Day Two in Chaco

Eric Faull

10/4/2016

A Day and a Life at UNM’s Chaco Canyon Field School

Today is day two on the site.  Now that we’ve covered what we’re doing out here and what archaeologists do, I’m going to write about the everyday life of a Field School Archaeologist.  We are still trying to get used to the daily schedule.  We roll out of bed between 5:30 and 5:45 in the morning.  Then we walk like zombies to the kitchen area to eat breakfast and make our lunches. At 6:45 we pack the trucks with all of the equipment that we will be using out at the site so that we can leave for the site by 7 o’clock sharp.  This morning it was 29 degrees when we got to the site.

When we got there, we cleared the brush off that had grown up on the site.  We then split into 3 different groups so that we could get as much work done as is possible.  I actually shoveled dirt from the location that I was working in onto another student accidentally, and that was just with 2 of us working at that location.  Can you imagine trying to stuff 12 students, 3 graduate assistants, and the professor all in the same location?  It would be chaos.  People would be stepping on each other and destroying each other’s work!

We worked until 10 o’clock then we took a mandatory cookie break.  WE DO NOT MISS THE COOKIE BREAK!  After the break we went back to work.  I was assigned to uncover a tarp that the previous field school put over their excavation in order to protect the location from the weather, the sun, tourists, and wildlife.  After they covered the location with a tarp they buried it under a lot of dirt.  I had to find the edge of the tarp and then, with a trowel, dig along the edge of the tarp until I had the complete edge uncovered.  I learned that the dirt that I cleared from the edge of the tarp needed to be placed at least a foot from the edge of the trench that I was digging.  When I got up for the cookie break, I accidentally kicked dirt back into the trench that I had just dug because I had stacked it right on the edge of the trench.  We then shoveled all of the dirt from off of the top of the tarp.  Underneath the tarp we found a stone wall and a flagstone floor.

After I was done with that location, I was moved to a spot of what looked like a wall that erosion had uncovered.  We wanted to see what it was and where it was going.  I only had about 30 minutes before lunch to start on this new location.  I had managed to uncover a few flagstones which made the location appear to be a stone wall.  It looked like it was perfectly lined up with a stone wall that was previously excavated so we think it might link up.

We broke for lunch and went back to camp so that we could build a portable garage after lunch.  We would usually stay out in the field until till about 3 o’clock but that garage needed to be built.  We are planning on putting portable heaters in it.  What we plan on using it for is to have a warm place to write up our field journals, eat breakfast and dinner and wind down and relax before we go to bed.  After we got the garage built, we went back out to the site so that we could look at an old aerial photograph of the Old Wetherill Homestead.  What we were trying to do is determine what we were uncovering in the different locations that we were working in.  After we guessed at what we were working on, we spread out and did an unconventional survey of the site.  I found a place that had an old brick, an assorted amount of rusty metal, a broken piece of glass and a broken piece of old pottery all laying on the ground in one location.  Where else can you walk around and find old stuff just lying on the ground than the desert?

We then went back to camp around 3 o’clock and wrote our first filed journal entry.  It was very stressful.  We had to write what we did, and why we did it in detail.  We had to make sure that it was clear what we were saying and legible.  The purpose of the field journal is to let future archaeologists know what we did and why we did it and where exactly we did it so they could use our research to help them do their own research.  If they won’t be able to read it or understand what we were saying, our work would not help them at all.  That is a very big responsibility. 

We then ate dinner, played basketball against the National Park Service Rangers, and then went to a lecture/lab at 7:30.  After that, we hung out in order to wind down and then I went to bed early so that I could drag myself out of bed on a cold, cold morning to start all over again.  This is awesome!