There are lots of interesting things going on in the archaeology/anthropology world, few or none of which I will find the time to sit down and write something thoughtful about. Much of my spring break week has had me partially pinned down at home with a sick kid. It hasn't been all bad, but I'm getting antsy to get back to my lab. There are computer simulations to run, data to collect and analyze, and piles of debitage to attempt to fit back together. For better or worse, all that stuff is higher on my priority list right now than writing about someone else's work.

Anyway, I wanted to post some artifact photos I received from a reader. I don't know what this thing is. I'm curious if anyone out there has any good ideas.  First, here are the photos:

The finder describes the artifact as being made of quartzite, found in a creek in Shelby County, Tennessee. The countersunk hole looks modern to me -- my initial thought was that maybe this was a water-worn piece of some kind of historic-period bath/kitchen fixture. Based on the photos, however, the artifact does appear to me to be some kind of quartzite or similar stone, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Anyway . . . does anyone know what this is?

Now that I've completed my second owl, it's evident that I will be making a third owl. There are parts of Owl #2 that I'm not particularly happy with, but the two look good together watching over our family room. Three is a better number than two, though. So I've already got a pile started for Owl #3.

I made Owl #2 more quickly than Owl #1 (sixteen hours for this one as opposed to about 25 hours for the first one). A couple of factors sped things up. First, after already making one owl, I had a somewhat accurate model of owl anatomy/proportions in my head.  That meant less time spent looking at pictures and thinking about how things would go together. Second, I was determined not to spend a lot of time representing individual feathers. After the marathon of feather cutting/welding that went into the fighting roosters, I just wasn't in the mood. 

Here is the final product:

Here is a video that shows the owl from all sides:

I made most of Owl #2 while my wife had the kids out of town for the weekend. I spent the entire Saturday finishing up the roosters, telling myself I would get other stuff done around the house on Sunday. That didn't happen: I spent the whole day working on the owl. I don't have lots of "in progress" pictures since I completed most of it in one stretch, pausing only to get some lunch and walk the dog. It was a real luxury to be able to do that. I gave the final product to my wife as a gift. Here's how I made it.

Without thinking about it too hard, it seems like a disproportionate amount of my work on the early hunting-gathering societies of the Eastern Woodlands has been done in the company of sick children. Today's update on the Kirk Project comes to you from a crowded chair, with my typing arms constrained by the presence of a 3-year-old in pajamas watching Fireman Sam. For the full effect, play this in the background while you read this post.

I have four updates, one of which includes an apology.

It is March, and we have entered pine pollen season here in the South Carolina midlands. For the next few weeks, everything will be dusted yellow. 

In more exciting news, at site 38FA608 on the Broad River we have entered what appears to be an intact Late Archaic/Early Woodland midden in our excavation block.  If my initial diagnosis is correct, we're now (literally) scraping the top of a buried occupation zone that dates to around 1000 BC (i.e., about 3000 radiocarbon years before present, give or take). We've encountered this zone at about 95-100 cm below datum, which translates to roughly 65-70 cm below surface in the block. There is no sign of a heavy occupation zone in the existing vertical profile wall at that depth, so we may be dealing with something that is fairly limited in size (or at least was not distributed evenly across the ground surface that was present 3000 years ago). In that regard, this was a bit of a surprise, but it's the good kind of surprise: we're learning more about the kinds, dates, and extents of deposits at this site with every shovel-full of dirt.

​First, the "downstairs." We were without Jim Legg, so work was paused on the profile wall excavation (Unit 9). Two students finished up level 4 of Unit 7, the 1m x 2m unit being excavated to explore below the exposed profile. As I wrote last week, Unit 7 succeeded in locating the termination (or at least a hiatus in) the lamellae that presumably formed as a result of a process of particle migration/accumulation caused by water percolation. In other words, the end of the lamellae may be telling us something about the position of the water table. 

I'm not done with Unit 7 (I want to take it as far down as I can, as long as things are safe), but I needed to shift people up to the block to finally start excavating Unit 3. Unit 3 is the northeastern 2m x 2m unit in the block.  It has so far remained untouched. As the other units in the block get deeper, they are getting more difficult to enter and exit safely (and without putting stress on the walls). So we began excavating the eastern half of Unit 3 to serve as a step down in the other units. Now that we know the top two zones are plowzones, we can excavate them as natural levels. So it was a return to battling roots for DuVal and a couple of lucky students.

Things got interesting in the block fairly quickly. Mid-morning, the students working in Unit 6 (shovel scraping through the last bits of their level 7, 75-90 cmbd) exposed a projectile point in the floor of the level. Their instructions for this level were to shovel scrape/skim at moderate speed, watching for stains and color changes and inspecting artifacts they encountered but only marking things for piece-plotting if they were large and/or interesting (i.e., diagnostic artifacts). I'm really happy that the student caught the point in the floor and it was left in place, as it gives us our first lithic diagnostic down in context in the block.

I think it's a Late Archaic / Early Woodland stemmed form, what we might call "Gary" in the Midcontinent but what is commonly known as "Mack" here. At first glance, the point has the basal shape of a Morrow Mountain (a Middle Archaic form), but I think it's much too high in the deposits to be that old. There is some unfortunate morphological overlap between Early Woodland and Middle Archaic point forms here. I'm going to be exceedingly lazy and just paste in a few paragraphs from Daniel Elliot and Ken Sassaman's (1995) Archaic Period Archaeology of the Georgia Coastal Plain and Coastal Zone (pages 44 and 45): 

After documenting the base of level 7 (at 90 cmbd), the students in Units 4 and 6 moved into the excavation of level 8. At the base of level 7 in Unit 6, the sediment appeared to be darker in the southeast corner of the unit. The boundary was too diffuse to define it as a feature, though, so I had the students map and describe it as a separate sediment zone. Scraping the floor at the beginning of level 8 immediately produced a good amount of material in that corner, including another point with a contracting stem. In Unit 6, they started encountering some large pieces of fire-cracked rock and lots of flaking debris. At first I thought we were might be coming down on a couple of features (one in each unit). After investigating further, however, it appeared more likely that we were just hitting the irregular top of a continuous zone that probably extends across the entire block. It was time to put on the brakes and return to a slower, more intensive piece-plotting strategy. Given that all the students have now experienced the joys of piece-plotting by hand, I'll probably fire up the total station next time we're out and begin using it to collect piece-plot coordinates electronically. 

Excavations in Unit 5 are a currently about 20 cm behind those in Units 4 and 6. Given what we now know is on the horizon for Unit 5, my plan is to continue the intensive piece-plotting excavations in that unit all the way down. At 75 cmbd, there's a possible feature to deal with (it looks fairly similar to Feature 6, the small charcoal-flecked basin we excavated in Unit 6 last week). The large, plow-sheared rock in Unit 5 remains in the floor, as we still haven't reached the surface that it's sitting on (thankfully, no-one has tripped over it yet). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, is around it when we reach the depth that would have been the surface when it was deposited.

Finally, we encountered our third serpent of this field school: a tiny snake that was sleeping under one of our plywood edge protectors. I moved it to a safe spot.

Last Friday marked the halfway point of the field school. We have accomplished a lot in seven days of work, and it's a pleasure to watch the students continue to become more and more comfortable and competent with the strategies, methods, and techniques of basic archaeological excavation.

In the "upstairs" portion of the site, excavations in Units 4 and 6 continued into the deposits beneath Zone 2. In Unit 6, we dealt with a small feature (designated Feature 6) that appeared beneath Zone 2.

A cultural "feature" is basically an immovable artifact -- an "in place" deposit created by human activity. In this part of the world, cultural features include the remains of such things as hearths, storage pits, cooking pits, postholes, burials, etc. Because intact features contain a record of a discrete set of human activities that occurred over a relatively short span of time, they hold valuable clues about what people were actually doing at a site. We love features because they give us specific information that other kinds of deposits cannot.

As you can see from the photo above, Feature 6 was a rather unspectacular stained area that contained a moderate amount of charcoal. We used standard feature excavating techniques to document and remove the feature: (1) mapped and described it in plan view; (2) bisected it to expose a profile, screening the sediment through 1/4" mesh; (3) documented the profile; (4) removed the remaining portion of the feature as a flotation sample. There wasn't much cultural material in the feature, but there were lots of large chunks of charcoal. In profile the feature appeared to be a shallow basin with a fairly regular shape, and there was no evidence that it was a root stain or rodent burrow.

The excavation to expose Feature 6 in profile went down to about 90 cmbd (centimeters below datum), so that seemed like a good target for the bottom of level 7 in Units 4 and 6. By the end of the day, Unit 6 was well on the way to being there, with no sign of cultural features. We're using a shovel-scraping methodology that, hopefully, strikes a good balance between speed and control. I want to go slow enough to recognize cultural features if they're present, but fast enough to end up with some good data on what we're dealing with as far as the horizontal and vertical distribution of prehistoric materials.

Meanwhile, in the "downstairs" portion of the site, work resumed on the excavation of Unit 9 (the 1m x 3m unit placed to extend the profile wall. As excavations near the top of the (supposed) Middle/Late Archaic zone, Jim Legg dazzled the students with yet another paisley shirt. Work also continued in Unit 7, a 1m x 2m unit being excavated to explore what lies beneath the exposed profile.

The last level of Unit 7 contained very little material. It did reveal, however, that the lamellae (the dark bands of sediment caused by the downward migration and accumulation of clay particles) appear to end rather suddenly. The base sediment remains coarse sand. It's possible that the abrupt ending of the lamellae is telling us something about the level of the water table: saturated sediment would presumably not facilitate the downward migration of clay particles. This will be something we can investigate with sediment analysis once we've got a nice profile exposed that we can sample. In the meantime, I've got my fingers crossed that we don't get a significant rainfall that presses the pause button on Unit 7.