Farewell Fort St. Joseph

         

Me in my pit before we
backfilled

Hello, everyone! This is Diana, again, and I have been granted the special task of writing our final blog for the season. Yesterday (Wednesday, August 16) was our final day of the season. Throughout this experience we uncovered two features and many amazing artifacts. For many of us, this was our first experience actually excavating at a real archaeological site. For each student, the experience was a unique and valuable part of not only learning what it means to be a real archaeologist, but also learning about ourselves and where we may wish to go with our future careers. Most people’s blogs will probably speak for themselves, so as someone who has not posted since the very beginning of the season, I will provide my own personal perspective on the season as a whole.

           In my case, I am a transfer student from Kellogg Community College (Battle Creek, MI), and archaeological field school was my first class at Western Michigan University. Since I had not completed the usual listed prerequisite, I was not expecting to do it this summer, but one of the WMU faculty referred me to Dr. Nassaney, and he told me to apply anyhow. I knew it was a major opportunity before I started because I had learned field school is a requirement for various forms of employment, but only once I showed up at orientation and learned that almost half of the thirteen students selected were from other universities did I realize the magnitude of what I was doing. I was in a room full of people who were passionate about anthropology, many of them majors who were considering careers in archaeology or related fields. At that point, I instantly knew that this class, which was almost entirely different from any other course I had ever taken, was the best transition I could have had from one school to another.

         

Erika and Anne discussing Feature 28 (Alvin)

    For those who do not know, the Fort St. Joseph Archaeology Field School is actually a six credit hour class offered through Western Michigan University. Being involved in this field school is probably most similar in overall experience to an internship, and just like an internship, we have to fill out a special application for acceptance. This is an opportunity to learn virtually every task involved in excavating a historical site by doing it, rather than simply studying it in a book or being told how it works in the classroom. We start off the season with two days of orientation, in which the field school staff members instruct us field students on basic skills we will need in the field. During this time we also received a lesson on the background of the project, as well as the goals for the upcoming season. The following week, we moved into our new “home” in Niles, Michigan where we will be stayed Monday through Friday for the next six weeks. During this time we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together as a group from Monday through Friday. Our days were spent working in the field from about 8 a.m. to about 4:30 p.m., we then had lab from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. every night except Friday, when we are dismissed about an hour early to go home for the weekend…or remain in Niles if we should choose to do so. This is the general idea of our schedule, except on rainy days, when we usually have to improvise; for those instances, Dr. Nassaney usually has a menagerie of alternative educational activities we can do as rainy day activities.

         

Feature 28 (Alvin)

Now we are at the end of the season, and I am amazed at how far we have come. Some of us had no idea before we started how to properly use or even hold a trowel, and now most of us have excavated all the way down to at least 50 centimeters below datum (we usually use the southwest corner of our units as references for depth). For me, the highlights were definitely reviewing notes to propose potential unit locations for this year and having the opportunity to draw maps and theorize where the walls of our house might be. Naturally, I was quite tickled when we discovered what is probably the corner of a house in our pit, because I had, in fact, guessed that we had a corner in our unit! Of course, finding a feature has its pros and cons; I was excited to find it, but not about the extra paperwork…I ended up deciding our feature needed a more interesting name than Feature 28, and started calling it Alvin, like in Simon and the chipmunks. Meghan said that was her name, though, so the jury’s out on whether Feature 28 gets to keep it. What can I say? Unit N24W11 or “Bertha” needs a little brother.

         

Ring placard I found just in time for
the Open House

As you can tell, field school was very time-consuming. This experience was sort of like an intermission in school and just general life, but it also gave me a chance to give my brain a break from academics. I am ready to go back to regular classes in the fall, as are several of the other students, but likely nothing ever will fully compare to this experience. Working in nature with an amazing number of frogs and butterflies all around, the excitement of a crayfish (Ashley and Hailey named him Archie) appearing in one of the pits, or finding my first unique artifact (for me, it was what we believe to be the placard of a Jesuit ring) are things I will never forget. Farewell from the 2017 Fort St. Joseph archaeology field school, and we look forward to the possibility of some amazing new updates next year!