Hi there my name is Jerry Moore and I'm
professor of anthropology at Cal State
University Dominguez Hills
and my students and I are out here
working at the Rancho Dominguez,
which is not only a lovely place, but
it's one of the most important places
in the entire history of Southern
California.  And what we're trying to do out
here is we're trying to recover aspects
of the unwritten history of the Rancho
that tell us so much about the history the
development
of Los Angeles County in general.
What my students and I are trying to
understand is aspects to the daily life
of this Rancho when it was actually a
working ranch.
It's interesting to realized that in the 1880's
LA county's biggest exports were wheat and cowhides.
And in 1920 their biggest exports were
petroleum
and movies.  This rancho was a very
important place in the
southern South Bay Area. And this area
that we're working right now
was supposedly an outdoor kitchen and
barbecue area.
So that during the harvest time or
doing roundup
large numbers a ranch hands would be fed
out her. So what we're doing here is
we're trying to use a number of
techniques
to try to test whether or not this idea
is actually correct.
And so the students in the background
are using a magnetometer
to try to find features in the ground
that might be things like
cooking pits or fire pits or areas where
animal bones or garbage pits would have
been discarded
Today we're focusing on collecting 10
samples.
And then we will go ahead and take those
samples to analyze them.
What they're doing is they're trying to
learn how to find stuff with different
pieces have scientific equipment. They're
working through trying to find out how
to make that equipment work and how to
discover things about the past using
that equipment.
Today we are at the Rancho Dominguez
testing out new equipment. It's called a
ground penetrating radar. And basically
what does it send
electromagnetic signals down through the
surface and whatever is under there
are reflected in the antenna picks it up.
And we're looking for anomalies in
the ground for
evidence a possible action or
encampment that took place
here at the Rancho Dominguez during the
Mexican-American war
And we've been do plots all over the
Rancho
to see evidence of military
encampment / artifacts.
And we've been using a combination of
folk history and
analyzing GPR results.  But at another level what they're doing
is they're discovering how to discover.
They're finding out how to
use a little pilot project and catch the
errors that they may have made in the first
steps of a process. How to check their
results. How to work as a group.
And how to not only determine that
they've actually discovered something
but how do you go about asking new
questions;
so that discoveries a process.  We found
out that the oil derrick itself being
of a metal property, most likely steel,
was sending off a
magnetic field and when we were
processing the data you can actually see
this distortion effect affect the entire
scan area.
This made us have to rework our
methodology. So we couldn't scan areas
with metal objects like the oil derrick nearby.
That's one of the things that people
are learning
in the course of a class like
this, is not just how to do this,
but how to have that thrill of discovery.
About how to make
learning not just something that you go
and passively do in a classroom
but something that actively becomes part
of your life and becomes the way
the person you are and the way in which you see the world.
That's a tremendously powerful insight
for people to get. And, in part, I think
they get that here.  I feel very fortunate
to have been a part in this course this
semester. Not only did I lead a team in
archaeological research
but I also gained a skill that I will
benefit from the future.
The skills I learned from Doctor Moore through this course will definitely help me
on my journey in Grad school and in my
career as an archaeologist.
Went great, you know. It's great day and
you can see you know I
you need to have a Ph.D the to wrap
string around the nail.
But a no it was a great day. And I think people learned a lot.
And they're getting faster what they're
doing and
now will be the the next level in this
process. Where were going to go back,
gonna look at data sets. Make sure we
got everything right
And see if we can figure out something
else a to do
in the next step of this research.
