Day 24: Surveying & Test Run

Another glorious morning welcomed the field students into the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve. Today the students were split into 2 groups of seven (one student was unable to come in today), and were given instructions to perform some surveying, and then to practice filling out the Site Inventory Form.

Pictured below are Nadia, Verena, and Simon


Pictured below are Brittany, Paul, and Max


Team Awesome: Verena, Nadia, Simon, Suzannah, Sean, Rikki, and Bora.
Team Super-fantastic (pictured below): Andy, Max, Anja, Paul, Brittany, Sonya, and Jessica/myself (not pictured).


Today team super-fantastic was instructed to go to "the point" (an area with picnic tables, on the Seymour River), and "comb the forest" which meant walking in formation, a certain distance apart, looking for features. The objective was to find a concrete pond that was somewhere inbetween "the point" and "Fowlers" where there is an archway (pictured below) and several posts.


Oh look! The pond was found! In the picture below, Anja is standing in the pond, and you can see it's concrete perimeter.


And below you can see Max, Andy, Brittany and Paul excitedly pointing at a very heavy portion of the perimeter, within the pond! Good job!


Instead of bringing a tape measure, students were encouraged to find out the length of their pace, and then use their pace and meter conversion rates for documenting the location of sites and distances. The student would walk a 30 meter distance three times, and take the average length of their pace. This proved handy for the second task of the day.

For task # 2, the students from each group were directed towards the Martin/McKay site and were supposed to document the area. In other words, they were to pace to the well in the area (pictured below), which was used as the focal point for the maps that were to be drawn for the Archaeological Inventory Form. The students then were to designate the perimeters of the area, by pacing in each direction (north, south, east, west) looking for features, and when no more features were found, that would be the border for the map.

The rest of the form could be filled out from home, if the student desired to do it there. After last Thursdays class, the student is expected to know how to find out the elevation, location, access, latitude & longitude, etc. for this site.

Tomorrow Sonya, Sean, Andrea, and Brittany will be in the lab, working away in the nice dry room, while the rest of the gang will be getting more exercise in as they to continue surveying and mapping. More updates tomorrow!