I have four quick updates to pass on today: two about archaeology and two about art.

If I was subtitling these posts, I'd call this one "A Tale of Two Plowzones?"

One of the main things we learned last week is that the upper sediment zone at the site is, indeed, a plowzone. Clear plow scars were present at the interface of zones 1 and 2 at the base of zone 1 in Unit 9 (the 1m x 3m unit being excavated to create a straight profile wall). In Unit 9, the plowzone was about 28 cm thick. 

With information from Unit 9 in hand, I hoped we'd be able to easily identify the same light-to-dark interface marking the base of the plowzone in the block units. Level 2 in Units 4 an 6 was targted to end at 50 cm below datum (cmbd), still within the upper zone. For level 3 in both of those units, we were able to easily discern the darker sediments immediately beneath the plowzone and excavate level 3 as a natural level, using trowels and shovels to remove the lighter plowzone sediment. I had the students in Units 4 and 6 finish off level 3 within the transition so that we could see the plow scars. Then they used trowels to remove the remaining light pockets of plowzone as level 4.

In Unit 5, level 2 will proceed to the base of plowzone rather than stop at 50 cmbd. It was almost complete by the end of the day. We'll be able to get into the sub-plowzone deposits in all three units on our next day in the field.

​While the presence of a plowzone is clear, the status of the zone beneath the plowzone is not. When I first began working on the machine-exposed profile, I thought the buried dark zone (zone 2) was a buried plowzone. As I worked on the profile more, however, I began to think it was actually, perhaps, a remnant of intact prehistoric deposit. That was still my guess as of last week. We've now gotten a new, closer look at the zone in the straight profile being produced by the excavation of Unit 9, however, and I'm back to thinking it's more likely it might be a buried plowzone. The main detail affecting my thinking is the very crisp interface between the base of zone 2 and the sediment beneath it.

So far, we have no evidence of any intact cultural features in zone 2. As of now, my plan is to excavate through this zone in the block units by shovel skimming. That will give us the opportunity to keep our eyes open for cultural features originating within or immediately beneath zone 2, and will also allow us to piece-plot artifacts that are encountered if it makes sense to do so. Shovel skimming and piece-plotting will be new methods for the students, so they'll learn something by doing it even if it turns out that zone 2 actually is a buried plowzone rather than an intact cultural zone.

Jim Legg's fantastic adventure continues in the "downstairs" portion of the site as the excavation of Unit 9 plumbs the profile wall. After excavating the plowzone as a natural level, Jim and his students have begun excavating the remainder of the unit in 20 cm levels. They're now below zone 2, so they're into sediments that unquestionably contain intact prehistoric deposits.  I've got my fingers crossed that they'll hit a feature or two as Unit 9 is excavated, as a couple of absolute dates would be of great help in understanding the deposits. If there's a big feature in there, however, it could really slow down the production of the profile wall. We'll see.

This is just a quick update on the spring archaeological field school I announced in November. I'm happy to report two things: (1) the class has filled up; and (2) I have received notice that my request for financial support from the Archaeological Research Trust (ART) has been granted. ART grant monies will support wages for a field assistant, wages for a lab worker to keep up with processing artifacts, samples, and paperwork as we produce it in the field, and  purchase of expendable field supplies and materials to stabilize the site.  Thank you, ART members and board: you won't be disappointed!

I'll write more about the field school as it moves forward. I'm considering including a small online writing requirement in the syllabus, as communicating with the public about archaeology is important both for the education of the students and for our discipline as a whole. I'll keep you posted. In the mean time, enjoy this picture of the Broad River on a crisp fall day (taken last week during a visit to the site).

The gears of science almost always turn more slowly then I would like. It was about a year ago that I first hatched the idea of the Kirk Project, and I've just now submitted my first formal publication related to describing and understanding variability in Kirk points from the Southeast.  The paper, titled "A Preliminary Analysis of Haft Variability in South Carolina Kirk Points," will be published in the next issue of South Carolina Antiquities.

The paper considers haft variation in a sample (n = 46 total) of Kirk points from the Larry Strong Collection (n = 41, Allendale County, South Carolina) and the Nipper Creek cache (n = 5, Richland County, South Carolina). The Larry Strong portion of the sample is a large "long time” assemblage that contains Kirk points from the full range of time those points were produced in the region. The Nipper Creek cache, in contrast, is a “short time” assemblage that was produced during a small window of time.  Comparison of these assemblages can be used to explore which aspects of haft morphology may be carrying useful stylistic information that is sensitive to change through time and, potentially, patterned in ways that can eventually tell us something meaningful about Kirk societies. This table summarizes the sample and provides links to the downloadable 3D models that I used (I also posted the table on my Data page). 

My analysis focuses on various aspects of shape as characterized by a series of landmarks placed on 3D models. Although 3D models are the starting point, I purposefully performed the preliminary analysis in the paper in only two dimensions (i.e., utilizing just the shape of the outline of the haft region and getting rid of data related to thickness).

The main take-away point from the paper is that shape variation in the lateral haft margins appears to be a better candidate for capturing stylistic change through time (and potentially also stylistic variability across space) than the the morphology of the basal edge and the overall length:width proportions of the haft. The "short time" Nipper Creek assemblage is more consistent in the degree of haft flare and shape of the lateral/basal junction than the "long time" Larry Strong assemblage, which is what one would expect if design of the lateral haft margins was strongly influenced by some kind of cultural-bound choice (i.e, if lateral haft morphology is essentially isochrestic). This is a potentially important observation, as basal edge shape and treatment are often thought to be good attributes upon which to base “type” distinctions that are presumed to have temporal significance. While basal edge morphology appears to account for the greatest amount of variability overall in the shape analysis, it may not be strongly linked to style within the Kirk Corner Notched cluster (and may, in fact, be linked to function through haft repair and maintenance). It will be important to sort this out going forward to avoid inclusion of non-stylistic variability in a stylistic analysis.

I'll let you know when the paper is available. In the meantime, I'll be working on expanding the analysis in several different directions. I'm hoping that making my primary data sources (i.e., the 3D models) available as freely downloadable files will encourage others to do the same. We're really not doing ourselves any favors by not taking better advantage of the data-sharing potential offered by the digital age.

Funds to support inventorying and analysis of the Larry Strong Collection were provided by the Archaeological Research Trust.

At least some of the chipping debris (shown as Feature 1 in the profile drawing) can be fitted back together, suggesting that the deposit was created when prehistoric peoples sat at that spot to make stone tools.  The deposit is thought to be Middle Archaic in age (dating to perhaps 4000-3000 BC) because of a quartz Guilford point that was recovered from the slump at the base of the profile. 

The goals of the excavations will be to: (1) continue straightening, documenting, and stabilizing the exposed vertical wall; (2) collect controlled samples of artifacts that can be used to understand the 5000-year-long occupational sequence of the levee; and (2) expose discrete cultural deposits so that they can be mapped and excavated.
 
Hand excavation will be used to straighten and plumb the vertical cut, exposing a long profile that will be documented during the field school. Dr. Christopher Moore (SCIAA) will assist in interpreting the exposed natural and cultural deposits. After exposure, straightened sections of the wall will be protected from further damage using landscape fabric and wooden buttressing.
 
Hand excavation blocks will be opened in two areas. One 3 m x 2 m excavation block will be placed on top of the levee a safe distance from the existing vertical exposure. Excavations will proceed in 10 cm levels in 1 m x 1 m units, screening all sediments and creating plan maps at the base of each level. Discrete deposits (such as hearth features, storage pits, postholes, or in situ deposits of chipping debris) will be documented and excavated.
 
A 2 m x 2 m excavation block will be opened near the base of the existing vertical exposure, enlarged as needed for safety.  The purpose of this excavation area will be to extend the profile vertically downward and explore any cultural deposits present beneath the presumed Middle Archaic zone.  

Enrollment is capped at 12.  This should be a lot of fun.  It's a great spot for a field school: it's close, it's known to contain complex and interesting archaeological deposits, and it's cared for by a very supportive landowner.

If you're a student interested in taking this course, please email me with any questions:  [email protected].

Stay tuned!

I've loaded a pdf version of my 2016 SEAC presentation "Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change During the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast" onto my Academia.edu page (you can also access a copy here). Other than a few minor alterations to complete the citations and adjust the slides to get rid of the animations, it's what I presented at the meetings last Friday. I tend to use slides as prompts for speaking, so some of the information that I tried to convey isn't directly represented on the slides. There's enough there that you can get a pretty good idea, I hope, of what I was going for.

One of the major things I took home from this conference was that there has been an important broadening of enthusiasm for subjects that used to be considered bizarre, baseless, unscientific, and even too political for archaeology. I got the impression that talking about ritual, symbolism, and belief systems (hot topics for decades among those who focus on the materially-rich Middle Woodland and Mississippian "florescences" of the Eastern Woodlands) is now also quite common among those who work on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods.  I saw numerous papers asking new questions about material remains, and they were fascinating.

The session that really brought the point home was a symposim titled "A Ritual Gathering: Celeberating the Work of Cheryl Claassen" (Session 3 in the program).  Claassen, a professor at Appalachian State, has been pushing the boundaries of the archaeological conversation in the Eastern Woodlands for decades (you can see some of her work on her Academia.edu page). The papers in this session (many by her students) evoked responses in me ranging from "what a profoundly interesting thought" to "are you sure about that?" to "get off my case."  It was great.

(As an aside, I wish that some of my friends on the "fringe" could have seen these papers. Perhaps if you witnessed a professional archaeologist discussing how the skeletal remains of immature bird wings in a feature were connected to the astronomical scheduling of seasonal ritual aggregation events, you'd have a better appreciation both for the kinds of questions that actual archaeology can address and the level of work it takes to convincingly address those questions. The claim that archaeologists are afraid to say anything new or different is preposterous.)

I want to state clearly that, in my opinion, the expansion of thought that was on display in the Claassen session is a positive thing with a lot of potential upside.  As an advocate of a complex systems approach to understanding human cultures in the past, it makes perfect sense to me that ritual and belief are involved in both "bottom up" and "top down" aspects of human societies. I see no logical or analytical reason to assume that ritual and belief are epiphenomenal or unimportant compared to other domains of social, economic, and political life. It all matters, and it's all fair game for trying to flesh out the past as best we can and trying to explain, using all the tools at our disposal, how those societies worked and why and how they changed. 

For me, however, my positive regard for the role of belief and ritual in human societies (and for the appropriateness of including it in our discussions) doesn't alleviate concerns about how we study it in the past tense. I know that I'm not alone here. I think several legitimate worries underlie uncertainties about both the approaches and the conclusions reached by those focused on belief and ritual.

One concern that's out there -- perhaps the major one -- is a feeling that the "ritual" people are jumping outside the established lines of scientific process in a way that undermines confidence in their conclusions. Talking with a few of my colleagues about this, I got the sense that people are not closed to the questions so much as they are skeptical of the methods (or the perceived lack of methods) used to address those questions. 

I conceive of science as an inductive-deductive loop. On the inductive side, you create an explanation to fit a bunch of data.  On the deductive side, you collect new information to test an expectation derived from your explanation. Ideally, the two sides of the loop are exploited together to create (eventually) a credible explanation that fits all the available information and makes further predictions about the world that are falsifiable but not falsified. As long as you get yourself into this loop, you're doing science. It doesn't really matter what the starting point is or where an idea comes from as long as you're willing to follow through and ride the inductive-deductive roller coaster around the track for as long as it takes.

Are there ways to skeptically evaluate ideas about Archaic ritual and belief systems and make sure we're utilizing the full power of the inductive-deductive loop?  I'm sure that there are. What I'm less sure of, at this point anyway, is the presence of an appetite for the deductive side of the loop that matches the robust enthusiasm for climbing up the inductive side. No matter how interesting or appealing an interpretation is, you still have to put on the skeptic glasses and try to find the seams you can follow to figure out whether you're right or wrong.  

The inductive-deductive loop is critical in archaeology because of all of our equifinality problems: there's usually more than one way something could have happened, so how do you know what the real cause was? You have to do the work to assemble independent lines of evidence, build theory, collect data, construct and test hypotheses, etc. You can't skip all that and just hug an assertion. Well, you can, but I won't buy what you're selling.

That leads me to a second concern: the burden of proof. Who's is it? Does it have to reside in one domain of inquiry, or is it the responsibility of the person making the claim no matter what the claim actually is? At one point in the session I heard the phrase "can you prove it's not a ritual assemblage?" I take the point of the question (which was used mainly, I think, to argue that we should always consider ritual as a possibility), but I'm uncomfortable with the notion that we should accept/assume that something is related to ritual unless we can prove it's not.  I think we all realize that people's lives are often not partitioned neatly into "ritual" and "non-ritual" components, but that doesn't mean all activities should be presumed to be ritualistic in nature unless we can prove they're not. That seems to me to be out of bounds of the way good science is done.  There has to be a positive case made for a claim, whether it's about ritual or not.

And that brings me to my third concern: the appeal to human "universals" to gird claims about past ritual behavior. Several times, in several different papers, I heard the assertion that all humans share a basic set of experiences in the material world and therefore all belief systems share a similar set of components tied to that material world: fire transforms, the sky is above and the earth is below, water goes down and smoke goes up, etc. This seems logical and may well be true (I haven't yet read through the arguments to evaluate them on my own).  My concern is not that such universals don't exist, but that playing the "universal" card as the basis for analysis rather than an empirical problem may do two counter-productive things: (1) short circuit the inductive-deductive cycle by introducing a powerful, unvetted assumption; and (2) actually bland out the kind of contextual variability that could potentially be very interesting and analytically useful.

This last point is somewhat ironic.  Many of the issues that the pursuit of ritual and belief articulates with have a particularly "post-processual" flavor. One of the main critiques leveled at the processual archaeology of the late twentieth century was that it didn't account for the meanings of objects in their contexts. Symbols and objects do not mean the same things in different cultures: context matters. It seems to me that by falling back to "universals" as explanation we're actually ignoring context altogether -- if something is present everywhere, what meaning does it actually have?

One of my professors at Southern Illinois University was fond of repeating the phrase "playing ethnosemantic tennis with the net down" (if my memory serves me right, he used the phrase in connection with criticisms of Claude Levi-Strauss).  If we lay down a foundation of presumed "universals" and then build an analysis based on those, I worry that we're lowering the net significantly if not taking it down altogether. Opening things up is great for generating discussion and new approaches, but at some point the net has to go back up so we can have some mechanism for discriminating between credible and non-credible explanations. 

I'm excited by what I saw and heard at SEAC. We've still got a long way to go to address many basic space-time issues for some of the questions that I and many others are interested in. That doesn't mean, of course, that we can't think about other additional things while that's going on. I bought Claassen's (2015) book Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America at SEAC. I look forward to seeing what's inside and comparing it to my own views and knowledge about the eastern Archaic. Nothing that I've said in this post should be construed as pointing at the content of the book, which I have not read yet. I anticipate the book will be a stimulating read. Should be fun!

Archaeological conferences serve several purposes. For me, there are three main attractions, all selfish: (1) meeting people; (2) learning about things I didn't know that I didn't know about; and (3) clarifying and catalyzing my own research. Conferences are fun, but they're also a bit mercenary -- I want something from them.

This year's Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) is in Athens, Georgia, which I hear is very nice. I put together a small symposium titled "Hunter-Gatherer Societies of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Southeast" (session 35 in the program). I originally wrote about the idea last April. We ended up with papers by seven presenters: Al Goodyear, Doug Sain, David Thulman and Maile Neel, Kara Bridgman Sweeney, Joe Wilkinson, Sarah Gilleland, and me. Here is the symposium abstract:

"Societies are groups of people defined by persistent social interaction.  While the characteristics of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies of the Southeast certainly varied, archaeological data generally suggest that these societies were often geographically extensive and structurally complex.  Patterns of artifact variability and transport, for example, demonstrate that small-scale elements (e.g., individuals, families, and foraging groups) were situated within much larger social fabrics. This session aims to explore the size, structure, and characteristics of early Southeastern hunter-gatherer societies, asking how patterns of face-to-face interactions at human scales “map up” to and are affected by larger social spheres." 

I decided to use my contribution to think about the issue of a possible abandonment of the deep south during the later portion of the Early Archaic period. Here is the abstract for my presentation, titled "Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change during the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast:"
 
"Previous studies of radiocarbon and projectile point distribution data have suggested the possibility of a significant shift in the distribution and/or behaviors of human populations during the later portion of the Early Archaic period (i.e., post-9000 RCYBP). This paper considers the evidence for an “abandonment” of large portions of the Southeast following the Kirk Corner Notched Horizon and explores (1) possible explanations for large-scale changes in the distribution of population in the Early Holocene and (2) how those demographic changes, if they occurred, might have articulated with social changes at the level of the family, foraging group, and larger societies."  

I first became interested in the Early Archaic abandonment issue while reading Ken Sassaman's (2010) book Eastern Archaic, Historicized. Working on this presentation was fun because it forced me to try to think through some of the issues about how we would recognize a large-scale abandonment, what the abandonment process actually would have been like, and what the social ramifications might have been for the people and societies involved in that process. I'll tweak the presentation before I give it, but it's pretty close to done.

​The first question is to ask is whether or not there was a large-scale abandonment of parts of the Southeast. On the surface (at least), I think the case is fairly compelling. Following the example of Faught and Waggoner's (2012) paper about Florida, I started compiling radiocarbon data from across the Eastern Woodlands to evaluate the idea. At 9,500 dates and counting, the radiocarbon database that I'm working on clearly supports the idea that there are far fewer than expected dates from 9000-7000 radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP) in the deep south:

A chi square easily defeats the null hypothesis: there just aren't as many radiocarbon dates from 9000-7000 RCYBP below the southern corner of South Carolina as you'd expect by chance. The pattern holds when you consider the number of dates during that period in the entire Atlantic Plain vs. the other major physiographic regions of the eastern United States (the Appalachian Highlands and the Interior Plains). 

The idea of a large-scale abandonment is also consistent with the distribution of post-Kirk lobed/bifurcate projectile points, which (unlike Kirk), does not extend into Louisiana, Florida, and southern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

If we presume that a post-Kirk abandonment/marginalization of the Atlantic Plain did occur, we can move on to the "why" and "how" questions. Regarding the "why" question: the limited environmental data I've looked at (e.g., the 1980 pollen core from White Pond, South Carolina) suggest that the period 9000-7000 RCYBP was one of significant change.  Oak and hickory decreased and pine increased. In simplest terms, this shift may have been related to a decrease in mast production, perhaps affecting the density of white-tailed deer (probably the primary game species for early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands).

But how would an abandonment actually take place? I can think of several ways that populations could shift out of an area. My gut is that an abandonment of the Atlantic Plain during the late Early Archaic would have most probably involved a contraction of populations into the Appalachian Highlands and Interior Plains. One of my favorite of Lew Binford's papers is his (1983) discussion of how hunter-gatherers often make extensive use of the landscape. Keeping his examples in mind, it's easy to imagine how "abandonment" could actually be the end result of a long-term process involving segments of the population getting "pulled in" to better quality environments in the course of normal decisions about movement.

Assuming population size stayed constant, this shift would have necessarily involved changes in mobility. If (based on Midwestern data) we assume that Kirk "bands" had a group mobility radius of about 200 km, there would have been room for about 18 such "bands" in the Eastern Woodlands. If you took that same population and crammed them into an area 33% smaller (i.e., the Eastern Woodlands minus the Atlantic Plain), the scale of group mobility would have to be reduced by 17% (mobility radius of 165 km) to keep everything else the same.

That level of population contraction would have almost certainly had ramifications up and down the levels of those post-Kirk societies. Residential moves would have decreased in frequency and/or distance, there may have been shifts in logistical vs. foraging strategies, and the lowered "cost" of maintaining extra-local inter-personal relationships may have de-emphasized gift exchange and inter-group marriage as mechanism for creating and maintaining distant social ties. 

It's possible to develop a suite of hypotheses and archaeological expectations to evaluate the idea of a large scale abandonment. 

Make no mistake: these are long-term propositions.  My entire dissertation, for example, was focused on using a combination of modeling and archaeological data to try to understand how changes in patterns of variability in material culture were related to changes in the characteristics and properties of social networks. It's not trivia, and it's not easy. 

For me, this presentation was a machine for thinking. I can't "prove" anything, but going through the process of committing to an idea and preparing a presentation has forced me to attempt to think through some complex, interesting issues. I'm hoping I'll get some good feedback on my ideas ("interesting" and/or "you're full of it"), which obviously involve an extensive geographic area that I make no claim to have mastered. 

I also hope to take full advantage of my hotel and at least quadruple my supply of ink pens. Every little bit helps.

I've spent some time over the last few days generating some basic morphometric data from the 3D models of Kirk points that I've processed so far (n = about 50) . I'd like to have about double that for a formal analysis to publish, but I also would like to discuss some preliminary results as part of my presentation at the SEAC (Southeastern Archaeological Conference) meeting that's coming up in a few weeks. So you go to war with the Kirk assemblage you've got, not the Kirk assemblage you want.

Before I talk about the data, I'd like to congratulate myself on having the forethought to take a day last spring to write down the workflow right after I got it figured out. There were a few details that I neglected to mention in that blog post, but overall it was a huge time saver. Figuring out the steps was enough of a pain-in-the-ass the first time. Let us never do it again.​

For each point, you have to tell the software how the landmarks correspond to those on the "atlas" model. The simplest thing to do is to always place the landmarks in the same order. You still have to manually define the correspondence between each model and the atlas ("View Correspondences" in the "View" menu).

I followed the same steps I described in the previous post to export and edit the data so that I could import it into MorphoJ. I used MorphoJ to perform a principal components analysis (PCA), the purpose of which is take all the variability in the 3D data and boil it down to its most important components. PCA lets you flatten the variability in a dataset into scores that you can plot in two dimensions.

Here are the basic results of the PCA performed on the points currently in the sample:

I haven't spent any significant time digging into the data yet, but my initial reaction is that the first principal component may well be measuring variability related to time. If you look at the examples of points that fall at the far left end of the plot, they look very Taylor- or Thebes-like, with relatively long hafts, deep notches, and small/shallow basal concavities/indentations separating broad convex basal edge segments. The points at the far right of the plot, conversely, have relatively short hafts, shallow notches, and broad basal concavities. If you squint a little, maybe, you can see how that end of the Kirk spectrum is trending toward a bifurcate/lobed haft morphology. In the center of the plot are points like 5947, which I think we can agree is a "modal" Kirk Corner Notched.

With the exception of the Nipper Creek cache points (shown in green), all the points in the sample are from Allendale County, South Carolina, and are made from Allendale chert. This all but eliminates the possibility that the variability is due to space or raw material.

My next step is to explore the possible "time" component of the PCA by gathering some data from the point forms that bracket Kirk: Taylor (on the earlier side) and lobed/bifurcate points (on the later side). If I'm correct that the first principal component shown above is telling us something about time, the Taylor points should plot to the left and the bifurcate/lobed points should plot to the right.  It's notable that four of the five points from the Nipper Creek cache plot close together. Those points were almost certainly produced during a short period of time (but so was 5963 NC 4, so . . . something to think about).

We're now into the fourth week of the semester here at the University of South Carolina. As usual I've been writing for this blog less than I'd like (I have several unfinished draft posts and ideas for several more, and there's currently a backlog of Fake Hercules Swords). A good chunk of my time/energy is going into the Forbidden Archaeology class (you can follow along on the course website if you like -- I've been writing short synopses, and student-produced content will begin to appear a few weeks from now). Much of the remainder has gone into pushing forward the inter-locking components of my research agenda. This is a brief update about those pieces.

Small-Scale Archaeological Data

At the beginning of the summer I spent a little time in the field doing some preliminary excavation work at a site that contains (minimally) an intact Archaic component buried about 1.9 meters below the surface (see this quick summary).  Based on the general pattern here in the Carolina Piedmont and a couple of projectile points recovered from the slump at the base of the profile, my guess is that buried cultural zone dates to the Middle Archaic period (i.e., about 8000-5000 years ago).​

My daughter washed some of the artifacts from the site over the summer, and I've now got an undergraduate student working on finishing up the washing before moving on to cataloging and labeling. Once the lithics are labeled we'll be able to spread everything out and start fitting the quartz chipping debris back together. Because I piece-plotted the large majority of the lithic debris, fitting it back together will help us understand how the deposit was created. I'm hoping we can get some good insights into the very small-scale behaviors that created the lithic deposit (i.e.,perhaps the excavated portion of the deposit was created by just one or two people over the course of less than an hour).

When the archaeology faculty met to discuss the classes we'd be offering in the spring semester, I pitched the idea of running a one-day-per-week field school at the site. Assuming I can get sufficient enrollment numbers, that looks like it's going to happen. The site is within driving distance of Columbia, so we'll be commuting every Friday (leaving campus at 8:00 and returning by 4:00). The course will be listed as ANTH 322/722. It's sand, it's three dimensional, and it's pretty complicated -- it's going to be a fun excavation. I'll be looking to hire a graduate student to assist me on Fridays, and I'll be applying for grant monies to cover the costs of the field assistant's wages, transportation, and other costs associated with putting a crew in the field. 

Large-Scale Archaeological Data

Some parts of my quest to assemble several different large-scale datasets are creeping along, some are moving forward nicely, and some are still on pause.

Complex Systems Theory and Computer Modeling

Complex systems theory is what will make it possible to bridge the small and large scales of data that I'm collecting. Last year, I invested some effort into transferring my latest computer model (FN3_D_V3) into Repast Simphony and getting it working. I also started building a brand new, simpler model to look at equifinality issues associated with interpreting patterns of lithic transport (specifically to address the question of whether or not we can differentiate patterns of transport produced via group mobility, personal mobility between groups, and exchange).  

As it currently sits, the FN3_D_V3 model is mainly demographic, lacking a spatial component. Over the summer I used it to produce data relevant to understanding the minimum viable population (MVP) size of human groups. Those data, which I'm currently in the process of analyzing, suggest to me that the "magic number of 500" is probably much too large: I have yet to find evidence in my data that human populations limited to about 150 people are not demographically viable over spans of several hundred years even under constrained marriage rules. But I've just started the analysis, so we'll see. I submitted a paper on this topic years ago with a much cruder model and didn't have the stomach to attempt to use that model to address the reviewers' comments. I'm hoping to utilize much of the background and structure of that earlier paper and produce a new draft for submission quickly. I also plan to put the FN3_D_V3 code online here and at OpenABM.org once I get it cleaned up a bit. I also discuss this model in a paper in a new edited volume titled Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis in Archaeological Computational Modeling (edited by Marieka Brouwer Burg, Hans Peeters, and William Lovis). 

It will be a relatively simple thing to use the FN3_D_V3 model in its non-spatial configuration to produce new data relevant to the Middle Paleolithic mortality issue I discussed at the SAA meetings a couple of years ago. I'm also going to be working toward putting the guts of the demographic model into a spatial context. That's going to take some time.