No tags yet.
North Shore Kūpopolo Field School has been having a great semester. One of the fun and interesting field methods that we did was to use Trimble receivers to capture our own geospatial data. N. Belluzo of State Historic Preservation Society came out to the field school to train us in using the Trimble receivers. Later, Mr. Belluzo was kind enough to assist a few of us in post-processing so that we could create a visual map to show the shape files captured by six of our teams. Use of geospatial data and the Arc GIS software is a powerful tool for future archaeologist. It will likely enable a higher degree of data exchange between agencies, archaeologist and across disciplines. According to State Historic Preservation Society, "they will be asking for GIS information as part of future site number requests, a process which will be structured by forthcoming guidance documents to be released in the next couple of months.”Thanks to Mr. Belluzo and the field school instructors many of us will be well positioned to apply our field experience in future careers.Fun fact: Mr. Belluzo will be teaching a 1-credit course at UHWO on cultural resources GIS this summer, 2014.
Some exciting discoveries were made at the last working day of Kupopolo Heiau field school Spring 2014. We worked late into the afternoon when a small excavation pit contained remnants of sharks teeth, fish teeth, fish bone, fish scales, shell pieces, a shell tool artifact and a finely polished adze artifact. It is fortunate that this pit also contained charcoal remains and provides an excellent opportunity for a student to further evaluate and document the findings and potentially use charcoal dating to correlate to the artifacts. The findings help to reaffirm the cultural, historical and archaeological value of the Heiau and surrounding area and will hopefully help to ensure protection of this important Heiau.
