Jacob Bigg
Prior to my participation in this field school I was blissfully ignorant of the role that rocks played while excavating an archaeological site. Upon finishing the school, I can wholeheartedly say that the only thing I disliked about digging is the feeling when you forcefully push your shovel into the ground and it pings off of a rock. This slightly annoying occurrence was somewhat prevalent during the 4 weeks here, although hardly irritating to the point of making fieldwork un-enjoyable. Out of the 4 different units I spent time working on over the course of my 4 weeks, 2 of them (OA6 and the Well) had extremely heavy amounts of rock. Despite this challenge, my team and I did everything possible to persevere and not let this slow down the progress we made. This did mean that the physical demands were increased however this was offset by the satisfaction in seeing our rock pile beside the unit growing. In the well we even had to use a mattock at one point, so that we could loosen the rocks to enable their removal.
Generally speaking, archaeology is known to be a delicate and slow moving discipline, all my previous classes reinforced this idea. So when we were told to grab a mattock out of the trailer I must say I was a bit surprised. However, through this school I know now that the reality of excavations can be much different, with digging conditions depending greatly on location (the Canadian Shield and other areas in Ontario can be very rocky for example). When digging gets rough the use of these other tools (besides shovels) can be a great asset, especially when used in conjunction with sound archaeological thought so as not to impact the cultural material. In the case of the well, our goal was to open an area around it for a section. We knew that the soil contained no artefacts because the first layers removed yielded none, therefore the use of a mattock did not risk destroying any material further down. These kinds of thought processes are part of what make archaeology so appealing to me personally as each situation is its own puzzle which can be solved through creative and strategic thinking to reveal a detailed and unique story of our history.
