Sarah Kennedy
Starting this archaeology field school, I didn’t really know what to expect. I have never been a big outdoors person, and yet I signed up to spend a month outside digging in the dirt. I really wanted the experience though, and to truly understand what it meant to do archaeology and work in the field. After the first couple of days, I started to get it, I had dirt under my fingernails, my hands were muddy, my pants were covered in dirt, I was sweating, but it was fine. Not caring about the dirt and the outdoors allowed me to fully immerse myself in the experience and get the job done, and I actually really enjoyed it. Sifting through the dirt and finding things was my favorite part, I got really good at picking things out from organic material. I even had Kate and James say “good eye” for finding something small or identifying bone from other materials, which made me feel like maybe I did know what I was doing, and was decent at it.
As an anthropology major, I spend a lot of time looking at bones in classrooms, but I never had the opportunity to apply that knowledge in a real world setting until now. Knowing what was bone and what wasn’t was very helpful while sifting through the dirt, I even had my group members (the snakes) asking me if something was bone or not and which bone it might be. This made me feel like all those endless hours of lectures and labs talking about and analyzing bones weren’t a waste.
This was another really cool find from unit OA-11 that I got to do some research on to find out exactly what it was. These are fragments from an Alfred Meakin plate dating to the 1930s+. What you see is a small fragment of the rim of the plate with this silver detailing, and then a fragment with the name Alfred Meakin in green on it which would have been on the underside of the plate.
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