UWM Field School 2025

Congratulations to everyone for making it through the first week! You all have learned so much already, and hopefully had some fun along the way. Good news on that front; there's so much more to come! We started off today talking about how to take good field notes. This is possibly the most important skill in all of archaeology, because once things are out of the ground, there's no putting them back exactly the same way, and field notes are our only way of reconstructing the relationships between artifacts. We spent the rest of the day doing more pedestrian survey. This is really paying off, and will be very useful when we decide where to put our excavation units! In the southern portion of the East Field, we have some huge clusters of shell-tempered pottery that are promising indications of where Oneota-period habitation structures were. In the West Field, we have been seeing a lot of lithic debitage at the north end, and a transition to ceramics and formal tools such as Madis...

  A beautiful sunny day today, perfect for more practice with pacing and learning how to use a compass! We covered a lot of ground (literally and metaphorically ;), and gained a ton of new skills.   In the afternoon, we put those skills to the test and made some sketch maps. Here are Shannon and Rowan with their final project. Great work to them, and all the teams! 

Today was our first full day of fieldwork, and we started off with one of the most useful skills for conducting Phase 1 survey work: pacing out 10m. Everyone made fantastic progress, and by lunchtime, some people could consistently get within 10cm! We'll keep practicing this skill to really hone that muscle memory. Since there was some rain on and off throughout the morning, we had great conditions for spotting artifacts during pedestrian survey. This is another vital survey skill, and was a great exercise in identifying artifacts in the field. As we discovered, it's a lot harder when they're covered in dirt than in a classroom or lab, after they've been cleaned up. 

 First day of the 2025 field school!! We started today in Sabin Hall, doing a quick orientation and introductions. In the afternoon, we headed out to the site and set up a Tarp Burrito to keep our equipment safe from any weather. Then, a site tour and cultural overview from Rick.  Overall, a great start to the field season, nice work everyone!