A Survey Reflection - by Tyvek Thomas

Thomas working hard on survey

After a late night of camp fire lectures and grandiose dreams of attaining archaeological glory, I crawled out of my sleeping bag ready to seize the day! Breakfast was uneventful and consisted of a green banana and a protein bar. After a brief pep talk from Dusty we hit the pavement and after a mile long walk along the coastal highway, we reached a site and instantly got busy mapping. We found ourselves on an amazing and fairly poison oak free coastal terrace overlooking some of the best California coastline I’ve seen. There were four bedrock mortars at this site, including one which hadn’t been recorded.  This gave us a great opportunity to learn how to record a bedrock mortar and practice our mapping skills.

After we finished up mapping the site it, was time to get down to the real work, transecting! This required our seven person crew to line up in ten meter increments and walk in straight lines for what seemed like miles and miles .The area we transected was characterized by coastal terrace and was quite beautiful, yet infested with ticks. After four hours of walking transects, we found nothing, except for the small Monterey chert flake found while breaking for lunch. Oh, and the dead grey whale carcass that was wafting up foul smelling odors from the beach.

Overall, today was brutal, the poison oak and ticks were terrible, yet and at the same time we couldn’t ask for a more amazing survey site. Our crew chiefs have been more then patient, and are at the ready to answer even our most ridiculous questions. I’ve learned to do mapping and survey work that at the beginning of the week terrified me, and I feel comfortable indentifying artifact. Despite the sweat and dirt, there’s nothing else I rather be doing this summer. Dig On!