I'm sorry to announce that the field school did not make it into the field last Friday. Having spent the entire week dealing with the flu in our household, I was worn out and probably still contagious. It would not have been responsible of me to expose my students to the virus, so I made the executive decision to stand down for the week.

In lieu of going in the field, I gave the students a three part reading assignment to help them understand the context of what we're doing at 38FA608:

Part 1: Review last season’s fieldwork

Please read through my weekly blog posts (listed here) from last season’s excavations to familiarize yourself with what we did and why we did it that way. This will help you better understand the purpose of what you are doing in this year’s excavations.

Part 2: Familiarize yourself with basic vocabulary used to describe sediments and basic concepts of sediment deposition and soil formation

Please read the following two documents online, keeping in mind what you know so far about the site where we are working: “Guide to Texture by Feel” (USDA) and “Soil Formation” (LSU). Being able to competently identify and describe sediments and understand what differences in color and texture might mean is important to being a good excavator.

Part 3: Understand the general geomorphological setting of 38FA608

Please read this short article on natural levees and have a look at this paper about the formation of lamellae in sandy sediments. The lamellae paper is fairly technical, so don’t be discouraged: try to understand what the authors are saying about the formation of lamellae (which we have in abundance at 38FA608 in the deeper zones) and what they might be telling us.

Last year, I wrote a blog post after every day of field school. This year I'm going to try something different. My plan is to create a short (5-10 minute) video that shows and describes our activities each day in the field. While the blog posts were useful for both research and public communication (and I plan to write when I need to talk about particular things in more detail), I think I might be able to expand my audience by making our work accessible through video. 

I hope to have a video from each Friday posted by the following Monday on my YouTube channel. Here's the first installment. Enjoy!

I recently announced the return of the Broad River Archaeological Field School for the spring semester of 2018.  Student registration begins in November, and the logistical and strategic wheels are in motion.

This week I received radiocarbon dating results from two samples I submitted to Beta Analytic. Radiocarbon dates are not cheap (about $600 for an AMS analysis that returns an age estimate from a very small sample), and I am grateful to a private donor who supplied funds to date one of the samples from 38FA608.

Here are the date results on a generalized figure of the stratigraphy at 38FA608 as I currently understand it (based on profiles of Units 1, 2, 9, 11, and the original machine cut):​ 

The date for Zone 7 -- from a single piece of charcoal that Jim Legg picked out of the profile of Unit 9 -- came back right at the Middle/Late Archaic transition. It's a date that's consistent with Zone 7 being related to the Guilford point fragments that we've gotten from the site (only one of which has actually been found in situ).  Thus my original suspicion of a Middle Archaic age for Zone 7 is supported.

The date for the Zone 19 sample, however . . . was a bit of a surprise. It also came back as Middle Archaic in age, about 700-800 calendar years older than Zone 7.

I only wrote briefly about Unit 11, which I and several volunteers put in after field school to get our first good look at what is beneath the deposits exposed by the original machine cut.  There wasn't much material until we neared the boundary of a seasonal water table. Right above that, there were some large cobbles and a very light scattering of small, angular quartz fragments. As I wrote back in May, none of the cobbles appears to have been modified (at least based on a macro inspection), and none of the pieces of angular quartz is a slam dunk for a human-made stone tool. Other than human deposition, however, I can't think of a good explanation for how that material got there -- it is so unlike its sandy matrix in terms of size that it could not have been transported by the same mechanism.

I dated a single piece of charcoal plucked from the wall of Unit 11 (FS 1318) from a zone beneath the "cultural" material in an attempt to learn something about where those deposits might be in time. Given what seemed to be a fairly regular accumulation of the sand from the Middle Archaic though the Woodland period, I was expecting an Early Holocene rather than a Middle Holocene age -- I thought we might be looking at the edge of an Early Archaic deposit. 

​There are two main possibilities for the date: (1) it accurately dates the age of Zone 19; or (2) it doesn't.

It's possible that that piece of charcoal worked it's way down through the sand from a higher elevation, perhaps through bioturbation (movement by animals or roots). There's no obvious signs of intrusion from where the sample was taken, but that doesn't mean much in these old sands: we wouldn't necessarily expect that subtle signs of intrusion would be discernible in these kinds of sediments after 6000 years. 

So the date could be "bad" in the sense that it isn't giving us the age of the deposit. I think it's entirely possible, however, that it is accurate. While the idea of a slow and steady accumulation of sand over the course of the Archaic is appealing, there's no reason to assume that that's how it went down. It's possible that rates of deposition varied. The levee could have aggraded more rapidly during the Middle Holocene, perhaps as a function of both Middle Holocene climate and the lower elevation of the existing surface at that time (making it easier for the landform to be over-topped by flood waters). 

If Zone 19 really dates to around 4700 BC, the deposits in Zone 15 could be related to a deeply-buried Morrow Mountain occupation. 

Investigating the deep deposits at 38FA608 is a top priority for excavations in the spring. Stay tuned!

I'm happy to announce that I'll be teaching an archaeological field school again during the Spring semester. We'll be returning to site 38FA608 in Fairfield County, South Carolina, for a second season of fieldwork.  The course will be listed as ANTH 322 (722 for graduate students) and the basic details will remain the same: every Friday from 8:00-4:00, transportation provided.  You can learn all about last year's adventures through blog posts on the Broad River Archaeological Field School website and through a summary article in Legacy.

The Spring 2017 field season helped us learn a tremendous amount about the natural and cultural deposits at 38FA608. The discovery of a buried Mack (Late Archaic/Early Woodland, ca. 2000 BC) component was one of the big surprises. There is also evidence of a slightly earlier Savannah River component (perhaps represented by several intact pit features). There are tantalizing suggestions of a deeply-buried component that could date to the Early Archaic period.  The basic laboratory processing of the materials from 2017 has been completed, and I'm working on an analysis as time permits. I sent to radiocarbon samples off to Beta Analytic last week (one from the deeply buried zone that I'm betting is Middle Archaic in age, and one from the lowest zone exposed in our post-field school Unit 11 excavations last May).

The 2017 field season has set us up very nicely for work in 2018.  My two main goals are to: (1) excavate several of the pit features that almost certainly belong to the Mack and/or Savannah River components; and (2) make a more extensive exploration of the deep deposits.  The feature excavations will involve both re-opening and expanding the "upstairs" block as well as working along the profile wall to salvage the features that were exposed by the old machine cut.  Investigating the deep component will require some engineering to protect ongoing work from water, both from above and flowing into the air. I've got a plan for that and it involves sandbags.  We are, after all, not lacking in sand.  

I've got some strategic, monetary, and logistical issues to work out before January. I'll keep you posted as my plans develop and as analysis of the 2017 materials moves along.  In the meantime, here's a quick diagram illustrating what I have in mind.

I've spent the last couple of weeks on a family vacation to northeast Ohio, southeast Michigan, and the Upper Peninsula. I'm back in Columbia now, armed with a long mental list of things I'd like to do and talk about over the next few months. As I know from past experience that my eyes are often bigger than my stomach, I'll keep the specific list to myself for now. I'll just say it includes some real archaeology, some fake "archaeology," some ecological observations, some politics, some music, some art stuff, and possibly some ponderings about a spaceship cult.

Here's some real archaeology to start.

With the Spring 2017 semester in the books, I have developed an allergy to firing up my laptop. I apologize if you wrote me an email and I didn't answer. 

Anyway, I've got all sorts of things worth writing about but very little desire to actually spend time writing about them.  So I'll just post some highlight blurbs and photos.

38FA608: What's in the Basement?

I spent last week with several student volunteers (I named them Deep Team 11) excavating a unit in the "downstairs" portion of 38FA608 (the site of the Broad River Archaeological Field School). The goal of the excavation was to learn something about what lies beneath the deposits exposed in the deep profile. If you followed along with my weekly blog posts during field school, you know that we made two attempts to excavate units (Units 7 and 10) below the wall. The area near the wall is artificially low and the matrix is soft sand: water that collected during two heavy rains significantly damaged both units and I gave up trying to excavate there on a one-day-per-week schedule. 

Our new unit (Unit 11) was a 2 x 1.5 m unit that articulated with the previously damaged unit. We had four straight days without rain and managed to get down about 80 cm below the existing surface. We hit an interesting sediment change beneath the lamellae, getting into a zone with more clay and very distinct grey/orange mottles that (I presume) were likely associated with seasonally-shifting wet/dry conditions. Right at that transition, we encountered a scatter of large rocks and several pieces of angular quartz in a relatively thin horizontal zone. On first look in the field, none of these items appeared to be unequivocally modified by humans, but I have yet to think of a better explanation for how they got there. We'll see once we get everything washed up. I'm considering pulling the trigger to date a piece of charcoal from the lowest sediment zone, which would at least help nail down the early end of the top 3 m of deposits in the levee. ​

R.I.P., Chris Cornell

I don't usually get too emotional about celebrities passing away, but this morning's announcement of the death of Chris Cornell was like getting punched in the gut. To me, he was a rare bird with an amazing combination of technical ability, vision, creativity, ferocity, and nuance. Badmotorfinger (1991) is on the short list of albums that really changed how I felt about music and art: it was on heavy rotation for many years of my life. My friend and former bandmate Nadine commented on Facebook this morning that Cornell was "one of my best teachers." I would echo that. He went for it, all the time. He pushed, he explored. Sometimes you "miss" when you're out on the edge, but that's what happens when you're out on the edge. And being out there is part of being an artist. He was only 52 and had tornadoes of good music left in him. I've been playing his music all morning with a lump in my throat.

My wife has been out of town this week, so I've been holding down the home front on my own. I've used almost every scrap of time in the 4-5 between when I get the kids to school in the morning and when I have to switch gears to pick them back up again to work in my garage.  I've been indulging myself, and I've been making a lot of stuff. I'd rather spend the time making things then writing about them, so here are a few pictures of what I've been working on.

I'll Drink to That

Like much of the free world, I breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Robert Mueller had been appointed Special Counsel to head the Russia/Trump investigation. My understanding is that things will probably go dark for a while as he takes over and does his job. I had a choice of two bottles of wine to open last night. Guess which one I picked.

Brood VI . . . Tip of the Spear

Yesterday as I was working outside I heard my first cicada of the season. This is supposed to be an emergence year for Brood VI of the 17-year cicada.  I don't really know what to expect other than it could be deafening. The  regular annual cicadas were louder than crap our last two summers here. I'll keep you posted.

Century Plant About to Bloom 

In other local wildlife news, there is a century plant a few blocks from my house that is about to bloom. The kids and I have been watching it for weeks as it sent its giant, asparagus-like shoot into the sky. I can report that there are lots of buds up there. I've never seen one of these things blooming in person before. I'll take a picture when the blessed event occurs. Hopefully no-one will run the thing over before then.

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 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.