Good
morning, afternoon and evening!
It’s Shailee once again, and for my
last blog of the season, I want to give a big FSJ thank you to the supporters
of the site, our social media, and blog, for being as involved as you are
through each field season. In my first blog, I recounted what it was like to
set up the field and our units for the first time. From there, we saw it only
fitting for me to come full circle and tell you what it was like to close it.
Most field students like myself
form a lot of attachment when it comes to their units, even going so far as to
name them. My pit was named Claudia, and nicknamed “The Dragon Lady”. After
building a stark routine day in and day out, as you take your tools to the pit,
untarp, set up, and get digging, it seems weird to hear that at least for this
season, your unit won’t be going any deeper. In many ways, it feels unfulfilling
because you haven’t answered all of the questions that you may have.
Especially in my unit, we decided
to stop due to remaining time, not because we had run out of artifacts to find,
or occupation zone to excavate; quite the opposite, in fact. We had just
uncovered the beginnings of more large bones, and possibly structural stones.
So when we said at the Open House that there was still so much more to be done…
we certainly meant it! But what does it mean to close out a unit? What happens?
Well, in the case of this field school, it means to curate, or preserve the
site for future visitation and excavation (should we decide to do so). Each
unit we set up teaches us something about Fort St. Joseph, even if we only
learn that something is not located where we’re digging, so it’s located
somewhere else. We want to preserve that, so at any time, the unit can be
revisited and reexamined.
The first thing that happens when
the decision is made to close down a unit is that the level sheet is finished.
Notes, maps, and plan view photographs are all taken and checked by an
appropriate staff member. With that done and checked, we then begin to clean
scrape the walls and floors to set up for a new type of photograph called a “profile
view,” and just as the name entails, these photos focus on the profile walls
and stratigraphy of the overall unit (more specifically, which soil zones can
be seen and where). These give us a photo view of what we are seeing in
preparation for the next big step: profile mapping. We set out to map the soil
zones (such as landfill, plow zone, and occupation) as well as any artifacts in
the walls and other things worth noting. I just so happened to be lucky enough
to not only map one wall, but all four walls.
A datum string gets set up and
leveled out at a certain depth (a constant depth) in relation to your original
datum line in the southwest corner. Mine happened to be at 20 cm bd (below
datum). From there, you draw a two dimensional map with the points being
measured above, below, or at that new datum line. Like all maps, a profile map has
a key that lists what certain things are, as well as the interpretations of the
soil zones.
Upon completion of the profile map,
you get to begin the strangest goodbye of your life. It is a goodbye that includes
at least 16 pieces of paperwork, some of which are your last hurrah, a unit
summary. This summary is the pivotal moment of being a field student, because one
of two things happens: one, you look back at your past notes and maps, reveling
at your own brilliance and clarity; and two, the one that I personally
experienced, was multiple hours of me yelling at myself for not taking more
specific notes, and reinterpreting the date I left myself with a seething
hatred. A unit summary is meant to be a semi-succinct overview of the unit
excavated, providing highlights about each level and what it revealed,
suggestions about what should be done with the unit and the area surrounding
it, and finally, a conclusion detailing what was learned from the excavation of
this unit.
My summary took three drafts and multiple
days to write, and I’m sure that if I looked at it again right now, there would
be more that I wanted to change. But, the goal here is to provide accurate
interpretations of data collected over the course of the field season, not to
argue about why your unit may or may not be the best. These things all need to
be summarized in a way that any archaeologist should be able to read and
understand them.
Then, the hardest and seemingly
most final part of closing down a unit… is backfilling it. We protect the unit
by laying down a tarp on the unit’s floor, which makes it easier to distinguish
fill versus undisturbed soil, and then we fill it with dirt. Adding the fill
back in creates a secondary layer of protection by providing stable temperature
conditions (something we learned from Dr. Lynn Evans during her lecture about
curation records at Fort Michilimackinac, one of my other blogs), which
continues to preserve artifacts. A piece of flagging tape with some information
about the unit is dropped in for later excavators to have the correct provenience,
and then we leave the site (more or less) so that we can come back and continue
our work the following seasons.
It’s bittersweet to think that I
may not come back next field season and open my unit once again, but overall,
this has been one of the most clarifying experiences of my life. I hadn’t
considered a job in field work before, but now I know that it isn’t something I
would entirely dread (though I recognize that I much prefer lab analysis), and
I live for what we learn from the artifacts we collected. More so than that, I
wouldn’t trade the friends I have made along the way. In any place that you go
or work, you’ll hear that it really is the people who make it, and I’ve never
found that truer than being here. The people of Niles embraced us, my friend
group expanded exponentially, and a working family formed, all over two months
in the bottom of a dump.
From the trenches to the trees, this is Shailee Kuroswki
signing off for the season.
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