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Lily's blog posts underscore that this is indeed a field school. With such projects, education is extended beyond walled classrooms and preplanned campuses to rivers cutting through mountain valleys like this one as well as meadows, beaches, deserts, and tropical rain forests. Technologies and online resources of twenty-first century, such as blogging, allow information such as field school experiences to be shared with thousands of online onlookers on a daily basis. We leave the dig house at 6 a.m., just as the sun peeks out over the horizon and it is still relatively cool with the world is open. The project area is about an hour's drive from the dig house, so we settle in to our nine-passenger mini-bus - named Skanderbeg after the Albanian national hero - and sleep or chat during the trip. Such technologies spring to life visions of what one can be. Lily is not alone in celebrating her summer accomplishments. Colleen Kirsten, an American Indian Studies major from University of Washington, is working alongside her. Colleen feels that by being at site and learning firsthand from descendents of people who first populated area around Hope some 9,000 to 11,000 years previously, she now understands indigenous oral history and culture of area better. rituals, customs, and legends that are shared and then tried out go well beyond what was possible in classroom. Not surprisingly, Colleen finds this project ideal summer getaway. . Once we arrive, we begin surveying the agricultural fields, searching for any artifacts that appear on the surface. We use a mobile differential GPS unit loaned to us by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology to collect detailed and precise information on the size, shape, and location of the survey tracts, as well as any sites or important features that we find. I specifically chose to come to this field school not because of exotic location, but because I seek to further understand collaborative relationship between archaeologists and Stó:lo, First Nations group who have inhabited Fraser River Valley for thousands of years. |
