surveying at crow canyon

More about my trip out west.
The first day at Crow Canyon those of us who had been there before,(alumni), went out to the field to spend the day doing total station surveying. We wanted to link the surveyed maps of a site we had worked a few years ago to the one from Goodman point, where we are working now. This way,the relationships between them can be better understood, one of the goals of the excavation. Total station surveying involves taking sightings from a known point to a new point in line of site, then switching and sighting back to the first point. The known datum points in the two sites were probably a mile apart, with hills, gullies, and dense pinyon and juniper forest between. We had to bushwhack across country to find line of site points between. And then we couldn't get the computer to work properly to record our sightings. It was time consuming, frustrating, exacting work, and it took all day, but we got it finished. I really have a better appreciation for archaeologists who spend days doing this. I also feel we acclomplished something important.
The next day we headed to the site to get set up in our units and start digging. This site, Goodman point, was the first area ever set aside by the U.S. government as an archaeological preserve, in the late 1800's I believe, and has never been excavated or even looted very much, so it is special. It is also part of Hovenweep national monument, and since the national park service has not let anyone dig at sites on their land for many years (at least in the southwest) it is a major coup for Crow Canyon.
I'll talk more about it later.
By the way, you may have noticed most of my archives are missing. I had major blog problems and ahad to start over, and I think they are gone for good. I might post more on that when I am not so ticked off about it.