Category: Archaeology

Get Caught Up on the Field School!

3/4/2020

It's been a pretty busy spring. I've been working on papers, keeping things going in my lab, and teaching the field school. I just got back from a visit to Texas A & M, where I gave two presentations dealing with my work on Paleoindian and Early Archaic demography, complex systems theory, etc. It was a good visit and I'll write more about it if I get a chance.

Last week was Day 7 of the Broad River Archaeological field school. If you haven't been following along, you can catch up with the videos here. We have been battling a wet spring in several different ways, but overall it's going well. We're making good progress on the excavation and things are going pretty smoothly considering the various challenges we've faced this semester. Things will likely continue to get more complicated as we get farther down in the units and into more complex deposits.

We've also got a good luck charm this year. It may look creepy, but it says "good luck charm" right there on it, so . . .

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Update: Friday Night Omnibus News Dump Edition

1/25/2019

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It has been a busy few weeks. As usual, I have more topics than time. At this point, I'm going to just accept that my blog sometimes functions as an open access journal. Here is the bullet point version of what I've been up to. We'll do art first, then archaeology.

Two Crows Named "Desire"

Flavia and I finished the crows we were making for each other. I love the one she made me (it's going to go in my office), and I'm pretty happy with what I made for her. Here are some pictures of my "Desire." There's a lot I could say about it, but it's Friday night and time to move on.

Me and Flavia with our crows.

The Jasper Artist of the Year Is . . . Not Me

As I wrote in December, I was one of three finalists nominated for Jasper Artist of the Year (in the visual arts category). The awards ceremony was last Friday. I did not win the award: that honor went to Trahern Cook. I met some new people, drank some wine, and had a good time (the picture above was taken there). Congratulations to all the winners!

New Pieces Over the Holidays

In addition to "Desire," I completed several other smallish pieces over the holiday break.

"Left Behind" is small rabbit made mostly from debris I collected in Gainesville, Florida, at last spring's TAG conference.

"Pretender" was a wedding gift for my friend Whitney and her new husband (congratulations and sorry I haven't mailed it yet!).

"Crow" was a quickie. As promised in my post about "Kiss Goodbye," I'm looking to move on. I threw out my rule book and I really liked the result. The king is dead, long live the king.

Fact Bucket Videos: Six Down, One to Go

I'm still working to finish up editing the student videos from my Forbidden Archaeology class last semester. I finished one on Atlantis last week and one on pyramids today. You can find them on my YouTube channel, along with videos about my archaeological fieldwork and my art.

New Grant For Collections Work

I'm happy to announce that I have received grant monies from the Archaeological Research Trust to continue inventorying and preliminary analysis of chipped stone projectile points from the Larry Strong Collection. You may remember me writing about working with the Early Archaic materials a while ago. I'm still working with those (more on that later), but now I'm going to move on in time and process the Middle and Late Archaic stuff. Part of the rationale is that I'll be dealing with those time periods in the materials we've been excavated at the field school.

South Carolina Archaeology Class: We're Making a Movie

I'm teaching South Carolina Archaeology (ANTH 321) this semester. The class is bigger than in years past. That's good from an enrollment standpoint, but a challenge from a teaching standpoint. In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to build in a class video project. We'll be making a video attempting to showcase the archaeology of this state. I've divided the students up into groups and given them topics (mostly organized chronologically) that they're responsible for. They're going to research their topics and develop proposals about what issues, artifacts, sites, and people should be included the video. Then we'll take it from there.

Go Deep!

Today I submitted a grant proposal for systematic exploratory work on the deep deposits at 38FA608 (the field school site). We know now several things about the sediments below the Middle Archaic zones: (1) they're deep; (2) they're Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene in age; and (3) they contain artifacts. I don't believe I've mentioned it publicly, but I submitted a sample for OSL data from the deepest stratum we've documented so far (about 5m below the original surface) and it returned a result around the Last Glacial Maximum. Also, we've found an Early Archaic Kirk point in a disturbed part of the site. What all that means is that the landform did indeed exist at the end of the last Ice Age and (minimally) Early Archaic peoples were using it. In other words, there's a really good potential for some very high integrity buried archaeology there. Fingers crossed.

Other News

In other news . . . our 2003 4Runner finally suffered a terminal injury. And I'm tearing out our rotted deck. And I've started working a rabbit sculpture that's big enough to sit on. It will have a tractor seat. And a gear shift. And a dashboard.

And now you are up to date.

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Week 7 Field School Video

3/5/2018

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I spent my morning putting together the video of last Friday's field work. The work continue to go well, even as things become more and more complicated. We've started dealing with the Late Archaic features, the excavation of which is my primary research goal this semester. I had to rush a bit on the editing of this one for personal reasons, but it's done and posted. Enjoy!

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Get Caught Up on the Field School!

Update: Friday Night Omnibus News Dump Edition

Week 7 Field School Video

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