WARP has just finished its first week, and although it was a short one — our first day in the field was on Wednesday — it was exhausting. Results have been encouraging, however. In only three days of survey, we have surveyed 177 units covering 0.435 square kilometers (these figures were kindly calculated for me by Sam Walker). If that doesn’t sound like much, it’s worth noting that we only started work on Wednesday, the first several hours of which were taken up by training exercises. We’ll get faster. We’ll need to become faster and more efficient with experience if we’re going to cover most of the 10 km2 that constitutes our study area for 2014, but I’m confident that we will. Our team leaders and student field walkers are excellent.
Our average unit size is just under 2500 m2, which is slightly smaller than we’d like it to be, but our survey units are largely based on modern agricultural fields, and many of these are very small, narrow fields that are very different with respect to the factors that allow them to be effectively surveyed. For example, survey archaeologists often focus on a field’s visibility — that is, the percentage of the ground surface that is visible to field walkers. Obviously the higher the visibility, the more likely it is that field walkers will be able to see and collect artifacts. We therefore break up fields with different visibilities into different survey units. If we don’t — if we lump them together — then it becomes very difficult to unpack the processes that shape our data. For instance, in an area full of material, one field yielded no pottery. That might be a meaningful pattern, but in actuality that field’s visibility was extremely low, suggesting that we’re simply unable to see artifacts in that field. So, unless the fields become larger and more uniform in size, we’ll probably be stuck with relatively small units. One the one hand, this gives us greater spatial control; on the other, it does slow us down.
On a personal note, I continue to be overwhelmed by the non-archaeological tasks that remain to be done. On Friday, Sarah and I spent a good hour or two waiting for the technician from the phone company to install the phone line in our storage facility, only to be told that the phone line couldn’t be installed because (a) the phone company’s line to the building was faulty, and (b) someone had cut the phone lines within the building, so that even if their line was functioning properly, we would need to get the phone line repaired on our end. We’re still waiting for security measures to be installed and for electricity, in addition to our phone. We’ll also spend much of Tuesday attending to similar administrative issues.
Tomorrow is a holiday, however, so we can’t work in the field, or deal with administrative tasks, because offices will be closed. So we’ll take the students on a trip to some archaeological sites that are always open to the public, supplementing our usual Saturday trips to local sites of historical and archaeological significance.