How do you remove several cubic meters of sterile sediments in an efficient way? Early this spring Torbjørn came up with a suggestion – could we not suck sediments out of the cave using a long tube? In the cave we are excavating we have several meters of sediment lying on top of the layers that contain bones. Last year we removed these layers by hand, but that is a lot of hard work that takes time. This year we wanted to be efficient.
We hired the Vacumkjempen ("vacuum giant"), a company based in Tromsø with a department in Narvik. We had several meetings with their personell to plan the operation. Early one morning last week, Fredrik and Anders connected a long tube from their truck all the way into the cave. For one and a half day we shoveled stones, sand and clay that was then sucked up into the tube. It was definitely hard work, but it was also fantastically efficient. In this short time we removed more than >10 m3 of sediments! Now we have exposed several square meters of the layers we are interested in, and we can start excavating these over the coming weeks.