Excavation Day 1 - by Sasha S.

I woke up from my bed at home in the usual state -- pure confusion. Like last week, I had placed my alarm on the other side of my bedroom; forcing myself to jump out of bed to shut the annoying, yet much nostalgically loved Kim Possible jingle off. Today was the day, we were off to San Luis Obispo.

This and next week’s focus is excavation, and much like everyone else in this field school I was excited to start digging and find something remarkable in the dirt. This excitement first started as a spark first inspired by a poorly bound middle school text book about the famous hominid Lucy, which was now further brightened on this trip to Camp San Luis as a senior anthropology major at UCSC.

I was picked up in front of my apartment complex by the lovely Rachael, her mother, and another fellow camper Brooke. We drove down to Cabrillo College, and waited for the vans to arrive so that we could load our personal gear and start heading down the road. I watched as Brandon chugged down a bottle of raw, organic milk. On the ride down to camp, the remnant exhaustion from the lack of sleep rose within me. I slept most of the ride, except for when we stopped for a much needed coffee break (which somehow did not curb my desire to sleep the rest of the ride).

We arrive at camp, and I begin to search for the flattest piece of land I can put my little cocoon of a tent on. I find a spot, and begin setting up. After all our tents were up, we begin to set up our large food storage tent -- which soon became a game of “how many archaeology students does it take to set up one tent?” Once that tent is set up, everyone eagerly starts grabbing at the food. While snacking on our sandwiches, Pringles, and string cheese, Renee reads over the rules for staying on Camp San Luis. After lunch was over, we prepared to head out to our first site of the week. We smothered ourselves in sunblock, bug spray, and long sleeves; all in the hopes that we would reduce our chances of catching poison oak and coming back to camp covered in ticks. Everyone was given a Marshalltown trowel, and measuring tape. We luxuriously rode down to our site our vans.

Learning how to set up a 1x1m unit

 Our lesson of the day was learning how to construct a perfect 1x1 meter square on the ground, and how to back-stake the square to keep the square more in-line during the excavation process. I probably took like four pages of notes, as there’s a lot of steps that go into just putting down 12 nails into the ground. We broke into our new crews for this week, and were each given either a CU (control unit) or STU (shovel testing unit). My crew had the job of constructing a CU, and were lucky that is was in the shade surrounding a giant tree. It perhaps took less than an hour, but longer than 40 minutes to construct the 1x1 square and to back-stake it. One of my crew members, Max, decided to volunteer to dig the first arbitrary 10 cm layer. Meanwhile, Brooke, Brandon, and I sifted through the dirt that Max attacked. When the dirt had been sifted away, we were left with these clumps of clay in our sieve. We broke down these clumps even further, looking for any sort of stone artifacts. We found a lot of rocks instead. Things that had not been sifted through were loaded into buckets labeled with the site name, CU number, provenience location, level number, the screen size used to sift through dirt, the date, the initials of our crew members, and the number of buckets used per level. These buckets would later be sent to the wet screening process.

I certainly don’t feel as sore as I did on first week of field school, but I don’t doubt the pain will catch up later on in the week. Our first dinner of the week will be Chili, and it smells delicious.