The Girls of Fort Bragg
welcome you to the one and only home of the 82nd Airborne. In October of 2002, I trasferred to FB to start a six month Phase I project along with eight other crew members from all over: Iowa, Tennessee, Michigan, Indiana, Maryland... It was a very eclectic and exciting crew. We listened to NPR in the morning, barbequed in the evenings, and had dinner and a few beverages together many weekends. It was also the first apartment I ever lived in; my very own and a nice one at that. My roommate, Danielle, moved in February until the end of the project in April.
Fort Bragg is huge... It houses many branches of the military, and is training grounds for Airborne and Special Forces. We worked in four areas, one of them being a few hundred acres of Nature Conservancy, which had never been surveyed and was quite a beautiful and interesting place. The other areas were Special Forces training grounds. They have a big cabin next to a huge lake with a gorgeous view. While there, I met a few of the training "teachers". These guys are required after a certain amount of time to come train new recruits for a few years. They tend to be pretty smart and interesting. I had a few conversations with them about the base and what they do, and my job. Some of the topics of conversation ended up being about odd things like aliens and the pyramids worldwide.
We set out in the morning in the area we were surveying, walked our lines and kept digging until lunchtime. It was nice to be able to work at our own pace and see if we could keep up with everyone else. By lunchtime we were usually hungry and tired, and the end of lunch ended with a scene similar to the one in the photo.
The landscape of Bragg was totally new to me. Unlike Stewart in Georgia, there was a lot of mountainous areas, slopes, hills, and high areas. The trees were farther apart and the woods tended to be more open with very tall pine trees. There were areas of water, but they weren't swampy or stagnant. Instead, there were little streams, ponds, and even lakes.
One area had a huge lake and lots of little ponds and streams. This area happened to be rich also in sites, as Prehistoric peoples lived near sources of water. I took the opportunity to get some nice photos...
Since we were surveying hundreds of acres, we did LOTS of walking. Sometimes we walked for half an hour through woods, brambles, thickets, fields, water, and hiked a lot of hills. I think I must've walked hundreds of miles over the course of those six months.
Here we are "delineating". After transecting, all the tests which were positive are revisited. More tests are laid out (usually on a north-south/east-west axis) off of the positive test. To conclude the site, there must be two tests in each direction off the original positive that turn out to be negative. Sound a bit confusing? It can be. What happens is four people stand in a circle around the original test, each holding a tape measure. A person in the middle holds the ends of the tape measures. The four people walk in cardinal directions for 15 meters. They stop, flag the spot, and someone comes and digs this hole.
The people continue walking for another 15 meters and mark that next spot. Someone comes and digs these also. If all these holes are negative, we can leave. If not, we repeat the entire process for every hole that has an artifact in it. When the entire area is encircled by a barrier of two negatives, then the site is concluded. The site is given a status of "isolate", meaning four or less artifacts, or "site", meaning five or more artifacts.
Delineation is technically part of Phase II. Many Phase I projects use delineation to help show areas where a Phase II would be most effective. We dug fifty-by-fiftys, which are also a Phase II process. We found the area of the site that had the most dense number of artifacts, and dug a fifty centimeter square test, like the one in the photo.
Our Last Day: After six long months at Bragg, we finished our project and prepared to go home. Many of the crew ended up in Florida on another project. That was definitely a nice way to finish a long winter and start off a beautiful summer.
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