Week 1- 7/14/03 to 7/18/03

The first week of a field school is always tough, because not only do you have to learn a whole new language and new procedures (archaeology), but you have to get to know a whole bunch of new people from professors to teaching assistants to your fellow field school compatriots. Therefore, week one tends to be one giant learning curve, but once it’s over with, everything becomes almost second nature.

The first day was spent at Machmer. We had a getting-to-know-you session, then Bob did a little explanation of context by giving each student a penny and asking them to describe its characteristics. He then talked about Du Bois, the site, and the research design for the field school. Finally, Kerry discussed procedures, we handed out equipment, and then it was all over for the day.

Tuesday began bright and early, and we drove to Great Barrington to begin our first day in the field. We started out at the Barrington Brewery, using Topographic maps and compasses to orient ourselves with the landscape.

Figure 1- Outside the Barrington Brewery, getting our first taste of contour lines, declination, and the landscape around Great Barrington.

After that, we went to the site and had a little walking tour of the House of the Black Burghardts. We located middens A and B, as well as the house foundation. From there, we split into three groups. Liz took students to work on the resistivity meter, Bob showed a small group how to set up and use a theodolite, and Kerry and Quentin did compass and tape exercises.

Liz had some initial problems with the resistivity. The ground was very dry, and that combined with some probable large stone anomalies in the side yard made resistivity initially impossible to measure. The solution was to pour some salt water on the poles, and this, in addition to some evening rains, made the whole process go much more smoothly. By the end of the week, she managed to get all of the side yard area completely measured.

Quentin and Kerry set up two half-meter square test pits to the north of the site to get a sense of generalized stratigraphy. Though they were supposed to be sterile of artifacts, a few artifacts associated with both the plowzone and midden B did come up. Proveniance index 1 had over a thousand metal fragments in the first excavation level.

At the end of the week, Quentin took some students into town to set up the field lab/interpretive center at the A.M.E. Zion Church in Great Barrington. Because there were only a few artifacts coming in from the field, we mostly worked on processing problem proveniences from the 1983 and 1984 field schools at the site.