News Coverage

In addition to being filmed for a PBS special, the field season saw other media coverage.  Here are some links:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Lake Mills Leader

Daily Union

Wisconsin Public Radio

Finally, we were visited several days by our friend and photographer, Dan Seurer, who maintains a blog at http://danseurer.com/

Be sure to look through all the tabs on the side of his main page, as there are several different links featuring the field school. 

Crew Photo

Relaxin' After Work

Last Week

Alanna:  It has come to the last week of field school, sadly, and I have learned more than I ever expected.  I found gravel is difficult to shovel (but sand is way too easy).  I learned about bone identification a little as well.  The newest thing I have learned is that exiting and entering the square is an art form.  Especially with sand, you have to carefully "leap" in, but exiting needs more of a running start.  Besides our

My partner and I removed the soil between two of the squares recently.  It was a little intense since we got part of a prehistoric pot out of the wall while it poured down rain and caked me in mud.  The other students had tarped their units earlier, but our square was partially covered by an Easy-Up Tent.  So, the professors and students were watching as we protected the pottery with our cold, wet, muddy bodies.  I have to say that has to be one of my favorite experiences at field school.

Alanna (bottom right corner) watches her partner work in their unit.

The Gravel Knows

Jacque:  For the past week, I have been excavating a feature in my unit on the Gravel Knoll.  A feature is a human-made structure that can't be removed, such as a house or a fire pit.  A suspicious circle of gravel appeared in the floor of my unit, so we decided to cross-section it to determine exactly what it was.  While digging out half of the the gravel circle, we were able to follow the color changes in the soil to determine the shape of the feature, which ended up being shaped like a pit.  After mapping and profiling the feature, we dug out the other half of the gravel pit.  Based on the artifacts discovered within this feature, such as charcoal and animal bones, we were able to conclude this feature may have been used as a cooking pit.

Pop it (the dirt), lock it (the screen), bag it ( the artifacts), tag it (the bags)

Hi all, I'm stepping up to the plate for round two, and quite a bit has happened in the intervening time. Since we last saw each other I've completed my forty years wandering in the clay desert of the Western Palisades, and arrived in the land of milk and honey known as the Gravel Knoll. Not to say that the time spent on the Western Palisades pit was wasted, far from it. Still, the change from clay to soft, easily screened
soil is a welcome change of pace. On top of that, my gravel knoll pit has shown remarkably better results almost immediatly. My first level turned up a comparable quantity of items to the entirety of my Palisade pit, and of a better quality. The pottery sherds at minimum match and frequently exceed by several times the size of Western Palisade sherds. The introduction of shell was a development I hadn't anticipated, but having a new category to bench mark is exciting. Interestingly, flakes are less frequent on the Knoll in our pit, though we found a few flakes and excitingly a pair of chert cores. Our biggest find to date was a Late Woodland projectile point I found in my pit's first level. Apart from artifacts the variations in soil texture, color,and consistency have been interesting ( If at times aggravating) to observe. I never thought I'd encounter white soil. If not exactly archaeology, digging this far in the ground has given me a new appreciation of the natural world. These are the chronicals of the test pit Gravel Knoll Unit 5. It's mission to discover new soil feature and uncover new artifacts. Captain Neill Goltz signing out.

Working After Work

Aaron (UNI), Ian (MSU), Neill (UNI), Lynne Goldstein (MSU), Claudia (UNI), and Ashley (MSU) working on notes, checking phones, reading, and playing mandolin after a hard day.