The Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Simon Fraser University
'TWAS THE YEAR 1997 AT DhRl 16.....
THE SITE
If you paid attention, you probably noticed that we
skipped the year 1996. Once again, there was not enough
money to run an excavation so the year was spent
studying what we had learned so far.
Hold on to your seat though because
1997 was a busy year at DhRl 16 !
This year we had a crew of over thirty people, so we got
a lot done, but the going was tough.
The mosquitos were out in full force this season,
so everyone on the site was continually doing battle with the bugs.
As you know, DhRl 16 has been worked on for several seasons.
Several different excavations have gone on, let's just go over them once more to get them straight.
With all this excavation, you might expect that the site would
look very messy, with trenches and holes everywhere.
Surprisingly, it doesn't. It's almost hard to imagine that so much
work has been done on the site when you first look
at it at the beginning of a season.
 This is because the grass and trees grow back so fast that they cover
up most of our traces from the past years.  If you look carefully
though, like a good archaeological detective, you will probably
see markers and other things stuck in the ground that can give us
clues as to where an excavated area is.
WHAT DO WE ALREADY KNOW?
From past years excavations we know that DhRl 16 has burials
and house floors. Last season we found out that the
houses were built one on top of another.
If you think about it that's quite a lot of information that we now know.
Although it took a few years, it's a big leap compared to what
we knew before we started!
WHAT DO WE WANT TO KNOW?
Because we had such a big crew this year, we decided to focus
our research on several things at DhRl 16.
Our main goal was to expand on our findings from earlier
years and to make sure that they were correct.
In order to do this, we asked a few different questions:
                   1.  We wanted to find out about what the houses that
                        stood at the site looked like.
                        How big were they? What went on inside of them?
 
                    2. We also wanted to know why the houses were built so
                        close to the mounds. What was the relationship between
                        the two things?
 
                   3. Lastly, we wanted to know if this site was related to other
                       ones in the area or if there was other archaeological remains
                       in the mountains and area nearby.
WHAT DID WE DO?
                    1. To find out more about the houses, we exposed large
                         sections of the house floors that we had found by very
                         carefully excavating away the top of the soil until we
                         reached the floor.  We also took samples so
                         we could identify what animals and plants were there
                         at the time the houses stood.

                     2.  To find out more about how the houses related to the
                          burial mounds, we dug some 'test' excavation pits.

                     3. In order to find out more information about the area
                         near the site, one of our archaeologists went trekking in
                         the mountains and the area all around the site looking for
                         other archaeological remains and clues.

    WHAT DID WE FIND?
Wow! We found out tons of stuff !!!