Excavating in Trench 1

Hello everyone!

My name is Jenny, and I’m a senior at WMU. I am an Anthropology major with a minor in Classical Studies, and this is my last class before I graduate! My plans after school are to start my career, and eventually go back to school and focus on paleoanthropology. This is the first field school experience I’ve ever had, and it has been very cool so far. We’ve been lucky this past week to get nice and cool, though still some rainy, days while working at the site in Niles. 

My partner Rae Daun and I are excavating in Trench 1 at Fort St. Joseph. Our unit, which was previously partially excavated by another student in 2019, was laid out slightly larger than our peers’ units. The unit dimensions are 1 x 1.5 meters instead of a 1 x 1 meters because we ran into some difficulty getting our southwest stake into the ground. It was harder for us because the ground in this corner has a gravelly texture, resulting in the area not being stable enough to get a plastic stake into it. We also found an obstruction deeper in our soil, so hard that it bent the tip of a thick metal stake that we tried to get down there. (I hope we get to find out what the obstruction is!) Because of this issue, we had to extend our south half another 50 centimeters, which is why we have an 

extra half meter measurement. We also had a bit of trouble working around the dewatering pipe that runs  through our trench. But thankfully, we were able to raise it a bit so we could get the dirt out from underneath.

After getting the stakes in and stringing our unit, we mainly focused on the north 50 centimeters of our unit, which was the section previously excavated in 2019. We spent a while just clearing out the fill dirt in this part because it would tell us how far down we needed to go before reaching the tarp that was put down to protect and identify the area where excavation was halted. We were very careful with digging around the tarp, as it was fragile and hard to find below the soil. Eventually, we found and removed the tarp.

Once we removed the backfill in that section, we began troweling the southern 1 x 1 meter section of the unit to eventually make it level with the north side. Currently, we’re still working on this part and we have found a couple of large stone, which we think may be limestone. For now, we are working around the the big rocks because we aren’t sure how far down they go.

Thanks for reading! I can’t wait to see what we end up finding out this summer.

- Jenny