In May, right when I was supposed to be traveling to the field, the ice kept me and my crew in Fairbanks for a few days. Around the same time, I called Don Charlie in Nenana to ask about ways I might share my research with Nenana village. He said, Our Tribal Council meeting is tomorrow, I can put you on the agenda. After a bit of thought, I agreed. On May 18, the very same day I was supposed to load my whole crew up in boats and set up camp on the lake, I drove down to Nenana's Tribal Hall and was invited to come to fish camp later that summer.

Flash forward to July, and I'm back in Nenana. I'm learning how to bead and make baskets, heating up tea on a fire, and laughing at the boys who have turned log splitting into a kind of game. I'm hearing wonderful stories, learning about the history of a place, and watching the Tanana River cruise by.  Eva Dawn Burke, who made this entire experience possible as the tremendous camp coordinator, is introducing people, telling stories, and loading the next activity out of her pickup, somehow all at once.

Old hearths, bird bone straws (?!), and microblades, oh my! We did it again folks, we survived another field season. From the ice on the lake as we moved in to positive covid tests as we moved out, it was a season equally matched by the elements as my crew's resistance to them. I brought a combination of graduate and recently graduated UW students along with field school students new to Alaska and to field archaeology for about 30 days of work at the Bachner site.

I arrived in Alaska right after the last post, in early May, to find that spring hadn't yet come to the Interior. What had been an unrelentingly brutal winter (so bad even moose couldn't take it) wasn't ready to quit. For context, I remember it snowing during May exactly once during the 15 years I lived there as a kid.

Needless to say, by the time my crew arrived, the lake was still frozen (but not frozen enough to walk across) and we were essentially stranded on the road side of the Bachner Site. What's a field school to do when you can't get to the field?

As we enjoyed coffee at our weekly community coffee hour, I asked Dr. Bob Kelly what he was most looking forward to in retirement. Without hesitation, he said: No more term papers.

I know many students who face term papers with similar apprehension. Five pages, okay, but 10? 20? Why are my professors making me do this? They won't even read them. (Bob Kelly is perhaps the exception to the rule.)

So why do we do term papers? Professors don't like them, students despise them. Certainly, writing a long form paper is great practice for getting your head around a big problem and trying to keep focused on it for a few thousand words.

The field of archaeology isn't really known for solo-authored papers though, and few term papers are anywhere near publication-ready. So why not try something else?