I'm currently in Tulsa, OK, at the 2017 Southeastern Archaeological Conference. I took a break this afternoon from papers and talking to hole up in my hotel room and put the finishing touches on the presentation I'll be giving tomorrow. I'm honored to be senior author on a paper with David Anderson (University of Tennessee). Our paper will be last tomorrow in a marathon symposium organized by Shane Miller (Mississippi State University), Ashley Smallwood (University of West Georgia), and Jesse Tune (Fort Lewis College).

I'm really looking forward to the session, which will present summaries, updates, and syntheses of work from across the Southeast. It's intended to be a 20-year update to the work that culminated in the landmark Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast volume that was published in 1996. Congratulations are due to the organizers who conceived of the symposium and pulled it off.

I briefly discussed our paper back in September. Significant work has happened since then, and I'm pretty happy with the result. The point of doing a "big" paper like this, in my view, is to attempt to identify and describe patterns that require explanation. We used information from three large datasets -- PIDBA, DINAA, and an always "in progress" compilation of radiocarbon dates -- to investigate patterns of population stability/fluctuation during the Paleoindian period in the Eastern Woodlands.

As of now (rushing through this blog post so I can go out to dinner) I like the result: a six period chronological/geographical model identifying the time/space parameters of population stabilities and fluctuations. As I listen tomorrow to region-by-region updates on what we know about the Paleoindian period in the Southeast, I will almost certainly learn of many things that are wrong. But I will be listening to the results of others' work with a model in mind. That's useful. As the famous quote goes: "all models are wrong, but some are useful." To me, a useful model is a machine for thinking that makes predictions about the world that can be evaluated. So I'm looking forward to seeing what I got wrong. I wish I had a big piece of paper I could spread out on a table so I could take notes time period by time period, region by region.

After this updated photograph of Woody Guthrie, I'll post images of a few key slides from the presentation. I'll put the whole thing on my Academia page tomorrow after the dust settles. [Update 11/13/2017: the presentation is available here.]

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.

Readers of this blog from the pre-Swordgate era may remember the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) that I initiated in February of 2014. The goal of the EWHADP is to assemble and make available information about prehistoric residential structures in eastern North America. The project has it's own website where you can read all about it and access the data.

After an initial startup pulse, I had to put the project on hold when I started teaching at Grand Valley (Fall of 2014). Emily Gilhooly, one of my undergraduate students at Grand Valley, worked on the project during the winter of 2015 and began the long process of updating the database by checking and re-coding every single entry. As I prepared to make the move to the University of South Carolina in the spring of 2015, I started a GoFundMe campaign to raise some cash to pay a research assistant to work on the project. Thanks to the generosity of several donors, that campaign was successful. With the hiring of USC graduate student Laura Clifford, the project was up and running again in the fall of 2015. While Laura made a lot of headway tracking down references and moving the database forward, however, she soon found a better long-term employment situation. So I hit the pause button again on the EWHADP.

The project stayed paused as I moved from the SCIAA building into my new lab space, worked my way through my first two years of teaching at South Carolina, and initiated some excavation fieldwork at a site on the Broad River. After that field school, I hired one of my students (Sam McDorman) to do the bulk of the basic laboratory processing of the materials we recovered. With the artifacts from 38FA608 washed and cataloged, I can start analysis. And I can move Sam on to another project: the EWHADP.

Of the $3400 in donated EWHADP funds that I came with, there was about $2870 left at the beginning of the semester.  That money should be sufficient to get through at least 2.5 of the three goals I have:

1) assemble primary references for all information in the database;
2) check and re-code existing information in the database, supplying missing information and adding greater detail;
3) add new information to the database.

I don't expect to get through these goals quickly, but the wheels are now in motion again. The EWHADP is staffed, funded, and exists in a dedicated office space with room for files, books, piles of stuff, a scanner, and a computer. When the second goal is completed, you'll get an updated database that should be an order of magnitude better than the one that exists now. And then you'll start getting updates to the website as we begin adding in new information.

I'd like to again thank those that donated to this project and haven't questioned why it has periodically slowed down over the years: anyone who juggles knows that it's difficult to keep everything up in the air at all times. Your patience is appreciated. Thank you. And stay tuned.

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.

It's the end of March, which means the dogwoods are blooming, the dragonflies are back, and it's time to start sweating. After an early morning thunderstorm, the temperature cracked 80 degrees on Friday.

As I wrote last week, the last days of this endeavor will be devoted to collecting some final, crucial pieces of information and then buttoning up the site so that the deposits are protected until we're ready to excavate again.

In the "upstairs" block, it's now evident that excavations in Units 4 and 6 will terminate at the base of level 8 (100 cm below datum [cmbd]). I had hoped to get one more 10 cm level done in those units, but the density of artifacts to piece-plot has not decreased and the best thing to do is to aim for a good ending with a flat floor at the end of the levels.  

We're also preparing for the endgame in the "downstairs" portion of the site. Jim Legg finished his excavation of Unit 9, exposing a full 3 m of clean, plumb profile wall. On our next day in the field we'll dismantle the wooden buttressing that has been protecting the 2 m section of wall to the south of Unit 9. We'll clean and document the entire 5 m at once. It will probably take most of a day to prep and photograph the wall, and at least another day to draw and describe everything.

In conjunction with analysis of the artifacts excavated from the "upstairs" units and Units 8 and 9, the new wall profile will help us add considerable detail to our understanding of how this landform developed and change through time. I'm hoping to have money for several radiocarbon dates to help nail down the absolute chronology of the upper 2.2 meters of deposits.

What lies below the exposed profile remains an open question. The excavation of Unit 7 demonstrated both that artifacts are present and the lamellae cease within about 60 cm of the base of the profile. I had hoped to take Unit 7 down farther to get a better look at what's down there, but water damaged the unit two weeks in a row. The sand is very loose, and the ground surface at the base of the profile is the lowest spot around.  Water collects in the area during a heavy rain, and it takes very little water to erode the unit walls. After deciding that a "deep look" would require a concerted effort that would us to excavate quickly and continuously, we lined the remains of Unit 7 with landscape fabric and filled it back in. I hope to return a later date with a small crew and make a concerted effort to go deep and see if there's an Early Archaic component hiding down there.

Our tenth day in the field was unusual in that the focus of the day (for me, anyway) was a site visit by the board of the Archaeological Research Trust (ART), the landowner and family, and other guests. As I wrote last December, funds supplied by ART are supporting staff wages in the field and laboratory, as well as the costs of expendable field supplies and the lumber required to build protection for the vulnerable parts of the site. It was my pleasure to show them their money in action and try to communicate why what we're doing is worthwhile.

In terms of the archaeology, we're now to the point were we need to dial in the exit strategy for the semester. We've got four field days remaining, weather permitting.

"Upstairs," the last day will be spent backfilling the units and making sure everything is buttoned up and protected until the next opportunity to excavate. The second-to-last day will be devoted to drawing profiles of all the unit walls. That leaves us just two more days to excavate. Although I'm very curious to see what the deposits look like below the Mack zone, I'm not prepared to alter the piece-plot strategy at this point in order to speed things up. I think continuing to gather high resolution information as we excavate the Mack component will pay off during analysis. At the rate we're going, we may finish just one more 10 cm level in each of Units 4, 5, and 6.

"Downstairs," the end game will include cleaning, photographing, drawing, and describing the 5 m-long, 2.2 m-high profile that will be exposed when Jim Legg completes the excavation of Unit 9. With only one or two more levels to go to expose the base of the profile in Unit 9, we hope to be prepared to remove the wooden buttressing from Units 1 and 2 and clean and photograph the entire profile after one more day in the field. Drawing the profile will take at least a day. Constructing the buttressing to protect the entire 5 m will take at least part of a day. With luck, we'll be done with the downstairs before we're done upstairs.

I'm also starting to formulate my future plans for work at the site. I'll write about those plans when they're done cooking.

After a week off for spring break, the field school returned to the Broad River to continue excavations at 38FA608. We're in the thick of things now. Unfortunately, the student who brings a coffee maker was absent.

It's slow going in the excavation block. During our previous day in the field, we began getting into what appeared to be a Late Archaic / Early Woodland deposit in Units 4 and 6. That day ended with numerous artifacts marked in place on the floors of those units. The crews in those units spent most of the latest field day dealing with those artifacts, plotting and collecting each one. ​

Unit 6 (upper left in the photo above) produced the bases of two heavily reworked Mack points in context, along with numerous pieces of chipped stone debris and fire-cracked rock. We've seen nothing yet in those units that suggests a discrete feature. Unit 4 has produced some ceramic debris in the "Mack" deposit, but I have yet to see any large pieces or pieces with decoration (that doesn't mean we won't found them or even that we haven't already -- the students are plotting hundreds of artifacts and I'm not looking at each one as it comes out of the ground).

Progress in Unit 5 was slowed by the presence of two small features (Features 7 and 8). Feature 7 was a small deposit of dark, charcoal flecked sediment that appears similar to Feature 6 that we encountered in Unit 6. Only a portion of Feature 7 was visible in the floor of Unit 5, with the remainder extending into the unexcavated portion of Unit 3.  We documented and removed the portion in Unit 5, and we will catch the profile of the feature in the wall of the unit.

Feature 8 was a circular area of light sediment. We documented it in plan and then bisected it. It appears to be a circular pit with relatively straight sides that extend at least 15 cm from the depth at which the feature was defined. Based on the light fill of the feature, its shape in plan and profile, and the fact that it appeared within Zone 2 (the buried plowzone), the feature is almost certainly a historic period post or auger hole of some kind. We'll need to scoop out the remaining fill to keep any intrusive artifacts from plowzone from contaminating the prehistoric deposits.

Work resumed on the "downstairs" portion of the site with the return of Jim Legg. Jim and a student continued excavating Unit 9 to produce a straight profile wall. There were no diagnostic artifacts and no sign of any features associated with the presumed Middle/Late Archaic deposit, which was a bummer.  There's still a chance we'll find something in what's left of Unit 9 that can give us a firm handle on time/culture deep in the profile, but it's not looking good at this point. Jim wore black instead of paisley, and I can't completely let go of the idea that his wardrobe choice might have hurt our efforts. (Update [3/21/2017]: Legg has promised to return to paisley when we go in the field this Friday.)

Following the spring break hiatus, the Broad River Field School will be back in session tomorrow. We'll be shifting gears a bit to carefully work our way into what appears to be a buried Late Archaic/Early Woodland component. I'm also anticipating continued work on the deeper deposits at the site. Hopefully it will be an eventful day. It's supposed to be sunny and in the mid 60's. I'll just leave it at that.

Here are a few quick updates on other things for those playing along at home: a new modeling paper about the minimum size of demographically viable hunter-gatherer populations, new Fake Hercules Swords en route, and an identification of last Friday's whatzit. 

Finally, following up on yesterday's post about Against Me!, I would like to encourage you to listen to the song "Rebecca" if you like the rock'n'roll music. It's on repeat in Andyland.