Clearing the Floodplain

Thursday July 5, 2018,
My name is Shelby and I am a student at Western Michigan University. I am majoring in Psychology and minoring in Anthropology. I am a member of the 2018 field school and I will be a senior at the end of the season. This is my first time in the field, but I did help with the 2017 artifact inventory process.

Working hard clearing the flood plain for the 2018 FSJAP.

Today was the kickoff to field work for the 2018 Field season. I am super excited about what is in store for the season! It is quite the adjustment going from living at home versus dorm versus our Niles home. I honestly thought today would be primarily moving our stuff in, going to the museum, and taking things to the field. However, I was surprised when they divided us up into two separate teams and tasked us with either clearing the Fort St. Joseph site (20BE23) or doing shovel test pits in a potential new site. It was really exciting to get to be in the field on our first day here; like I said, it wasn’t expected.

I was on the team tasked with clearing the brush from the fort site. I am not a stranger to working outside; however, I was not ready for the physical aspect of clearing brush nor was I ready for the heat. It was about 85 degrees outside and it was decently sunny even in the shade. I am very glad that I remembered the sunscreen and bug spray. It was a lot of hard work and I am fairly certain that my abs are going to hurt in the morning. Mosquitoes weren’t terrible today, despite reports of high concentrations of the pests. However, biting flies were everywhere. I got bit by those more than mosquitoes. I don’t think they liked us cutting down their homes.

Five minutes into clearing the brush, three of us had already put blood and sweat into the project. I scratched myself with the blade I was using to clear the grass; it didn’t look like much, but man was that blade sharp. It was an adjustment in the sense that work done in the field is approached

Hard work now, good sleep to come!

differently from work at home, even if it is the same type of project; usually when I am clearing tall weeds and grass at home, we use the lawnmower, so this was the first time I have ever used a weed whip.

The ground is still very wet from all the rain we have had, so as soon as I stepped off the path, I sank in two inches of muck. It wasn’t even mud at this point. It was straight swamp muck. Several of us slipped and almost fell as soon as we arrived and no one left with clean shoes. Some of us who had been wearing shorts, left the field tonight looking like we were wearing leggings. We called this look “Mud Leggings”.

We divided our efforts by doing different tasks. Some of us were using the weed whips and others were raking or picking up the clippings. One individual was tasked with using a weed whacker and the weeds were so thick that it jammed several times.

Overall, this was a decent taste of how this summer will go as far as how labor intensive it will be. Luckily, today wasn’t all manual labor. After a few hours of clearing weeds, we got to join the others at the potential site and we started our own shovel test pits. Today held a lot of surprises; both in the ground and in our schedule.