Student Blog — Love at First Site – Mapping

Brooklynn Loder

I have always been interested in mapping, but I am also known to be someone who is extremely directionally challenged. This field school has provided me with a great deal of valuable information on mapping and maintaining direction, and honestly what a coordinate actually means. I also had the opportunity to supervise and set up my own stage 2 survey on site BcGn-15, which I was very excited about. After recording the coordinates of all 106 shovel test pits, had to plot every single one of them by hand onto a map, or rather a very green piece of grid paper. At first, I found this task to be quite redundant and meticulous, but after completing it I began to see the value of hand drawing maps. It provides an excellent way to visualize clusters of positive test units, as well as a guideline upon which to expand for further survey.

This past week, James taught us how to plot coordinates into QGIS, a free GIS software. I had some previous knowledge of the software, but it was interesting to see it put to use on the work that I had organized. James then explained that we could use basic data from stage 2 survey like artefact counts to create distribution maps and find patterns within the basic field work performed. Throughout the process of our stage 2 survey, I was not able to fully comprehend how much information can be compiled with a bit of shovel testing and a few 1x1m test units. Overall, field school has taught me the value in mapping and recording all data observed.

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