Angel Mounds Field School

Since this is apparently the hip thing to do, I'm creating a blog to document my 6 week experience, training as an archaeologist.

This summer, I'm going to be excavading two 3x3 m areas where a building used to be at Angel Mound historic site, one of the largest Mississippian sites, second only to maybe Cahokia.

Today was day three, but first recap of what's been going on.

Day 1 (5/12/09)
We got a lot of lectures... like 4 or 5... about the site, archaeology, native americans in prehistory, material culture, archaeology at angel mounds, etc. I got to try flaking stone tools. It was hard. I'm bad at it


We also took a tour of the site... basic synopsis: there are mounds. 3 are big, 4 are not. People lived there. we're excavading this "structure." not a building, not a house, a "structure" from 1100 AD that was burned down.
Cool things about the structure: 1) there's no evidence that anyone ever lived in it or did any specific activity like stone tool making or. 2) it was burned down for some reason, and was put out very soon after it was burned 3) it had a woven floor matting. This has NEVER been found at any other Mississippian (period in history when Angel Mounds was active) site. it's kind of a big deal.

Fact: Even though I spent no more than 2 hours outside, I managed to get sunburnt. :(

Day 2
RAIN.
We started the day with... more lecture.

But, the weather cleared up pretty quickly, so we went out to the site.
While other people were constructing water screens (a method to separate artifacts and other small non-dirt things from the soil that we dig up), the rest of us went to work

We shoveled out the two old excavations (which were filled with sand). If you didn't know, sand is pretty heavy, especially in large amounts. I'm still sore.

We eventually started trowel-ing the old site, to get it back to it's old conditions, since it's the other half of our "structure."

This took all day, aside from doing "profile walls," which was generally tedious and unexciting, especially since other people were starting to excavate our units :(

Fact: I got sunburn, even though it was overcast all day... and there were tornado watches and it looked like it was going to rain all day long.

TODAY
So, last night in Evansville, it rained. A lot. A LOT. So... we had to individually bail out the old units of their water. All of our sites were covered in tarps, so they were pretty unharmed. The tops of the tarps were full of water... which we got to scoop out so it didn't alter the excavation with runoff etc.

Today, after the water was gone, we started excavating. Exciting stuff... sort of.

Since the site is anywhere from 600-900 years old, we had to dig a little to get to the sites... which sadly all has to be done by hand.

Angel Mounds used to be farm land, so we have what is called "the Plow Zone." As the name implies, this area was the soil that the Angel family used to plow for their farm, so none of the artifacts have context, so we just kinda whack at it and dig it all up.

From my 1x1 meter square, we got 14 bucks of dirt. within my unit, we found a stone tool flake, some unused chert (what stone tools are made of) and some fired daub (daub is basically mud, which in our case was burnt down and is a neat red color instead of normal dirt colored)

This took roughly 7 hours today.

Fact: I didn't get any NEW sunburn! :D

Tonight, 10 of our 13 field school kids went to Los Bravos for dinner.
As the only true Evansville "towny," I get to be the resident expert on where things are. It's more exciting than it should be.

All of the kids are super cool (we even have some grad students working with us, as students). Our staff of supervisors are all pretty chill it seems.

Our two directors are both at least over 55, and one of them is probably 70. The older smokes a pipe. They have the cutest old man bromance ever.

If anyone is interested in coming to the site, please feel free to let me know! I'd have to give you an intellectual-sounding talk, and you can make fun of me (and see a REAL LIVE ARCHAEOLOGY DIG!)

So, that's my summer, so far