End of the second week already

Time is flying by, we are now at the end of the second week of the field school, halfway done!

It’s taken us this long to get down to the archaeology, and then we will do the next steps, which is recording, and then we will cover everything back up again.

One important part of recording is drawing plans of the excavation. You might ask, in the age of photograph and movie technology, why we would bother getting a human to draw something instead of just taking a picture. We certainly do still take pictures (and movies, sometimes) but a drawing is a special thing as it has interpretive layers built into it in the way a photograph doesn’t. Planning by hand allows nuance and interpretation to enter into the image.

The students who had been excavating in this operation area first tried their hand at planning the rubble feature. I think some of them even enjoyed it! You don’t have to be a good artist to be a good planner as well — we aren’t looking for photorealism, just a schematic of what is going on in the feature of interest.

One thing we hope the students have been learning in our field school is that archaeology is composed of many different tasks, and you don’t have to be excellent at all of them to be a good archaeologist! Being willing to put in a solid effort is the most important thing. There may be some things you really don’t like doing, or feel like you don’t have a natural aptitude, but that is usually balanced by the things you do like doing or learning that you are a quick study at picking up some of the aspects of fieldwork. It’s one of the reasons Trent requires that field experience be part of the archaeology degree, because it is really important to put the theoretical things you learn in classes to practice.

The other students continued excavating the midden area. We have located two tarps which should be covering the planking we last discovered in 2023, and the next goal is to see if there is anything more of interest around that feature.

Another task today was starting the backfilling. We spend all this time digging nice neat holes but when we are done investigating we need to fill them back in. I can say our group has definitely developed their shovelling skills over the past two weeks, and they got one area backfilled by lunch!

After lunch we met at the Archaeology Centre for a debrief. We are almost finished at the site, and will begin to move people over to the second site we will be investigating on Monday. They will be with me, while James keeps some of the crew to continue investigating the well and finally getting to excavate the rubble feature! I will be sad not to be there, but it will be fun to explore the new site some more as we did some preliminary work there last summer.

We finished off the day by meeting at our new site and having a little tour to orient everyone to set up shop there on Monday. We broke for the day with best wishes for the weekend. See you all on Monday!