In the week before SEAC, I had the students in my South Carolina Archaeology class sorting sherds in my lab. As the first part of a group/individual ceramic project, they were getting some experience identifying vessel portion, kind of temper, surface treatment, and decoration in sherds from a surface collection from Allendale County, South Carolina (the Larry Strong collection -- the same one I used to get some data for this Kirk paper). For the second part of the project, I'm going to supply them with the combined data and ask them to: (A) match the groups to named ceramic wares using information on excellent sites such as this one; (B) create a graphic depiction of change through time in temper, surface treatment, and the frequency of decoration; and (C) address in writing several questions linking the pottery to patterns of social/technological change. 

I'm posting some quick images of most of the rim sherds (and some decorated non-rims) here so they will be able to look at them without coming back to the lab repeatedly while they're working on their projects. I know that some of you will know what these types are -- please don't deprive my students of the joy of discovery!

​Also - hi students!

It is March, and we have entered pine pollen season here in the South Carolina midlands. For the next few weeks, everything will be dusted yellow. 

In more exciting news, at site 38FA608 on the Broad River we have entered what appears to be an intact Late Archaic/Early Woodland midden in our excavation block.  If my initial diagnosis is correct, we're now (literally) scraping the top of a buried occupation zone that dates to around 1000 BC (i.e., about 3000 radiocarbon years before present, give or take). We've encountered this zone at about 95-100 cm below datum, which translates to roughly 65-70 cm below surface in the block. There is no sign of a heavy occupation zone in the existing vertical profile wall at that depth, so we may be dealing with something that is fairly limited in size (or at least was not distributed evenly across the ground surface that was present 3000 years ago). In that regard, this was a bit of a surprise, but it's the good kind of surprise: we're learning more about the kinds, dates, and extents of deposits at this site with every shovel-full of dirt.

​First, the "downstairs." We were without Jim Legg, so work was paused on the profile wall excavation (Unit 9). Two students finished up level 4 of Unit 7, the 1m x 2m unit being excavated to explore below the exposed profile. As I wrote last week, Unit 7 succeeded in locating the termination (or at least a hiatus in) the lamellae that presumably formed as a result of a process of particle migration/accumulation caused by water percolation. In other words, the end of the lamellae may be telling us something about the position of the water table. 

I'm not done with Unit 7 (I want to take it as far down as I can, as long as things are safe), but I needed to shift people up to the block to finally start excavating Unit 3. Unit 3 is the northeastern 2m x 2m unit in the block.  It has so far remained untouched. As the other units in the block get deeper, they are getting more difficult to enter and exit safely (and without putting stress on the walls). So we began excavating the eastern half of Unit 3 to serve as a step down in the other units. Now that we know the top two zones are plowzones, we can excavate them as natural levels. So it was a return to battling roots for DuVal and a couple of lucky students.

Things got interesting in the block fairly quickly. Mid-morning, the students working in Unit 6 (shovel scraping through the last bits of their level 7, 75-90 cmbd) exposed a projectile point in the floor of the level. Their instructions for this level were to shovel scrape/skim at moderate speed, watching for stains and color changes and inspecting artifacts they encountered but only marking things for piece-plotting if they were large and/or interesting (i.e., diagnostic artifacts). I'm really happy that the student caught the point in the floor and it was left in place, as it gives us our first lithic diagnostic down in context in the block.

I think it's a Late Archaic / Early Woodland stemmed form, what we might call "Gary" in the Midcontinent but what is commonly known as "Mack" here. At first glance, the point has the basal shape of a Morrow Mountain (a Middle Archaic form), but I think it's much too high in the deposits to be that old. There is some unfortunate morphological overlap between Early Woodland and Middle Archaic point forms here. I'm going to be exceedingly lazy and just paste in a few paragraphs from Daniel Elliot and Ken Sassaman's (1995) Archaic Period Archaeology of the Georgia Coastal Plain and Coastal Zone (pages 44 and 45): 

After documenting the base of level 7 (at 90 cmbd), the students in Units 4 and 6 moved into the excavation of level 8. At the base of level 7 in Unit 6, the sediment appeared to be darker in the southeast corner of the unit. The boundary was too diffuse to define it as a feature, though, so I had the students map and describe it as a separate sediment zone. Scraping the floor at the beginning of level 8 immediately produced a good amount of material in that corner, including another point with a contracting stem. In Unit 6, they started encountering some large pieces of fire-cracked rock and lots of flaking debris. At first I thought we were might be coming down on a couple of features (one in each unit). After investigating further, however, it appeared more likely that we were just hitting the irregular top of a continuous zone that probably extends across the entire block. It was time to put on the brakes and return to a slower, more intensive piece-plotting strategy. Given that all the students have now experienced the joys of piece-plotting by hand, I'll probably fire up the total station next time we're out and begin using it to collect piece-plot coordinates electronically. 

Excavations in Unit 5 are a currently about 20 cm behind those in Units 4 and 6. Given what we now know is on the horizon for Unit 5, my plan is to continue the intensive piece-plotting excavations in that unit all the way down. At 75 cmbd, there's a possible feature to deal with (it looks fairly similar to Feature 6, the small charcoal-flecked basin we excavated in Unit 6 last week). The large, plow-sheared rock in Unit 5 remains in the floor, as we still haven't reached the surface that it's sitting on (thankfully, no-one has tripped over it yet). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, is around it when we reach the depth that would have been the surface when it was deposited.

Finally, we encountered our third serpent of this field school: a tiny snake that was sleeping under one of our plywood edge protectors. I moved it to a safe spot.