, we did find other features nearby that were similar to the anthropogenic features we had identified the day before. We continued hiking along the south wall of the valley looking for additional potential archaeological sites to map with the Trimble. Around 1:00pm we experienced another beautiful Hawaiian rain shower as we broke for lunch. We took the opportunity to relax and eat lunch before making our way back down the hillside. As we descended down the slope, I got distracted by a seemingly misplaced tree and decided to investigate. What we found appeared very similar to the other rock features we found, but was surrounded by loose rocks that seemed to follow the slope of the landscape. I look forward to further investigating this location in the future.

Lunch Time

After we had returned to the ranch, we had some free time to go to the beach and work on data processing. Now that everyone has finished with lab work for the day, we are all going to watch Jurassic Park and enjoy the evening.