The cold rain today made us extra glad that we closed up the site yesterday. We met in the classroom this morning for a final chance to share site news. During an excavation, even if you try and talk to other people on the site, it is very easy to be monofocused on your excavation area and never really see the big picture. James and I can’t be everywhere and dig everything ourselves either, so this is really where the team aspect comes in. All our students are our eyes and hands and their work/records are the foundation from which we analyse and interpret the material. The excavation might be completed, but now there are many days of lab work, analysis, interpretation, and finally, writing the report on the excavation which won’t be completed for many months.
James also showed the students the start of the GIS project for the site, where the mapping information collected by some of the students is now georectified and plotted on a basemap. As we progress through the analysis, more and more types of information will be added into the GIS like the artifact distributions, the unit plans, and other features of interest.
As this course focuses on field methods, we do prioritise that, but we also try and give a bit of lab experience as we can. Today’s task was washing all the artifacts we collected so they can dry and then undergo primary processing, which is counting and bagging artifacts by material type within each collection unit (in this case the field bag, which was tagged in the field with a number, operation area and the level of the excavation).
With everyone gathered in the Archaeology Centre, it was soon lively and filled (almost to bursting!) with laughter, singing, and the sound of many toothbrushes scrubbing away dirt from artifacts. James was slightly dubious that they would be able to get through all the backlog but they did, bravo!
It’s really hard to believe that tomorrow is our last day! We’ll meet up in the classroom in the morning and the students will try their hand at some further steps in the artifact processing/analysis workflow. We have artifacts that were washed earlier in the week and have gone through primary processing that are now awaiting secondary processing.
I know some of our crew are really looking forwards to applying their knowledge from their coursework to actual artifacts and that will be a fitting end to the field school!
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