May 15 2013

This morning, all students continued to establish the coordinates across the site. Once all markers had been placed, Bob divided us in to five groups of three students. Each group was given specific coordinates, and we set out to do 30cm by 30cm test excavations in the southwest portion of the site. The excavations were done along the east-west transects, spaced 10 meters apart. The objective of the test excavations are to get a good sense of the camp layout. The entire camp appears to be roughly the size of a football field.

Erinn, Jeneva and Nathan finishing marking off the coordinates.

 All buildings had evidently been burned down at least several decades ago, and since covered by forest re-growth. Consequently, it is not obvious where the artifacts and features will be found. Almost all features and 99 percent of the several hundred artifacts recovered in previous excavations have been subsurface.

Team Marshalltown: Kathleen, Emma and Richard.

The trowels first hit the dirt for the 2013 project at 1:00 pm. It took only 2 minutes for the first cultural evidence to be discovered in a test pit and within 10 minutes four of the five test pits had yielded cultural material.

Nails varying in sizes, found by one of the groups.

A proud Ananda shows off her discovery, a Ponds hand cream jar in its entirety.

Most of the material consisted of nails and bottle glass, and part of a tin can. For this project we are collecting and recording these things, but not determining them as artifacts. Bob says if we were to record every nail and piece of glass or metal as an artifact we would be filling out artifact forms for the rest of our lives and never get a chance to excavate again. Things that did make it in to the artifact category today include a metal can lid ( Bob thinks it is probably the lid to a tobacco tin or boot polish tin), a complete clear bottle, and a complete Ponds hand cream jar.

Artifact show and tell with the class... and of course, documentation.