It's all Greek to me!!!

I get to be the second blogger here at the FSJ Field School. This is my first year participating in the field school. I was really excited when I was chosen to participate this year. I have been learning about Fort St. Joseph and the field school for two years now and I am ready to get my hands dirty. (Get it… we dig in the dirt).

Clearing the site.

I would have to say that not only was today an interesting day but also a very productive day. We started out by heading to the Lyne site which is near the Fort St. Joseph rock. At the Lyne sited we had to clear a bunch of over growth and fallen trees so that we could set up to start digging. It was a lot of work and especially team work, some of the trees we moved took most of us to move. We took a lunch break and cleared for about another hour. At this point we were about ready to set up our units we planned to excavate.

Then the fun stuff began. We received our pit partner assignments and started to dig. It’s a slow process and normally you don’t find too much stuff in the top 5 cm or so that is really interesting, but today was another story. My pit partner Erica and I actually found the first artifact of the season- a stone flake. Something so small that many people would most likely think it was another stone, but to us it meant a lot more.

For those of you who do not know, when I talk about this stone flake it is basically a piece of rock that is broken from another rock while trying to produce a stone tool. Stone tools first show up in the early Paleolithic (about 2.5 million years ago) and were still used by many of the natives that lived around Fort St. Joseph. This gives us more proof that there was interaction with natives or at least they were around the area at some point in time.

Erica and Amanda with the first artifact of the season!

Though this flake is about the size of a dime, I am thoroughly excited. I mean, how many people get to say that they get to play in the dirt for a job (as we joke)! Who gets to work with things that people haven’t seen in hundreds of years? I mean this small flake we found was a part of something much larger at one point.

My final thought of the night. While today, being the day for breaking ground and getting started was a long and tiring day, what items we’re finding here today could change history.

To all I must now say goodnight as we have another busy day in the field

Sincerely,

Amanda

Photo credits Cathrine Davis