Month: July 2020

It’s Fuel – Eat and Get Moving

After having taken first two steps toward getting ready for a 2020 field season (developed at COVID-19 safety plan and worked out what want to try to accomplish), can now turn to one of my least favorite but essential pre-field tasks.  Getting the food.  This has changed quite a bit during the GRSLE project from a team cooking approach with a fixed, planned menu1 to the current reliance on freeze dried food and individual food preparation.  Changed from stoves and camp cooking to boil water, add to foil pouch, soak, and consume.  I much prefer the new, quick and lean system, which it now based on several of my field food biases:

  • Food is fuel, nothing more;  
  • Preparation time needs to be minimal – the working GRSLE rule is “if it takes more than 20 minutes to prepare, consume, and clean-up it’s a waste of field time”;
  • Do everything possible to limit cooking smells, food waste, and garbage – “pack it in, eat it”.
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2020 Fieldwork Plan

Plans for GRSLE 2020 fieldwork have changed considerably since first roughed out in December 2019.  At that time, the focus of our work was going to be in a remote area of the Washakie Wilderness continuing the investigation of methods to assess prehistoric migration corridor routes.  As Spring 2020 assaulted us and a new variable was added to the field planning concerns (COVID-19), until recently it looked like would not be conducting archaeology fieldwork with a team this summer.  Too many fuzzy variables and concerns.  But after having spent considerable time sitting on and sometimes falling off the fence, although there are still huge doses of uncertainty to deal with, finally was able to cobble together a COVID-19 field protocol for being able to give near-maximum protection (maximum protection would be no team fieldwork) for all team members. 

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