Can You Dig It?

Hi buddies! I’m Raegan Delmonico and I’m a student in WMU’s 2018 archaeological field school, I also really dig kids. We both generally have the same high energy and can just bounce off the walls for hours at a time sans caffeine. When I first came to the field school I was so excited to find out that there was a camp for middle schoolers that the university students get to help with. They had a great energy and I was really excited to see how that translated to working in the field for them. Would they like it as much as I do? Would they lose interest after 10 minutes? Would they try to poke each other’s’ eyes out with a trowel? Fortunately, the latter two were both a no and they ended up having blast!

A camper was so excited to find a bone fragment
 while hand excavating in a unit.

Each day the kids would spend the morning learning about the history of the fort and doing other classroom activities with Tim Bober, our education coordinator, at the Niles Public Library. Around noon, they would head out to the site and begin digging side by side with us students. They were able to get hands on experience and learn the techniques we use every day. One of an archaeologist’s most used tools is a trowel. The kids learned how to hold them and how to gently scrape up a thin layer of soil from the unit, while also keeping everything flat and level. Shovel skimming is another method used to clear away dirt while also keeping a unit level which the campers got to practice on a unit of their own. They kept high spirits and a great attitude even when doing the most tedious tasks.

 Wet screening is a technique used by archaeologist in order to more thoroughly search the soil for artifacts and ecofacts. You take a bucket of soil from a unit and put it into a 1/8^th inch screen then spray it down with a hose to wash away the sediment. The kids helped assist us with processing buckets of sediment and sorting through what was left in the screen. This task can be monotonous, but the campers found a way to make it stimulating. “Bone or stone” became a sort of game when picking through the screens and guessing whether an item was a piece of calcined bone or a pebble.

Tim Bober, our education coordinator,
wet screening with some of the campers.

Working with the campers this week was such a fun experience for everyone. The energy the kids brought to the site was so refreshing! It was a great way for me to share my passion of archaeology with a younger generation. I have learned so much while working on the Fort St Joseph Archaeological project and being able to pass on that knowledge to the kids and maybe future archaeologists was delightful.