Survey Crew Starts Work at Spruce Mill

As part of the Field school, the students learn skills in field surveying to discover and record archaeological sites, including basic orienteering and gps, pedestrian and subsurface shovel probing, and mapping and site recording.  This week, a quarter of the field school started this portion of the course under the direction of Tony Hofkamp.  The site of this course is the field east of the reconstructed fur-trade fort and west of Pearson Air Museum.  This was the location of the World War I Spruce cut-up mill.

Last week Kendal McDonald (Z-Too Archaeogeophysical Prospection and Applied Archaeological Research) collected remote sensing data from the Spruce Mill area using her gradiometer (see Remote Sensing post from last week).  She was able to get us some preliminary results from the 160 m long north-south by 20 m wide transect we set up across the Cut-up mill. There are some dramatic patterns in magnetic anomalies that the survey crew will explore over the next four weeks.

While we excavated over a dozen probes this week, we have not had good fortune hitting the source of some of the anomalies. Next week I plan to use a metal detector to refine the locations for probes

Kendal McDonald shows Field School the results of the
Gradiometer Survey in the Field Laboratory

Magnetometer Results laid out on the Laboratory Floor.  Some of the strong positive-negative
linear anomalies may be buried cables for aircraft ties from the later airport.