15 Jun A Week of Success

This has been one tough week for me! My work week is Monday through Thursday 10 hours a day.  It’s an especially a long day in the hot sun and dry air. Thankfully I have been adapting to the weather as the week goes on. It has been getting easier for me to handle the work we are doing every day. Matt, our team leader, has been the best mentor and archaeologist I could’ve asked for. He works with me step by step on sites, working through each artifact so that I can understand not only what the artifact is, but how it came to be. Allison and Tracey have been enormous helps to me as well. Any question I have is always answered with a positive and reassuring vibe. The support I have receive in the past week has been outstanding and has only made me want to work harder to be as good as they are at archaeology. There are four areas that must be surveyed. Two were already completed upon my arrival. The pictures show only part of one area. It is a lot of acreage to cover! We started off Monday with a brief over view of the White Rocks that has graffiti and has damaged elements within the site. Moreover, it has been damaged from people visiting the site off trail and creating social trails through the site. Once we are done surveying the other two areas we will return to the White Rocks site to begin preservation techniques on the site. After my introduction we went to a previously recorded site in the third area. We encountered a spread of artifacts in the area all from the prehistoric era. They ranged from just flakes to tools scattered all around the site. We found blades, scrapers, and a mano which was used to grind corn into flour. Once we found everything on the ground we would record it in documents making sure each individual artifact was accounted for and written on paper for the records. It was a lot of fun and seeing things from the prehistoric era is always fascinating. The rest of the week we spent surveying the area. We walked across everything that had not been previously recorded in the past looking for other features and sites. Part of the time we spent surveying on the ground. The other half we were on the side of the mountain walking along side of it to make sure there were no possible features or artifacts. We did find a lot of features. They consisted of cut trees that were brought down in the 1900’ss by settlers that had lived there before the park. In the early 1900’s early European settlers lived along the back-country in the whit rocks and cut down trees to build structures and fires. We record these sites as archaeological features since they are more than 50 years old and have historic value to the park and the community. It has been a pretty busy week so far and I am exhausted. I am exhausted from work this week and I can’t even begin to explain how sore my body is! But sometimes knowledge comes at a price and it was a lot of fun! Pretty excited to see what we find next week! I would say it’s been a week of success.