A lone dumpy stands on site.
On the Monday of February 4th, a small group of novice archaeologists packed into a small bus and proceeded to the old lighthouse of Port MacDonnell to begin, for most, our first taste of field archaeology. The 11 archaeologists were divided into two groups of four, and a group of three. Of these, two groups were to commence a baseline/offset survey, and the other group was tasked with conducting a dumpy survey of the sight. I was a part of that dumpy team.
None of us knew what this consisted of.
The dumpy team quickly learnt the difficulty of conducting a dumpy survey on the edge of a cliff, along with a developing hatred of dense vegetation. Oh, and the local fly’s which bit and stung while resisting copious amounts of AeroGuard. The wind constantly barraged the 3 metre ranging pole, making readings difficult to get exact; but no amount of foul play from nature would stop us from producing that map. One particular issue, however, did not come from nature but the irritating lack of straight lines when recording the walls. Baffling us, it became clear after double checking our measurements that perhaps they just weren’t made straight and parallel.
In all, for our first field experience we could not have predicted a tougher way to learn; but this made us strong. At the end of the day, the dumpy team was working in perfect unison to create a rather nice, if a bit unfinished, map showing a cliff, dense vegetation and a series of small walls.
