Horses were one of the highlights of working at our site!

Me and just a few of the amazing people that helped make this experience great no matter what happened.

My experience at the FMIA field school has been full of surprises; meeting wonderful new people, making new friends, and discovering a new way to do archaeology in the Willamette Valley. One surprise that was not as welcome however, was the realization of how much anxiety living at the project would cause me.
In the field of Archaeology, traveling for work is expected as a fact of life. For someone with anxiety, however, this aspect of the job has always worried me. I have tried to deal with my anxiety in the past, but as is common with anxiety, it can be triggered randomly and severely in the most unexpected ways. For me, it was having to live at camp. Fortunately, I was able to bond with the team during the first week, and after attempting to deal with the issue and failing, the staff was kind enough to accommodate me by letting me commute from home to mitigate my now near constant state of anxiety. Though this condition can make individuals, myself included, feel extremely isolated, the FMIA crew has done everything possible to make me feel understood, included and supported and I will be forever grateful.
As I continue into the field of archaeology with this issue, I plan to seek counseling to learn how to control and limit my anxiety, and be able to travel on my own for work in the future. But for now, I will have to make archaeology work for me. This may mean finding work within an hour commute of my town and family, or working more office based jobs, or even putting my dream of archaeology on hold to deal with my anxiety properly. As daunting as this future is, what I want to communicate through this story is that people with anxiety are not alone; in the field of archaeology, and in the world in general. Take care of yourself, and make the world work for you if you have too, and know that it’s alright to take a break to care for yourself. And, always remember to be grateful to those who help you make this possible (Thank you FMIA camp fam!).
Speaking of not being alone, it helped me to know that making the field of archaeology, and academia in general, more accepting of different people is an effort being made from many different angles. Opening up the field to people dealing with everything from anxiety and depression, to more serious mental and physical disabilities, is a relatively new cry being taken up by many social groups, individual archaeologists, and universities around the world. For more testimonies, and examples of archaeologists dealing with anxiety and mental health see: (Digging While Depressed, Mental Health in Archaeology, Excavation) for a helpful guides on helping people with mental health issues in field work see: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/Number5_Teaching_and_Learning_Guide_Inclusive_Accessible_Archaeology.pdf
https://www.archaeologists.net/sites/default/files/Disabilitypaper.pdf

It has been an amazing 3 weeks here at Grande Ronde. We have learned lots, been on many a field trip and started working on site. This is such an awesome group of people and we all work together well. We have been eating wonderful food cooked by the fabulous Grande Ronde Nutrition Program. You might be interested in what we have been doing for three weeks. Let me tell you.

Our schedule is as follows (with some flexibility). We are in the cars ready for the day by 7:30. Breakfast starts when we arrive at the Historic Preservation Office. Breakfast ends when morning meeting begins. Morning meeting begins around 8:45. This is where we go over the plan for the day. At 9:00 we start our day, whether it is a lesson, a field trip or going to the site. Some of the lessons we have had include colonization and decolonization, native representations, THPO 101, mapping 101,102, and 103, GPS, and digital storytelling.

We have taken several field trips. One field trip was to Salem. We started at Baskett Slough, where we talked about the land. We were told to not see the land as it is today, but to imagine what it would look like in the past, when people managed the land. We then traveled the Union Mission Gospel site. Here we talked about some of the struggles that are involved with urban archaeology.  After, we had lunch at Riverfront park.Here we talked about life ways, selective representation and new technologies being used in archaeology. We ended the trip at Chankal. This is a sacred site for the Grande Ronde tribal community.

We did a mini field trip around Grande Ronde. We started at the Natural Resources Department in their gardens where we talked about native plants and first foods. We then went to the Molallah site and talked about the work that had been done there in previous years. We ended at Fort Yamhill where we look at how the Oregon State Parks represented how the fort was used to control/protect the Native Americans in the area.

Our field trip to the coast was super fun. We started at Mt. Hebo, although we were in a cloud, we could still look at all the amazing plants. We then went to Cape Mears to see the Octopus Tree. We ended the day at Tillamook.

At the site we have started to work with the total station to set up the Ground Penetrating Radar grid. We also started the pedestrian survey to find objects on the surface. The GPS team goes behind the pedestrian survey to place the objects on a map. To split up the day we have lunch at 12:00. We work until dinner at 5:00. After dinner we have free time to write in our field notebooks, write our blog posts, create digital stories, play games or read books. We usually go to bed around 10:00 so we can get up and start our day all over again.

These 3 weeks have zoomed by and I am so excited for the next 2 weeks. It will be sad to leave this amazing community, but I will have learned many things and made connections that will help me continue my career.