James and I have been hibernating after the end of last field season, but we have woken up with the spring weather and are itching to get back into the field. We are pleased to welcome a new group of students to the 2024 field season of the Trent Archaeology Ontario Field school, and the Nassau Mills Research Project! For loyal blog readers, there will be some familiar locales this season, but also some new places and activities we are excited to share with you.
We began yesterday with some introductions and preliminary classroom background work introducing the course structure, past excavations under the Nassau Mills Research Project, and a thumbnail history of our broader study region.
We continued this morning covering some of the method and theory behind archaeological investigation, and an introduction into the Standards and Guidelines for Consultant Archaeologists, and the Parks Canada system, which are the two main excavation and recording systems we use.
After lunch, we decamped to a nearby green space, where everyone could practice some surveying. The goal today was to contrast two methods:
- using the GPS in a phone to log each artifact location in our simulated scatters compared to
- measuring angles and distances with a compass and tape from a datum point to each artifact.
Despite some drizzle, we triumphantly returned to the classroom with data in hand, broke out the brains and the calculators, and graphed the simulated artifact scatters in UTM coordinates at 1:100 scale. The students could either use a protractor and ruler or apply some trigonometry to work out points relative to the datum for their maps. The prospect of math was a little daunting to some, but we persevered (and practice will make perfect). We pretty much guarantee everyone will be an old hand at this by the end of the field school!
Tomorrow looks like it will be a beautiful day, we have an artifact identification crash course and walking tour of the campus on the bill. Stay tuned…
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