Hi all!
I'm glad to leave overall summarizing to Aaron's debriefing, but I've now had enough time away from field school to actually sit down and reflect and thought I'd throw it on here for another perspective.
Amen to the refreshing attitude toward decision-making down there! I couldn't believe how often we heard Jim say "It's your dig, what do YOU think?)! And, in the end, I have to give up my private tirades against Arizona...it was a paradise compared to St George, although both camps were comfortable.
My personal highlight was our last three days after several weeks of survey and site recording. My crew spent 3 days on a site we named Hilltop Condos for the number of habitation structures clustered tightly around a small plaza on the point of a hill. Great site! We drove over it with Jim when we went to show him a feature we'd found during survey and it's absolutely gorgeous. The rubble we first recognized in the road turned out to be one of the round structures on site. We eventually identified 3, possibly 4 or 5 total round structures. One is set way apart from the others with very few artifacts. Best guess is it's our kiva, but we didn't have time to test it. Not sure what Hilltop dates to, but ceramics ran the full gamut from PI-ish (I think) to a single poly-chrome piece. We dropped a 1x1 into the plaza where the midden is darkest. Hit our best bet at sterile only 30 cm down, paling in comparison to Aaron and Brad's site, but boy was it artifact rich.
Well, anyway, it's a great site. I think Dave may be the only person on here who saw it, but we were still finding features at that point, so it may not have looked like much. And there's no real comparison to Molly's Imperial 400 or Brad and Aaron's Poverty Ridge East.
The students did really well, I was very impressed. It was an interesting group. Eclectic, to say the least. Jim's kids were an interesting addition. Molly and I shared a tent with Elizabeth and Christopher spent a couple days out on survey with my crew. And, despite my insistence that historics can be fun, it was really great to spend some quality time with real artifacts and such. I really wish I'd known my stuff better--horribly inadequate--but there is still so much to learn about the Anasazi. Our biggest problem, as ever, will be finding good dates for these sites, but hopefully next year they'll get corn.
Well, I'm glad to be back and enjoying a much needed change of company, though I'd stay with the venue down there anyday. It's going to be interesting to see what develops in lab, though I don't envy the students for the amount of washing and labeling they'll have to do on top of their analyses. Molly, Brad, Aaron and I will be co-authoring a paper with Jim for GBAC, mostly summarizing and presenting preliminary data. We'll see how that turns out.
On an aside, if anyone knows people looking for volunteer experience--poor jobless undergrads and such--send them my way. We've got the Uinta National Forest PIT Project out at Vernon 2nd week of August and are pretty short-handed. We'll be focusing on homestead recording, but we've also got some wicked big lithic scatters to chase out. Not the most exciting work, but gorgeous scenery. Vernon's the center of the universe, after all. There are a couple postings about it on the bulletins at the MPC.
Happy field work, everybody! Savor the summer, woe the winter, eh?
3 comments:
One of the difficulties with being spread out so thin was that many of us didn't get to see each other's sites. I would have liked to seen a few of Jenny and Molly's sites.
As one who was able to have a gander at Hilltop Condos, let me say it was pimp. When I first heard of Jim's strategy I was not very impressed. But after spending the day driving around and viewing all of these site with him, I think it really gives you a better feel for the archaeology of the area then just excavating one site. I'm glad Karen is focusing on one site to give us an in depth look, but I like Jim's shotgun approach as well. There are some cool sites up there on the Shivwits.
I agree, Dave, it's chaotic at best, but it sure does give us this huge big picture look at a really cool area. And I'm really glad the awesomeness of Hilltop Condos wasn't just in my mind!
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