Taylor Purtell

• Spent hours rough sorting bags tagged and taken from professor's archaeological sites from Florida and Louisiana. After everything was sorted we had to count and weigh everything we found.
• From there I would catalog everything both in our site books and on an excel spreads sheet.
• Helped photograph all of the artifacts after cataloging them.
• Helped keep the lab and equipment clean to prevent contamination.
• Helped keep the lab organized so there would be no mixing of site bags.

This was not actually a internship, but a field school with my professor held at a site in Tallahassee Florida. The objectives of this school where to:

• Be proficient in archaeological survey, excavation, and recording techniques
  • Be comfortable conducting archaeological research in a variety of settings
  • Understand how to operate, maintain, and perform basic repairs on archaeological excavation
  equipment
  • Be able to recognize, describe, analyze and conduct basic analysis of material culture recovered from
  archaeological sites
  • Have attained competence with collecting spatial data through total station use and other recording
  methods, and be able to discuss the role of these data in site analyses.
  • Be able to discuss the theoretical and ethical foundations of archaeological excavations, especially
  those related to the research questions guiding the current excavations
  • Have practiced public outreach and interpretation of archaeological sites by updating site books and blogging about the process.

During this time I got to help with:

• Equipment set-up at the site.
• Introduction to excavation methods, stratigraphy, arbitrary versus “natural” levels, intrusions,
  descriptive note writing, interpreting cross sections, water-screening.
• Setting up units and excavations. Tagging wheel barrows and moving them to water screening stations.
• Water screened wheel barrows and labeled screens for them to dry on our racks.
• Bagged and marked dry results from water screening screen.
• Closing up site, cleaning and storing equipment.

• Here I helped my professor clean up the site archaeological at Weedon Island St. Petersburg after hurricanes came through the area.
• This including recutting the trail to the site, removing debris that fell on the excavation units, dug back out a couple of units whose tarps had been removed by the debris and wind.