The Excavation Process: The Tools

Well, we're here at the Cooper's Ferry site, and we want to talk about how we excavate. So this is a way that we find out information about people of the past, is to come in and remove the sediments that are here in order to find anything that's left behind from those people that lived here a long time ago. So in my hand, I have the tool that we're going to use the most in our excavation, and that's a trowel. This is just a simple trowel that you can use for laying bricks, but we also use it to dig. It's really nice because it's not a very big instrument, and we can sharpen the edge on one side to give us this ability to dig dirt very easily. We also use a brush, and the brush is also used to just simply sweep up the dirt after we've excavated it. We put it into a dustpan, and that goes into a bucket. All that dirt will go to the screen, and they're going to look for anything that I've missed when I'm excavating. One of the things that we need to pay attention to as we're digging is not to use this thing inappropriately. We don't want to use the tip in a way that digs down into places we can't see, so we don't want to stab into the ground. We want to use this nice edge to just simply pull the dirt, scraping it away very carefully, very easily, to find any artifacts or bones or shells or other things associated with people of the past. In order to find them in the ground, by finding them in place, we actually can learn more about what people were doing here at the site than if we just had the objects. So if we came in here with a bulldozer and pushed all this away and screened all of the dirt and just found all the thousands of tools and flakes of rock and bone and shell, well, that would just tell us the things that we already know. The people of the past made stone tools, they ate deer, let's say, and they also ate shellfish, but that's not the most important thing. We want to find these things together, next to each other, so we understand that they did this kind of activity over here or that kind of activity over there. By reconstructing all the things in space, we can learn a lot more about what people were doing here in the past.