It was pretty amazing, though a lot of hard work as usual in archaeology. Four squares were set up with spray paint and four of us dug in a square 4.6m by 5m area while the others (there were nine of us total) screened or joined the bucket brigade. Pretty much everyone had the opportunity to do both. We only excavated half of the house and yet couldn't even finish that in eight hours of backbreaking work. Free lunch and donuts were also provided and who doesn't like that? Especially after bending down over a screen for two hours straight? Just so you'd know, black sugar-less coffee always tastes better when you're freezing in the snow. As part of our work we managed to find one of two guns (the other gun was in an un-excavated area), a knife, and two of the four bullets as well as tags which were around the pig carcasses (most of the bones were incinerated though). That's enough to say that a murder has taken place. So yeah, we were pretty successful. We recovered other really neat stuff too that didn't go along with our investigation - like one guy found a monkey wrench and I got a key, a belt buckle, and a penny. The nice part about working in an experimental archaeological situation is that you get to keep anything that you find except for the experiments.
It really goes a long way of showing how archaeological techniques - squares, shovels, and screens, can actually go to benefit humans right here and now. One thing did occur to me though a few times - once as I stood in a middle of that frozen field by the burnt down house and when we were pushing our van out of the mud (for the third time in two weeks): Why couldn't I have picked a normal major? Like sociology or something. Well, if I did that then I would have missed out on all of that fun and that's just unacceptable.
Oh and for all of you stratigraphy fans out there here's a photo of some really nice burnt layers as well as a camera crew from the Discovery Channel (sorry yanks, the Canadian one), filming it:
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