by Valencia Moore

  Today (February 28, 2017) was an awesome day at field school. I have learned a lot over the past couple of weeks from my peers, Dr. Dumas, and Mr. Meredith. Myself, Skyler, Natalie, Cory, and Dr. Dumas were all present and ready to work. Once we arrived at the fort, inside the earthworks of Fort Confederation to begin working, we discovered a muddy mess due to the previous days of rain. After removing the plastic tarps used to cover the holes from the rain, we got right to work.

  Cory and Skyler begin cleaning up panel hole 6 and later in the day they were taught how to draw profile walls. It is important to have a drawing of the profile wall for each unit so the excavator or reader of the work will have a visual aid on what the unit look like before it is refilled with dirt or destroyed by nature. I continued to remove Layer C clay from panel hole 7 and noticed that the large pieces of chalk that I worked around did not appear to be in any specific arrangement. No artifacts were found in this layer of soil. Natalie continued to dig out the clay in panel hole 8 and found decayed seeds; as of now, we are not sure what type of seed they are. She has also found a lot of chalk packed into the clay. Dr. Dumas is not sure yet what this is. 

   Moving right along to Thursday, March 2, 2017, everyone was present and we had a few visitors. Black Belt Museum staff James Lamb (director), Brian Mast (public historian), Tim Truelove (technician), and Wesley (student volunteer) came to visit us today and to help complete some tasks throughout the fort. They used small, strong magnets in the ravine to see if they were useful for finding metal artifacts. They didn’t find anything, so the magnets are probably not strong enough for pulling things out of the mud. Cory and Skyler finished their drawings of the profile walls for panel hole 6. Dr. Dumas and I drew a superior view of panel hole 7 in depth. In addition, I began learning how to draw a profile wall. It was not an easy task, but once I got the basic instructions down it became an easier task to complete. 

Throughout the remainder of the day everyone continued to work on what they had previously started and worked until the end of class. But wait there is more! Natalie continued to work on panel hole 8 and sorted through a five-gallon bucket of soil from Layer C by hand and found no artifacts. The clay is almost impossible to screen and has not yielded anything but the mysterious seeds and chalk so far. I hope you enjoyed my blog and I hope to hear from you soon with any questions.