During the spring semester of 2010, I approached Dr. Stephen L. Black about the possibility of doing an internship with him during the Lower Pecos Canyonlands field school during the summer of 2010. Dr. Black mentioned that he was in need of someone who knew how to use GIS to work with the digital datasets that were to be collected over the course of the field school. My career goal is to become an archaeologist, but I have a lot of experience working with GIS which can be a useful tool for archaeology. GIS is an acronym which stands for Geographic Information System. For archaeology, this system is a useful tool that provides the opportunity to combine spatial and non-spatial data in a form that can be used for analysis.
For both the field school and my internship, a majority of my duties involved working with GIS to generate spatial datasets and to develop hard copies of maps for use during field work and post-field work presentations of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Shumla Ranch, and Javelina Heights. During the field school, I was assigned the staff position of “Data Manager”, in charge of organizing all digital datasets collected during the field school and managing a GIS database of spatial data relevant to the excavation and survey work. During the internship, I continued working with GIS, creating new GIS shapefiles from data collected in the field. I also learned how to use Photogrammetry to create accurate aerial photographs from stereo pairs of close range aerial photographs of Javelina Heights, the site that was excavated during the field school. Near the end of the internship, I started developing a three dimensional model of Eagle Cave in Val Verde County, with the hopes of incorporating ground penetrating radar data with the model to create a useful visualization and analysis tool.
Javelina Heights (41VV2005) in Val Verde County is believed to be an upland camp locale where wikiup structures (grass huts encircled by rocks to hold down the supports of the structure) were used. It is located on the western side of a flat ridge which is covered in thorny desert vegetation. At the site, large portions of the limestone bedrock are exposed. Aside from the bedrock, there are numerous limestone rocks of varying sizes. The orientation of these rocks and the many artifacts found on the surface suggest that this area was a campsite where grass huts (wikiups) and ramadas were utilized to provide protection from the elements to the early inhabitants of this area.
I have been lucky with this internship, in that I have been allowed room for experimentation and trial and error. Though I was dubbed “GIS Expert” by Dr. Black, I admittedly spent a large amount of time teaching myself things that I didn’t know before. Of course, since I was the “expert”, if ever I encountered a problem during the completion of a task I could cite GIS or photogrammetric concepts and insist that I could figure it out. Frequently when I encountered such an issue, I looked to others who were more knowledgeable on the subject. For example, my success in working with Leica Photogrammetry Suite is directly attributable to my correspondence with Mark Willis. Without his help, I would not have the level of knowledge of Photogrammetry that I have now. To anyone else considering this internship or one similar, I would advise taking advantage of working with others to find the solution to a problem, as I have found you can learn whatever you need as long as you know who to ask.