Casa Grande was a shock to me because it was literally a big house. I would have never guessed the town of Casa Grande was named after the site. If it wasn’t for the program I would’ve never known this site existed despite driving by it hundreds of times.
The program also introduced me to a whole other side of archaeology that I didn’t know about which was the science aspect of it. For example, in the picture above we were using UV light to determine what the glass consisted of.
These two pictures are of a sandal and in one we were having a closer look at the item. In the second picture of the sandal you can see the type of weave they used to create the sandal
The artifacts in the picture are located in the Arizona State Museum. When I was in the museum I realized that not all artifacts archaeologists find are put on display.
In this trip we went to Tumacacori and San Xavier Mission. At first I thought it was a little weird because I thought they were not connected to each other. I later realized they were more connected to each other than I would have imagined. Firstly I didn’t know Tumacacori was a mission established by Father Kino like San Xavier and secondly, I didn’t know that the Christ in Tumacacori was repainted as Father Kino and the model repainted as Father Kino is the one in San Xavier right now.
Through the program we met a few park rangers. In the first picture Laura was teaching us about Montezuma Well and in the second picture Cam Juarez was teaching us about Saguaro National Park. Both Cam and Laura helped me realize that becoming a park ranger would be something I would want to do. Additionally, Cam inspired me even more because he was Hispanic just like me.
In the picture above we set up the picture to look like we had excavated really deep when in reality Ethan was just on his knees. Regardless, the picture shows the type of work we’re doing in the field.
On our last trip to New Mexico we got a hands-on experience as actual archaeologists. At the site I got to experience different jobs an archaeologist would do, my favorite experience was getting the opportunity to search for artifacts because it made me feel like an archaeologist for a day.
