If there's one thing that folks in both the fandom and skeptics camps of The Curse of Oak Island TV show can agree on, it's that the biggest fake inanimate object to hit the show up to Season 3 was easily the Fake Roman Sword.

Yes, we capitalize it! 

The official verdict hit in January 2016 that the sword was a modern brass souvenir, and not a magical Roman ticket to a self-aggrandized franchise for the promotion of diffusionism. Alas, facts didn’t seem to matter to some, and the circus never quite left town. One year and a few months into the debacle, the Fake Hercules Sword database has grown to a whopping n=24 examples. That’s a new sword every two or three weeks! The regular flow of new swords, the growing timeline of data, and the continued involvement of die-hards, means blogging and Facebooking just isn’t enough to cover the zeitgeist. The rallying cry for video action was made at the 1st Anniversary Party and out of the primordial digital soup, a video came forth . . . and then another . . . a couple more . . . and crap now there are almost as many videos as swords!
 
So now it’s official. Well, maybe. It’s either the official unofficial or the unofficial official YouTube channel for Swordgate. Yes, Swordgate has gone multimedia in an entertainment conquering effort to control your minds with a visual and aural bombardment. Developed initially by freelance independent producer Critical Thinking, his early work caught the eye of S.I.R., the Swordgate Institute of Research, and a friendly takeover bid was made. S.I.R. has now invested deeply and the Critical Thinking Laboratory is up and running as a wholly owned subsidiary juggernaught.

Facts, fun, and frivolous, we take the three Fs seriously. No late night talk show clip intro required to build the plot or the characters. If you’re reading this, you probably know the saga so far. Best viewed in hi def on the big screens of PCs and Smart TVs. Coverage includes the anniversary party fun stuff, Sword & Sandals inspiration, recaps of analysis, database summaries, morphologic highlights, critiques, and there should be more to come. There’s almost 50 minutes of entertainment value. That’s like an entire season of new stuff in 15 episodes of Curse, or less time than one video by.........haha, never mind ....just kick back and enjoy!   ​

It's the end-of-semester crunch for many of us in the academic world. My Facebook feed is filled with posts by people who been grading for too long and finding too many cases of student plagiarism. The end of my road was easy this semester, as I taught a very pleasant field school populated by a good group of students. Having taught a 4/4 one year, I feel for all of you still slogging away.

I wanted to take a minute to write about two stories related to claims for sites of Middle Pleistocene age in two different corners of the world. Unless you're grading papers in a lead-lined underground bunker, you heard about the claim for a 130,000-year-old archaeological site in California that was published in Nature yesterday. That's the first one. The second one involves an age estimate of 250,000 for the Homo naledi remains first described in September of 2015. The first claim is buzz-worthy because of its extreme earliness (a good 115,000 years prior to what most archaeologists accept as good evidence for human entry into the Americas). The second claim is surprising for its lateness.  Let's do the second one first.

Homo naledi is Only 250,000 Years Old?

The announcement of Homo naledi and the results of the Rising Star Expedition made a huge splash in the fall of 2015 (I gave my take on it here). One of the main unresolved issues at the time of the initial announcement was that the remains were not dated.  The lack of an age estimate made it difficult to frame the analysis in terms of evolutionary relationships with other hominins and the implications of the claims that Homo naledi was burying its dead. If the remains are very early (say, close to 2 million years old . . . ), the claims for organized mortuary behavior are spectacular. If they're very late, the mosaic of primitive and derived features becomes very curious. 

Two days ago, the New Scientist ran a story titled "Homo naledi is Only 250,000 Years Old -- Here's Why that Matters."  Here is a quote from that piece:

"Today, news broke that Berger’s team has finally found a way to date the fossils. In an interview published by National Geographic magazine, Berger revealed that the H. naledi fossils are between 300,000 and 200,000 years old.
​
“This is astonishingly young for a species that still displays primitive characteristics found in fossils about 2 million years old, such as the small brain size, curved fingers, and form of the shoulder, trunk and hip joint,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London."

If you click on the link to the interview in National Geographic, you'll find that it leads to a photograph of a magazine page posted on Twitter by Colin Wren. I'm unable to access the original piece in National Geographic. I'm not quite sure what is going on, but presumably a formal publication explaining the age estimate is in the works and will be out soon. 

A 250,000 year age would, indeed, be surprising. Previous age estimates have ranged widely, from 900,000 years old  (based on dental and cranial metrics) to 2.5 to 2.8 million years old (based on overall anatomy). Age estimates based on the anatomical characteristics of the remains are problematic, obviously, as they rely on assumptions about the pattern, direction, and pace of evolutionary change that may not be correct. Hopefully the latest age estimates are independent of the anatomy (i.e., have a geological basis). This blog has some additional background.

And now on to the second one, which concerns . . .

A Middle Pleistocene Occupation of North America?

It's hard to know where to even start with this one. The claim is bold, the journal is prestigious, the popular press has been all over it, and the reaction from professionals has been swift and (as far as I can tell) overwhelmingly negative. The reactions I have seen among my colleagues and friends have been almost universally skeptical, ranging from amusement to mild outrage. I'll just summarize all that with gif I saw in an online discussion about the paper:

The claim centers around an assemblage of stones and mastodon bones that the authors interpret as unequivocal evidence of human activity in California at the Middle/Late Pleistocene transition (ca. 130,000 years ago). Here is the first part of the abstract of the Nature paper by Steven Holen and colleagues:

"The earliest dispersal of humans into North America is a contentious subject, and proposed early sites are required to meet the following criteria for acceptance: (1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context; (2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating; (3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and (4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context. Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum). The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion. The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial. Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum. 230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production." 

The 130,000 year-old date is way, way, way out there in terms of the accepted timeline for humans in the Americas. Does that mean the conclusions of the study are wrong? Of course not. And, honestly, I don't even necessarily subscribe to the often-invoked axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think ordinary, sound evidence works just fine most of the time when you're operating within a scientific framework. Small facts can kill mighty theories if you phrase your questions in the right way.

So how should we view claims like this one? For this claim to stand up, two main questions have to withstand scrutiny. First, is the material really that old? Second, is the material really evidence of human behavior?

If we accept the age of the remains, we're left with the second question about whether those remains show convincing evidence of human behavior. As you can see from the abstract, the claim for human activity has several components (modification of the bones, the presence and locations of stone cobbles interpreted as tools, etc.). The authors contention (p. 480) is that

​"Multiple bone and molar fragments, which show evidence of percussion, together with the presence of an impact notch, and attached and detached cone flakes support the hypothesis that human-induced hammerstone percussion was responsible for the observed breakage. Alternative hypotheses (carnivoran modification, trampling, weathering and fluvial processes) do not adequately explain the observed evidence (Supplementary Information 4). No Pleistocene carnivoran was capable of breaking fresh proboscidean femora at mid-shaft or producing the wide impact notch. The presence of attached and detached cone flakes is indicative of hammerstone percussion, not carnivoran gnawing (Supplementary Information 4). There is no other type of carnivoran bone modification at the CM site, and nor is there bone modification from trampling."

My impression is that most archaeologists are, like me, are skeptical that all other possible explanations for the stone and bone assemblage can be confidently rejected. I'm no expert on paleontology and taphonomy, but as I thought through the suggested scenario, I wondered how all the meat came off the bones before before the purported humans smashed them open with rocks. The authors state that there's no carnivore damage, and unless I missed it I didn't see any discussion of cutmarks left by butchering the carcass with stone tools. So where did the meat go? If it wasn't removed by animals (no carnivore marks) and wasn't removed by humans (no cutmarks) did it just rot away? If so, would the bones have still been "green" for humans to break them open?  

The absence of cut marks would be perplexing, as we have direct evidence that hominins have been using using sharp stone tools to butcher animals since at least 3.4 million years ago. The 23,000-year-old human occupation of Bluefish Cave in the Yukon is supported by . . . cutmarks. We know that Neandertals and other Middle Pleistocene humans had sophisticated tool kits that were used to cut both animal and plant materials.

Is it possible that pre-Clovis occupations in this continent extend far back into time?  Yes, I think it is. Does this paper convince me that humans messed around with a mastodon carcass in California at the end of the Middle Pleistocene?  No, it does not. 

Some of my friends seem angry that the paper was published. I have mixed feelings. I'm not at all convinced by what I've read so far, but I think claims like this serve a useful purpose whether or not they turn out to be correct. I can understand the concerns I've heard voiced about unfairness in the standards of evidence and argument that are acceptable at various levels of publication, but I also think there should always be room for making bold claims about the past as long as those claims have some basis in material evidence that can be independently evaluated. It will be interesting to see how the buzz over this paper plays out. Will other professionals carefully examine the remains and offer up their opinions? Will the claim be quickly dismissed and forgotten about?

One thing I can guarantee is that the "fringe" will be on the Cerutti Mastodon like a wet diaper:  they've already got a laundry list of "Neanderthal" remains from the New World (some buried in Woodland-age earthen mounds!) and "pre-Flood" sites into which they'll weave this report into. Maybe Bigfoot will even be implicated. Maybe the mastodon was killed by Atlanteans.
​
Onward.

Today was the last day of the 2017 field school. The woods has turned to a carpet of fresh poison ivy, the ticks were out in force, and the temperature cracked 90. Everyone pitched in for a group lunch, organized by Kate and facilitated by a George Foreman grill. Not a bad way to end a field season.

After the students exhausted the "upstairs" backdirt piles, they had to start trucking dirt in from below using a pair of wheelbarrows. New fill always subsides with time, so you have to mound the dirt up a bit to make sure the edges of the walls will remain protected. I'll be back to check on the fill job block after we get a good rain.

As for the "downstairs," we took some extra steps to reinforce the buttressing of the walls. In addition to the vertical sections of plywood braced by vertical and angled 2 x 4's, I used a series of horizontal 4 x 4's to anchor the wall along the top and and provide some protection to the "lip" of the wall. I salvaged the lumber from a decrepit playset that my kids and I dismantled in the backyard last week. The ends of the 4 x 4's are screwed into wooden stakes pounded into the ground.

After the buttressing was constructed, we buried the bottom outside portions with backdirt to provide support and protection. The students moved dirt up to the edge with the wheelbarrows, and we filled in the space between the landscape fabric (against the profile wall) and the plywood. Everything seemed to be holding together. I used more playset lumber to build up the edge, and we covered the whole thing in black plastic to keep water from rushing in behind it.

And now the real fun begins: lab work.  Over the course of the summer, I hope to get all the materials from the excavations washed and cataloged. I'll be working on some kind of report of the investigation and evaluating the next logical steps in terms of analysis, radiocarbon dates, and future work.

Overall, this field school went very well. I hope the 2017 field school was just the "tip of the spear" in terms of work at this site. We learned a great deal about the upper deposits present at 38FA608, and laboratory analysis will tell us a great deal more in the near future. The discovery of an intact Mack component is significant, as only a handful of other intact sites dating to this time period are known in the Carolina Piedmont. Following analysis of the materials recovered so far, we will be well-positioned to extract more information from the Mack component (including excavation of features) in the future. We'll then be able to explore below the Mack component in the "upstairs" block.

I also have plans to attempt -- soon -- a deep excavation "downstairs" to investigate what's beneath the deposits exposed in the profile wall. We know from the aborted Unit 7/10 excavation that: (1) there's cultural material down there; and (2) the lamellae stop but the sand continues. We also know that the matrix at that depth does not hold up well under even minor exposure to water: leaving units open down there (even protected by tarping, etc) for a week at a time was not a successful strategy. My plan to probe the deeper deposits of the site hinges on having several sequential excavation days to push down as quickly as possible into the sand. I'll keep you posted.

Day 13 saw us continue down the path toward wrapping up our excavations for the semester. The "upstairs" is going along willingly, the "downstairs" . . . not so much.

As I wrote last week, we wrapped up level excavations in Unit 4 and 6 and had just a few loose ends (final scraping and mapping of floor, etc.) in Unit 5. Today's goals were to finish the level excavations in Unit 5 and document the walls of the block by photographing and making profile drawings.  I took my own notes on the sediments in the profiles and collected a charcoal sample from one of the probable features exposed in the floor of Unit 4. The block was crowded.

Profile drawings are key to understanding the deposits from which we removed artifacts. It is often easier to understand the stratigraphy in profile (i.e., in a vertical plane) than in plan (as you're excavating through it). This is very true at this site, where the loose sand dries out quickly and makes it more difficult to move in the unit without disturbing artifacts and obscuring variation in the exposed sediments.

Drawing a profile uses many of the same skills the students learned while piece-plotting artifacts and making horizontal maps. The big difference is that one of the dimensions is elevation. The traditional way of drawing a profile is to establish a level line along the plane that you're drawing, measuring in everything in relation to that line. Setting a level line is simply a matter of stretching a string tightly between two anchoring points (typically gutter spikes or chaining pins), using a simple mason's line level to make the string level. ​

By the end of the day, the students had completed all the work in the "upstairs" block and had gotten much of the backfilling done. To protect the floors and walls until I can open the excavation again, we lined everything with landscape fabric and placed pieces of chipboard along the walls. The landscape fabric provides a marker between what's been excavated and what hasn't and, unlike plastic, allows water to pass through. The purpose of the vertical wood panels is to allow us to shovel right up to the walls when the fill is removed in the future. The whole enterprise will be filled and buried.

While everything went smoothly in the "upstairs," the "downstairs" portion of the site continued to fight back. DuVal and I visited the site mid-week to deliver a load of lumber for building the buttressing that will protect the profile wall until I can return to it again. I took that opportunity to try to salvage a decent photo of the deposits exposed in the wall after the collapse -- DuVal and I scraped it as best we could and waited for the sun to move to provide natural shade (early afternoon). It's not a perfect picture, but it wasn't a perfect situation. 

On Friday, Jim Legg completed his profile drawing of the intact north wall of Unit 9 and drew the profile exposed by the wall collapse. You can't really tell from the photo, but the surface is fairly irregular. In order to make it possible to build a wooden structure to protect the profile from further damage, I had some students cut back some portions of the lower zones to produce a surface closer to a vertical plane.  We screened the sediment. I was hoping that perhaps we'd finally get a diagnostic artifact from those lower zones. But, alas, no.

By the end of the day this coming Friday, the excavated portion of the "downstairs" profile wall will be protected behind wooden buttressing, one way or another. We'll line the wall with landscape fabric, install vertical wooden panels, and then fill the space between the two with sand. It would have been a lot easier to do this, of course, if the Unit 9 wall had not collapsed. The more irregular the wall, the more sand is required to fill in the spaces. More sand means more pressure on the wall, which requires more strength. The Unit 1 and 2 walls were already uneven, and the bottom part of the reconstructed buttressing there suffered a blowout during backfilling. I think we'll end up piling sand on the bottom portion of the buttressing to counter-act the pressure pushing outward. If there's one thing we have a lot of, it's sand.

Finally, I was happy to get a group photo with everyone in it. Good job, 2017 Broad River Archaeological Field School!

If you've ever wanted to see the stuff I make but were afraid to ask, I invite you to come and have a look at Tapp's Art Center in Columbia, South Carolina. Pretty much everything I've done recently will be on display, including all the large sculptures that currently occupy my backyard. As long as we can do it without anyone getting hurt, we're going to haul them out of the garden and onto a pickup truck for a trip downtown. That should be fun.

I've spent a significant chunk of my discretionary time over the last month trying to get things ready to go. I fixed the rabbit's head, built a wooden base for the T-rex, finished the heron, and applied Penetrol to a couple of the outdoor pieces that I hope to sell. I still need to spiff up my giant dragonfly and my first triceratops and sign many of the pieces. All the small stuff is mostly ready to go.

I'm currently working on another large piece that I originally hoped I could complete in time for the show, but I don't think it's going to happen. I don't want to rush it.

Here is the description I wrote for the show:

This is the first time I've done anything like this. It's a strange feeling.

Here is the event on Facebook. If you're in the area, I hope you can stop by and support the arts in Columbia.

This is going to be a short one, as I'm multi-tasking my way through a chaotic end-of-semester soup. I wanted to add a little information as a follow-up to Jason Colavito's post yesterday discussing a continuing education course about Bigfoot offered at Centralia College in Washington state.  The course ("The Old Ones, the First Americans") is being taught by Mitchel Townsend, whose claims about Bigfoot evidence I briefly discussed last June. Thanks to the miracle of social media, I have now learned that Townsend is actually, apparently . . .

Dr. Johnny Dagger, Bigfoot Tracker!

I was made aware of Townsend's alter ego by Steven Streufert, who pointed me to his blog post from June of 2015.

Have a look at this KickStarter page where Dr. Dagger attempted to raise $35,000 to "solve the mystery of Bigfoot once and for all:

"Dr. Jonny Dagger is a US Army Special Operations Trained NCO with 12 years of service. He additionally holds several Graduate degrees from world renowned Universities. Finally, he teaches Bigfoot courses at the college level. The only college professor in the world who designs and teaches these courses. He has the skill, experience, and abilities to solve this mystery once and for all with your help!!"

There: a ten minute blog post with thousands of loose ends to pursue. You're welcome.

If you've ever done any kind of fieldwork, you know that collecting data out in the real world is different from collecting data in the lab.  You control what you can control, but the real world will always be unpredictable and sloppy in ways that are usually not helpful.  An important part of learning to do field archaeology is learning to plan, anticipate, prepare, and quickly adjust to figure out how to meet your goals even when the real world doesn't seem to want to cooperate.

Yesterday was one of those days when the real world threw us an elbow.

For the most part, things have been going surprisingly smoothly during this field school: the students have been great, the information we're collecting is of significant value, and we've barely lost any time to weather. As I wrote last week, I formulated a plan to wind down and close things out in good order over the remaining field days. Some parts of that plan still hold. Other parts now require substantial re-working. 

Let's do the good news first.

In the "upstairs' excavation block, Units 4 and 6 and have been leveled off at 100 cmbd (centimeters below datum), the base of level 8. There is lot of material in the floor at this depth that will have to wait until excavations are re-opened at some point in the future. Additionally, the final floor scrape revealed several roughly circular areas of darker, charcoal-flecked sediment that are almost certainly the tops of cultural features. Large pieces of fire-cracked rock are scattered around on the floors of the units. 

Unit 5 is also coming to a close. The base of that unit will rest at 80 cmbd.  The large rocks in the floor will remain until the next time the unit is opened.

And now for the bad news.

The beautiful 3m-long profile wall that Jim Legg has been working on all semester suffered a major collapse while we were gone during the week.  It doesn't look to me like the severe weather we had on Wednesday had anything to do with the collapse: there was no evidence that water had come in from the top or eroded the wall at the bottom. It appears, rather, as though the soft sands of Zones 3 and 4 just decided they didn't want to be on the wall anymore. They may have lost their cohesion as they dried out, sloughing off about 25-50 cm of the wall into a large pile of slump.

The collapse came at a particularly painful time, as we were planning cleaning and photographing the entire 5m profile that morning in preparation for drawing the whole thing. I was even planning on taking the field school photograph with the beautiful profile wall as a backdrop.  Obviously, a change of plans was required both for the day and for the field school exit strategy.

The first thing to do was deal with the sediment from the collapse. We moved some screens into place and pulled some students from the "upstairs" block to move and screen the dirt. Even though the artifacts were now out of vertical context, anything in the slump still has the potential to tell us something about the occupations of the site (we still don't have any diagnostic artifacts from context in the lower deposits, for example, so an Archaic projectile point from the slump would help us understand the sequence of deposits even if we didn't know exactly where it came from). We went ahead and chopped out the overhanging near-surface sediments, as their presence would make protecting the profile more difficult.

The profile of Units 1 and 2 (protected behind plywood since last May) still needed to be dealt with, and the north wall of Unit 9 was intact. DuVal and I removed my plywood buttressing from the Unit 1/2 wall and found that it was pretty much as I left it, which was a relief. Also, the nest of snakes that I had dreamed would be behind the wall was absent. Jim Legg scraped down that surface (which was partly excavated on the 1000 E line and partly a concave surface left by the original machine excavation) and two students made a profile drawing after we photographed it in the afternoon.

Needless to say, the circumstances we faced yesterday in the field were not what I would have chosen. My vision of having that entire 5m profile all open and clean at once decisively (and literally) collapsed. It's a setback, of course, but in reality we didn't lose that much information. As it stands now, the 3m profile can still be cleaned, photographed, and described in a way that will add significantly to what we know about the deposits at the site and provide context to the artifacts recovered through the excavation of Unit 9. It won't be as nice as having a profile all along the 1000 E line, but I'm not sure it will make a whole lot of difference in the long run. I'm formulating a plan for dealing with the profile that will allow me to securely protect it until I can return to it with a crew again and get it all in good shape for the future.

On another "glass half full" note, I want to say that I was very happy with the way my students handled themselves yesterday. I asked several of them to switch gears several different times to help out as we dealt with the collapse and the aftermath. They all responded, pitched in, and helped when and where requested. The students "upstairs" finishing up the block units did almost everything on their own, from uncovering the units in the morning to covering them back up at the end of day. I went up there sporadically to assess things, make strategic decisions, and give tactical advice.  But for the most part they did it themselves. As a teacher, it's a great feeling to see them at this level of competence and independence -- they've come a long way from what they could do on that first day we went out there. That's a win.

It's the end of March, which means the dogwoods are blooming, the dragonflies are back, and it's time to start sweating. After an early morning thunderstorm, the temperature cracked 80 degrees on Friday.

As I wrote last week, the last days of this endeavor will be devoted to collecting some final, crucial pieces of information and then buttoning up the site so that the deposits are protected until we're ready to excavate again.

In the "upstairs" block, it's now evident that excavations in Units 4 and 6 will terminate at the base of level 8 (100 cm below datum [cmbd]). I had hoped to get one more 10 cm level done in those units, but the density of artifacts to piece-plot has not decreased and the best thing to do is to aim for a good ending with a flat floor at the end of the levels.  

We're also preparing for the endgame in the "downstairs" portion of the site. Jim Legg finished his excavation of Unit 9, exposing a full 3 m of clean, plumb profile wall. On our next day in the field we'll dismantle the wooden buttressing that has been protecting the 2 m section of wall to the south of Unit 9. We'll clean and document the entire 5 m at once. It will probably take most of a day to prep and photograph the wall, and at least another day to draw and describe everything.

In conjunction with analysis of the artifacts excavated from the "upstairs" units and Units 8 and 9, the new wall profile will help us add considerable detail to our understanding of how this landform developed and change through time. I'm hoping to have money for several radiocarbon dates to help nail down the absolute chronology of the upper 2.2 meters of deposits.

What lies below the exposed profile remains an open question. The excavation of Unit 7 demonstrated both that artifacts are present and the lamellae cease within about 60 cm of the base of the profile. I had hoped to take Unit 7 down farther to get a better look at what's down there, but water damaged the unit two weeks in a row. The sand is very loose, and the ground surface at the base of the profile is the lowest spot around.  Water collects in the area during a heavy rain, and it takes very little water to erode the unit walls. After deciding that a "deep look" would require a concerted effort that would us to excavate quickly and continuously, we lined the remains of Unit 7 with landscape fabric and filled it back in. I hope to return a later date with a small crew and make a concerted effort to go deep and see if there's an Early Archaic component hiding down there.

I finally got around to making a 3D model of the hilt of the infamous Design Toscano sword (Fake Hercules Sword No. 5 in the database). That brings the total number of models we have to five, a number large enough (I think) to contemplate doing some comparative analysis of the models. That analysis will have to wait until I've got a little more free time (or, one of you out there in Swordgate land could have a go at it -- all the models are downloadable). In the mean time, enjoy the new model!