Before using the front-end loader to do the bulk of the filling of our excavations, we carefully protect the features we discovered from possible damage by the heavy equipment. This involves some hot, sweaty labor...

Below, the trenches of the house we discovered are being carefully filled by hand with clean dirt.

The bottoms of the units are then carefully lined with plastic. In the southwest corner of each excavation unit, we place a "message in a bottle" (outlined in yellow below).

As shown from last year, these plastic bottles contain an archival tag with descriptive information about the excavation unit. These bottles have been a big help in the past when we came back to a site again and our benchmarks had vanished or been destroyed.

Then the backfilling began in earnest -- the photo belows shows the students spreading the dirt as I drive another bucketload in the backhoe.

After the dirt is placed back in the holes, the sod that we carefully saved in a separate pile is spread over the units to help prevent settling and to discourage the growth of intrusive weeds in these areas. The photo below shows several of the units after they were "closed out."

We took a final trip to the top of the hill today to take a photograph of our site after we finished "cleaning up." On June 14, our excavations looked like this...

Today, as we left, the site appeared like this...

More news next year...