The End. but not really.

Today was our last day at Moche Barago. Tommy and I were still excavating in our units and Hannah and Sebastion were busy drawing and mapping the profiles before we closed the units for the season. It was an extremely relaxed atmosphere and was a wonderful conclusion to our excavations. As apparently there always is on the last day of excavations, there were many interesting finds including plant remains Christopher found a quartz core in his unit and possibly a human tooth (I found that one)!! Overall, things look to be very promising and exciting for next year :) After lunch it started storming while we were in the cave and it was really peaceful listening to the rain and the thunder and the water cascading over the waterfall. We haven’t had enough rain for the waterfall in several weeks so it was a nice change. Things up at camp were alittle more hectic with everyone packing up the research tent and inventorying all the supplies. Andrew was sent on a mission to collect soil samples from the mountain with Kochito. At the summit, 2900 meters up, the views were incredible and were well worth the exhausting climb up. They began taking soil samples all the way down the mountain every 100 meters until they reached camp. Along the way they stopped for some photo ops on a rock formation that is believed to have been used for human sacrifices. (Dr. Ralf and Andrew jokingly threatened to sacrifice me when we went surveying up by it last week. Haha. Not). They than began hurrying down with the approaching storm bearing down. Dinner was delightful. Pasta with egg salad and tomatoes Yumm! We leave tomorrow for the Bale mountains to go on a hiking/horseback riding trek. We are unbelievably excited to start travelling around Ethiopia (we are following the historic route) but I am admittedly kinda sad to stop excavating. I really enjoyed it and I hope I will get the opportunity to do it again soon.