Public Archaeology Field School Starts!

Students were first oriented at the Visitor Center at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site

Students began their 3-day orientation to the site and excavation techniques today with a variety of introductions, presentations, volunteer applications, tours, and classroom work. While there will be some rain showers over the next few days, we will be mostly indoors. 

Last week the crew leaders and instructors set up the iPads with the digital excavation and feature record forms. We have decided to create a bag catalog entirely from the digital forms. This will lose one level of redundancy but will streamline the recording. Students will still need to enter data on the level or feature forms and on the bags. Bag catalogs will be generated on the project computer from the digital forms.

Meagan Huff shows the students artifacts from the Museum Collection.  Jacqueline Cheung works on a collection in the foreground. 

We taught old school recording for the 50x50-cm shovel tests on paper forms with pencils and the basics of field notes. Tomorrow we will introduce the students to the iPads.

At the end of the day we walked the site on an archaeology focused walking your of the Fort and Village. We also visited the Museum where Meagan Huff showed off the artifacts and explained museum public outreach. The public can access this space on one of our museum open house tours:

 http://www.nps.gov/fova/historyculture/museumcollectionopenhouse.htm