Aaron's FIR (Fieldschool in Review)

Alright, so I said I'd do this a few nights ago, but never got around to it. So here goes.

After all of the stress of loading up gear and then sitting in the parking lot for hours while Jim tried to get organized, we headed down to St. George. We camped on a wildlife preserve owned by BYU called Lytle Ranch. It was a nice little area with plently of trees and shady spots to camp, showers, and flush toilets. The only draw back was that Lytle Ranch was 45-50 minutes from our sites. So, every morning, we had to drive for quite a while to get to where we were going. Nothing like the convenience of Barnson's land.

Our work in Utah focused on the area of Land Hill, just outside of Ivins, Utah. The sites ranged in size and complexity form small storage features to large room blocks. The whole western face of Land Hill was covered in rock art. Molly and Jenny's crew were in charge of large scale excavations of roomblocks and storage features. My crew was more nomadic, tending to do re-record many of Gardner Daly's pre-recorded sites. In addition to re-recording, we dug test pits at many of these sites. Brad's crew was in charge of recording the rock art. That involved taking lots of photographs and placeing large sheets of Mylar over the panels and tracing over them with sharpies.

Jim's main research interests for Utah were to collect a high sherd yeild, understand the scale and quantitiy of sites on Land Hill, and to use this data to compare the data gathered in the AZ highlands.

I'll speak from personal experience, but our artifact yeild was significant. I got fairly good at choosing tet pit spots afte ther first few were a bust. Turns out, if you dig near or in midden, you get a lot more stuff than if you were to dig in or around a structure. The majority of our artifacts were ceramics. We had plenty of Dogozhi (sp?), Washington Black on White, Redware, corrugated and redwares.

The AZ part of fieldschool proved to be much more interesting (everything's better in AZ right?). We climbed up to an elevation of 6,500 feet. Which made temperatures much more tolerable. We camped at a BLM station in the middle of nowhere. The closest city was St.George, an hour away on a primitive road.

The sites were spectacular and relatively untouched. Brad and I worked on site A:10:24. This site had originally been recorded in 1988, and then later surface collected. As we got on site we were amazed at the high artifact densitiy. Immediately we found complete proj. points, shell beads, unworked olivella shells, lug handles, and painted sherds the size of the palm of your hand. The site was a sea of pin flags. The research strategy for AZ was slightly different. Jim was hesitant to excavate structures and preferred to do test pits and complete collection areas. Even with 10 people working on A:10:24, we still had too much to do. Jim wanted us to point plot all diagnostic and exotic artifacts on the surface (which really slowed us down). Field specimens collected from this site totalted in the 700s (and that was only two weeks of excavation). We also found a single piece of worked turquoise, a strangely worked and shaped scapula (mayan eccentric-esque), and the fragment of a human mandible, molars and pre-molars intact. Jim's strategy for dealing with the human remains was to simply stop digging and rebury it. The Hopi and Paiute agreed to that strategy, so we didn't have to notify anyone, inluding Joel's friends Rick and Rena... (if you don't get that one, I'll explain it)

After working on that site for two weeks my crew was put on survey. We didn't find much. Mostly lithic and ceramic scatters. Other survey crews found several large architectural sites with upright slabs, circular features, and high arifact densities.

All in all, it was a good field school. Jim was flustrered and stress at many times, especially after 9 flat tires, a run-in with a cow and one of our Yukons, and local crazies. It was obvious this was his first year. Joel had it down to a science, but Jim was way more flexible and open to suggestions. It was refereshing though to work with somone who felt that they could walk away from your site with the confidence that you were doing things the right way. That trust was refreshing and empowering. I feel like I could actually run an excavation now.

There is much more, including a visit to UNLVs excavation (sadly, Karen Harry isn't as colorful as Dave Madsen)(no funny stories), and the little funny stories about hitting the cow and other things.