Day 6! Intro to Shovel Testing and Hiding from Storms

Today was the first day we got properly dirty as we started learning to dig shovel test pits. After a quick demo and applying lots of bug spray, we headed down to the lowlands near the Koshkonong Creek (for which our site, Koshkonong Creek Village, was named ;D ). No archaeological survey has ever been done in this area, so we were quite literally breaking new ground!

Alas, we found no cultural materials in any of our shovel tests this morning. This doesn't mean people didn't ever hang out near the creek, or even that they never left artifacts down there; it just means that in the area we surveyed, there is no surviving evidence of human activity. But to get some practice digging shovel tests with actual artifacts in them, we'll head to a different area tomorrow.


After lunch, we had quite a bit of rain roll through, so we relocated to the Edgerton Library for a discussion of the process of discovering and evaluating sites archaeologically, and a riveting discussion on whether human coprolites are artifacts or ecofacts. The students all know my opinion already, but ask them what they think in the comments!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

End of Week 1!

Image
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...
Read more

End of Week 2!

Image
 Congratulations everyone! You have all successfully made it through Week 2 of field school, and have now acquired the necessary skills to conduct archaeological survey.  We spent the morning making maps of the "new site" we "discovered" yesterday during our Shovel Test survey of the parking area. While it's not technically a new site, it does represent a distinct cluster of Late Woodland grit-tempered pottery from occupations that preceded the Oneota component that our excavation will focus on. Then, we transitioned into working on our first skill associated with excavation, which will start in earnest next week: setting up units! This skill was harder than some people expected, but everyone got the hang of it in the end. Next week, we'll be doing it for real...  But over the weekend, please enjoy some photos of the more memorable moments from this week! You may notice that it is a little heavy on photos (and clay models) of Sean. I guess that means Rick an...
Read more

Day 23 - MEGASCRAPE! :D

Image
  Today, we did a megascrape of all our units! It was a long process, and especially tedious in areas near the edges of our protective tarps where the dirt turned to mud. But it really paid off when we took our big photos: Top left: Entire open excavation area with features visible Top right: Closeup of Structure 25-01 (in former units 01, 02, and 04). It has all four walls and corners, some pits, a possible hearth, potential doorway, and a "spooky" area that we suspect may be a house floor! Bottom: Closeup of line of posts and pits (in former units 06, 07, and 08 western extension). Although closer investigation is required, our current working hypothesis is that this line of posts may be a wall of another structure extending further west (under our backdirt pile, of course...) After the megascrape and photos, we took some time to map in all our features and give them numbers. Tomorrow, feature excavation begins, and we will hopefully start to answer some of our burning ques...
Read more