Overcoming Challenges at Fort St. Joseph

Hi everyone, 

My name is Audriana Skonecki, and I am a field school student this year at Fort St. Joseph. I am a 4th-year student studying Biomedical Sciences with a minor in Chemistry and Anthropology. One of the things I have worked on since being at the site is overcoming the many challenges our team and myself have faced so far. These challenges included becoming a team, the weather, and issues on the unit my partner and I work on.

On the first day of orientation, we joined together at a table as a group of people who hadn't even learned each others names yet. That quickly did not become an issue anymore because we would soon form a bond through our experiences, knowledge, and passion. This bond is what makes us a team, such as being at the site, for example. On our first couple of days at Fort St. Joseph, most of us were very new to the experience and unsure how to go about it. We had to learn about the materials needed for each unit, how to set up a unit, and the steps/tool/techniques for excavating. Help from instructors like Erika, Lucy, Gary, and Dr. Nassaney gave us advice and insight on how to best move forward with our excavations. As we ended our days at the site, we all struggled to clean up, bring materials back, and packing up the trailer. Yet, over time with lots of practice, we all became familiar with the process and developed an excellent system to get it all done much more quickly.

Catching rain to try and keep everyone dry during lunch.   

However, the biggest challenge, as a team, we we have had to face thus far has been the weather. On July 13th, we experienced hefty rainstorms that challenged the guests we had on the site as well as our team. Thankfully, we were able to get the tents up, which allowed everyone to seek shelter and continue lunch when the heaviest of the rain came. During the storm, the field students and instructors worked hard to catch any rain falling through the cracks, while Erika came up with a plan on how to spend the rest of our day. When the rain became too much and it was clear we wouldn’t be able to work at the site anymore for the day, we decided to leave and head to the Niles Public library to dry off, work on notes and watch a canoe-making video. Even though the day was crazy, we were able to work together to keep everything (mostly) dry, so that our excavating and public archaeology experiences would not be hindered.

After leaving the field we dried off and started some
research at the Niles District Library.

Unit N18 E29: Cutting out the dozens of
wires coming from the 20th century landfill.

In addition to the other challenges, in our unit N18 E29, Reid and I struggled to prepare our unit on the first day at the site. We knew our unit would invade into the trench wall, along with a pipe, a large piece of metal, and endless wires in the way. It took us a day and a half to finally set up our unit because we had to widen the trench and take out a decent-sized chunk of wire. Once that challenge was completed, it was on to the next one, such as leveling our unit. Because our unit is located in the 20th-century landfill, there has been a substantial amount of trash found and enclosed. Our unit is at currently 20 cm BD, and we have been able to slowly dig pieces out and cut through a lot of Styrofoam, but hopefully, that will change as we dig deeper. We are both excited to see what we can discover from our unit as we continue our excavations.