So this is an archaeological excavation
and it is actually the... this is the 50th
year of archaeology at Grand Valley
State University so we're kind of
excited. Students here are excavating one
by one meter test pits on a site that we
surface collected yesterday and we know
that there are artifacts here, we're
finding the soil a little bit dense and
hard and so there's a lot of a lot of
hard work going on just trying to get
through the top level, we're finding a
few flakes and some arrow points and
some other kinds of artifacts that were
left by people who camped here 20, 30
years ago to 10,000 years ago so it's a
very long occupation from just the most
recent past way back into the ancient
past that was occupied here by Native
American people. So you would go minus 12
from that corner over there, that's minus
10 in that corner yeah. Okay. Does that
make sense? Yeah. Okay good. Looking for
anything that could indicate that there
were people here such as fire crack rock,
projectile points, Native American
ceramics such as pottery but that's what
all these units are doing all these STPs
they're trying to find areas of possible
occupations so that we can do further
excavations and see if we can find
anything. During the surface collection
which is where we're walking up and down
the fields about any digging we found
fire crack rock, stone tool flakes and we
found a single projectile point which
was likely used on an atlatl point which is a throne speer
basically. My friend rock is evidence
that humans were in the area inhabiting
because prior crack rock is just rock
that was heated so it would break
differently than a natural occurring
break. You know this
is one of the things that we value in
the anthropology department that
students have hands on experience and
get the kind of skills that they might
need if they go forward into the
workplace and so every student graduates
from our program with a field school
experience or an internship experience
and they gain these hands-on skills and
so it's a very you know it's a big deal
for us, we have 23 students this field
school, we have anywhere from ten to
23 students, 25 students every
year doing either archaeology or
cultural anthropology. Some of the
students will be going off to other
kinds of work and other kinds of
programs as well some students realize
after they spend six weeks in the mud
and the wind and the cold that
archaeology is not for them but this is
their chance to find that out.
