Since we left Costa Rica a lot has happened. The semester has seen most of the students back in class, busily working on papers and participating in new field projects, but that does not mean Expedition Costa Rica has ended! Report writing and public outreach have continued. In January, the majority of us will present … Read more
After a great deal of hard work, and more than our fair share of “dumb jar” moments, all teams finished recording their sections of the Brick Site. After surfacing, we were treated with a quick boat trip to Cahuita Point to mark the end of site recording. Here we ate coconuts and checked out some … Read more
Another beautiful morning for diving in Cahuita! The goals of the field school are progressing well, and at this rate we should complete all our tasks by the time we head back to Greenville, North Carolina! We were back working on the brick site today. The entire crew really worked well and came together as … Read more
Today, our team (Lauren and Scott) continued to map our unit at the Brick Site. After refining our technique over the past few days, we found that we were becoming quite efficient at the task. We were also able to increase our bottom time through slow deliberate breathing in order to conserve air; some of … Read more
Today, a group of us returned to the brick site to continue working on our units. Most of the bricks lie between 20 and 30 meters on the baseline, approximately, so the buddy teams assigned to these two units were required to complete a large amount of detailed drawing. We (Katie and Emily) have been … Read more
Today we continued mapping the Brick Site in Cahuita’s National Park. The weather was perfect, the visibility was great, and the water temperature was better than anyone could have asked for. The baseline is 54 meters in length, so we split up the site into 5 meter units. In total there are 22 units and … Read more
If a picture is worth a thousand words than a map is worth a million. The finished product will be invaluable to presenting the site to the public, stakeholders, and other professionals. Mapping a site is one of the most rewarding aspects of a project. Now that recording is complete at the cannon site, the … Read more
Today, two groups basically finished working on the cannon and anchor site. My group was in charge of taking the compass bearings for each of the cannon and taking the distances between certain features on the site, including; three cannon, the two anchors, and the shore. To do this, we used a data scope which … Read more
Today we started mapping the brick site using the baseline we set two days ago. Each of us was assigned a “unit” to map to scale, and we attached a tape measurer to the baseline to take offsets within our section. We decided to use a 5 centimeters to 1 meter scale and prepped our … Read more
Today, we set, what might be, the perfect baseline on a maritime archaeology site. We will be systematically mapping the Brick site using the baseline offset methodology. Hopefully, over the next few days we can draw a really accurate site map by taking measurements to artifacts from this baseline. – Scott