Alarm goes off—it’s 6:45 AM and 29 degrees outside. Honestly, way too cold to be shoveling and trowling through dirt all day, but I must get out of my bed and get to work. Although I have never been a morning person, I manage to roll out of bed, put on sweatpants, make a peanut butter sandwich, and finally bring myself to meet with my field school peers so we can get the ball rolling and start our fifth day of field work. We arrive on site around 8:45 AM, once we manage to crawl out of our unassigned assigned car seats we gather around our 4m x 4m excavation block “upstairs.” First things first, we have to remove the two sheets of tarp that successfully protected the three 2m x 2m units from any precipitation that managed to reach our dig site. A couple of weeks ago, the process of removing water through the use of buckets and a trembling single file line of cold, wet, and tired students was traumatizing. Needless to say, this is probably the most tedious part of our day, but thankfully, it did not rain that much over the week, so there were only a couple of gallons of freezing water to remove. After Professor White goes over a couple of minor pointers and expectations for the day, he decides to switch up what stations we are assigned to. Every day before this week, I was assigned Unit 6 (the southeast 2m x 2m corner unit of the 4 x 4) with my peers Kate and Tiffany. Dr. White wanted to switch two people out of the block and transfer them “downstairs” to work on the profile wall with Jim Legg. He asked my little Unit 6 crew if we enjoyed where we were, I enthusiastically exclaimed “I love Unit 6,” to which Dr. White promptly said, “alright, Elena, you get to move downstairs.” At the time, I was mildly devastated. But, after being able to observe first hand Jim Legg’s perfected excavating technique, I am glad I got moved. Not only was my only job screening and filling out paper work, but I also got to experience a master at work. He makes every cut with such ease and perfection that I finally had to ask him how long it took him to master the art of excavating, to which he said his first dig site was excavated perfectly. Unbelievable. Though this day turned out to be pretty ordinary and uneventful, we did manage to uncover a misshapen form of some type of point, although we can not accurately claim it as such due to its asymmetrical form, but it was definitely shaped this way purposefully. This specific cultural material was the only individual piece that struck out to me in the midst of FCR (fire-cracked rock), pebbles, small pieces of pottery, and minor amounts of quartz flaking debris.
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Student Blog (2017)Blog posts written by the students of the 2017 Broad River Archaeological Field School Archives
April 2017
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