The first few nights on Gardner?

[Kevin Weeks]

regarding the first few nights on gardner, I've read many of you assuming that they found the cache of supplies that the norwich city crew left behind. Do we have an exact list of what they left?? where was the campground & cache on the island? I've seen a photograph taken of their campground with a description of it by the caption. it stated that the crew used logs that they chopped down to make a barrier to keep the crabs at bay. If this campground was found by the castaways would it not have made sense that they would have tried to make use of it??

after reading about all of the fire features that have been found at the dig site, what do you think of hypothesis that the castaways had died within 7 days. seems like an abundance of fire for such a short amount of time.?

[Tim Collins]

after reading about all of the fire features that have been found at the dig site, what do you think of hypothesis that the castaways had died within 7 days. seems like an abundance of fire for such a short amount of time.?

Interesting to speculate on that. I wonder if there is any way to get an idea as to how long an individual fire may have been used?

T

[Kevin Weeks]

after reading about all of the fire features that have been found at the dig site, what do you think of hypothesis that the castaways had died within 7 days. seems like an abundance of fire for such a short amount of time.?

Interesting to speculate on that. I wonder if there is any way to get an idea as to how long an individual fire may have been used?

T

they had speculated that the number of fires indicated that they were probably used once and moved to a fresh fire pit for the next meal. one would have to guess at the number of times a castaway would cook per day. My guess would be that 2 times a day would be the upper limit to cook. there being no way to store food, you would have to forage/fish/hunt for food then eat it. There would be a limit to the amount of energy you could expend in a day to do this with limited water supplies. water may or may not have been an issue. if they had bottles to store the water that the research team says is fairly easy to get after rain storms they may have been able to survive for some time. If no rains came, water was most likely very scarce. If a fire pit was only used to desalinate water, I don't see a reason they would have to move to a new pit.

[Cynthia M Kennedy]

Maybe I have missed this in my reading or in the discussions...Given the amount of animal remains (turtle, fish, bird, shellfish), is there any way to estimate how many meals this might have made for the castaway (if there was only one castaway at the Seven Site)?

Cindy

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

Maybe I have missed this in my reading or in the discussions...Given the amount of animal remains (turtle, fish, bird, shellfish), is there any way to estimate how many meals this might have made for the castaway (if there was only one castaway at the Seven Site)?

As I understand it, that is one of the questions that analysis of the bones might answer.  Lots of new bones were picked up in Niku VI and the analysis hasn't even begun yet.