I'm happy to announce that my archaeological field school is on the books again for the Spring 2020 semester. Assuming everything goes according to plan, I'll be taking students to excavate at 38FA608 each Friday next semester, beginning in mid January and running through April. I plan to once again produce weekly videos and have the students write blog posts.

I have several goals for the 2020 season. First, I plan to continue straightening "the wall" by excavating a Unit in the vicinity of Unit 13 (excavated in 2018). Unit 13 gave us our first real look at the Savannah River component of the site, producing several points in situ and a complex of deposits that included a shallow pit feature and several possible posts. At this point we know the stratigraphic location of the Savannah River component, at least in the "wall" portion of the site.  I'm hoping that an additional unit will help boost our sample of Late Archaic diagnostics as well as recover more detailed information about the components pre- and post-dating the Savannah River component. 

Second, I will continue work in the block. With removal last season of the two discrete features exposed in the floors of Units 4 and 6, we're set to continue pushing downward. One of the features was radiocarbon dated to Savannah River times, and we have a Savannah River point from the screen. While it's possible that the Mack and Savannah River components are somewhat mixed, the dated feature suggests we may already be below the Late/Terminal Archaic Mack component. It's possible that we'll hit a relatively heavy Savannah River component to match was discovered in the wall unit. It's also possible that the Savannah River component in the block is relatively light, and perhaps already mostly or partially removed. Lower than the Savannah River component, the next component that we know exists at the site is Middle Archaic in age (Guilford). It will be interesting to see what comes next in the block.

Three of the block units (Units 3, 5, and 12) are still above the Mack component. Work will continue in one or more of those units.

Thirdly, we will be searching for the Early Holocene component at the site. Two Early Archaic projectile points have been recovered from the site vicinity: one from the dirt road and one from the disturbed area immediately adjacent to where we have been excavating. Given that we know Middle Archaic materials are deeply buried at 38FA608, the presence of Early Archaic diagnostics suggests that buried Early Archaic deposits exist there also. We may have first encountered these with the excavation of Unit 11 after the close of the 2018 season. I applied for and received an internal grant from USC to fund a professional excavation in the "basement" area of the site to search for Early Holocene and/or Late Pleistocene deposits. That excavation will be concurrent with the field school.

I would like to once again thank those that contributed to the GoFundMe campaign I organized to support the 2019 season of the field school. As I have already discussed, that field school didn't happen. With the blessing of the donors, I retained the money donated for the 2019 effort. I have used a portion of the money to support the creation of 3D models of the lithic tools we've recovered from the site so far (many of the models are available on this page of the Broad River Archaeological Field School website), but the large majority will be used to support this field school. I plan to use the money to hire two people as staff and purchase the requisite expendable supplies.

Stay tuned!

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.

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. 

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.

I wanted to pass on the online version of this article ("The Fine Scale of Time" by Megan Sexton) that ran in the USC Times earlier this fall. It's a short piece about my work at 38FA608.  The photo is me examining some of the conjoining lithic debris from the Guilford-age deposit at the site. Enjoy!

For those of you that enjoyed the weekly videos from last spring's Broad River Archaeological Field School, I wanted to make you aware of this compilation of the entire season into a single 2:16 presentation. It will be a good refresher for me to watch the whole thing, as I'll be spending much of this semester working on analysis and write-up of the data from the first two seasons of work at 38FA608. Enjoy!

The second full season at 38FA608 is in the books. Last Friday, we backfilled the block (almost) and finished up with Unit 13 (excavated one last level and re-drew the profile to include the lower deposits). Chris Moore and Mark Brooks visited the site to enjoy JJ's fish fry and collect a column of sediment samples from the profile. We recovered a Morrow Mountain point in context in the last level of Unit 13, in the "correct" position below the Guilford component.

We didn't have time to get everything buttressed up, so DuVal and I will spend tomorrow putting the site to bed and schlepping equipment back to campus.

Cheerwine is now the official drink of the Broad River Archaeological Field School.

At some point I'll probably edit all the videos together to make a feature-length film to show to next year's students.

This was a good group of students and I'm proud of all of them. Enjoy the video of our last day in the field!

Tomorrow will be our last day in the field at 38FA608. Last Friday we finished excavating the features in the block and got Unit 13 almost down to where it needs to be. Tomorrow we'll backfill the block and collect final information from the profile exposed by Unit 13. We may not have time to get everything done during the day, so I'll probably have to finish up when I go out next week to break down the toolbox and grab the screens, etc.

If you like snakes, you'd love 38FA608 this time of year.

Enjoy the video! 

We've only got two more days left in the spring 2018 season at 38FA608. The weather looks good for this Friday, so I may end up threading the needle with yet another season with no time lost to rain.

While we're in good shape to finish up in the block on Friday, Unit 13 is going slower than I'd hoped. It just won't stop being interesting. As you will see in the video from Week 11, I took two students out for an extra day to work on the Late Archaic deposits and try to keep things moving along. There is still work to be done before we reach the Middle Archaic zone, and there's no telling what we'll run into down there. If the broad pattern of field archaeology holds, we'll find something extremely interesting this Friday that will bring the whole endeavor to a screeching halt.

The video for Week 11 is a long one, as it includes footage from an extra field day. I resisted the temptation to pose on a lawn chair in the back of the pickup truck. Enjoy!

We're officially in the "end times" of this season's fieldwork at 38FA608. After last Friday, we have just two more days to actively excavate at the site (the students will be doing lab work while I'm at the SAA meetings, and the last day will be reserved for buttoning things up and backfilling).

We made good progress last Friday, ending the day with Features 11 and 12 exposed in profile. Feature 11 is a relatively deep, midden-filled pit, while Feature 12 is a shallow basin associated with some large pieces of fire-cracked rock. As I'll discuss at some point in the future, both of these kinds of features are well-known from sites of similar age. Analysis of the contents of the features will help us understand activities at the site as well as refine the chronology of site occupation. 

As you can see in the video, Unit 13 refuses to stop becoming more interesting. Both of the Savannah River points from Friday came from an area of slightly darker sediment that is probably a feature. I'm planning on spending tomorrow working at the site with a couple of volunteers to keep things moving along in Unit 13.

I'm happy to report that my campaign to raise money to support next year's field school has passed a quarter of the goal of $4000. My sincere thanks go to Mike Morgan, Ken Kosidlo, and two anonymous donors for their generous contributions and support.

Enjoy the video!

I've started a GoFundMe campaign to support the planned 2019 season at 38FA608. If you've been following along with my blog posts, the students' blog posts, and the videos from this year, you have some sense of the value of sustaining the work at this site. We've shown that site 38FA608 preserves an extraordinarily fine-grained record of human behavior dating back at least 6,000 years.  The archaeological deposits protected within the levee provide a rare opportunity to understand the activities of individuals and small groups deep into South Carolina’s past and integrate those data into the larger narrative of Eastern Woodlands prehistory. They also provide a wonderful opportunity to educate students and the public in the use and importance of careful and systematic field methods to understand the human past. 

The site is the real deal.

I would like to keep the field school going as a yearly spring offering through the University of South Carolina.  To do that, two main things need to happen:

(1) student enrollment needs to be sufficient;

(2) I need to have funds to support the work.

After two seasons of work at the site, I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to be successful out there in terms of supplies, equipment, time, energy, and strategy. An important component of what I've been doing is hiring some experienced help to manage working in the two areas of the site (the block and the wall) at the same time. This year I hired one of the students from the 2017 season to act as a kind of "field sergeant," helping with direction, basic instruction, and quality control in one of the excavation areas. It helps with continuity, and also helps that student get some supervisory experience. I plan to continue that in the future (with different students).

I set up the GoFundMe with a goal of $4000.  That money will be used to : 

(1) pay a student field assistant ($1190); 

(2) pay student lab workers ($1280); 

(3) purchase expendable equipment and supplies to continue stabilizing the site ($557); and 

(4) rent a vehicle to transport students to/from the site ($973). 

Specific research goals for the 2019 season will be developed as materials and information from the 2018 season are processed, analyzed, and integrated with those from the 2017 season. My suspicion that there is a Late Archaic (ca. 2000 BC) house at the site grows stronger as the 2018 work continues (more on that later).

Sustained, publicly-accessible research on sites like 38FA608 has the potential to address numerous interesting questions as well as engage the community and help educate the next generation of southeastern archaeologists. Please consider contributing to these goals if you value our work and would like to see it continue.

Thank you!

Last Friday's fieldwork was eventful. With just a few days left in the field, we are down into the nitty-gritty of the feature excavations intended to recover detailed data about the Late Archaic (ca. 4000-1000 BC) occupations at the site. Last year's work in the block revealed the presence of a significant Mack component (dating to around 1000 BC) and hinted at the existence of an earlier Savannah River component (dating to around 2000 BC) in close vertical proximity. Although we won't know which features go with which component until we excavate and analyze them, Friday's work gave us some important clues. Enjoy the video!

You can find all the videos from the 2018 season on the Broad River Archaeological Field School website.