As the nation's response to COVID-19 began to unfold in earnest a month ago, I anticipated that we'd go through a "shut down" period of some kind in an effort to get the spread of the virus under control. I thought maybe I'd be able to use the extra time at home to get caught up blogging, do some writing, and produce some of the student videos from my Forbidden Archaeology class last fall. Surely, I thought, the experts in our government will be able to formulate and operationalize a response to this situation that will allow us as a country to navigate it fairly well and get through it quickly.

Boy was I wrong about that. 

As a scientist, it has been amazing (and not in a good way) to watch the various levels of government field the patchwork of responses that has gotten us to where we are today. Watching what was unfolding in Italy was like having a crystal ball, and yet those at the top levels of our government chose to . . . what? Fill in the blank yourself.

Things could have been much different. If we had used our headstart and data from other countries to get a legitimate testing program up and running . . . If we had used that time to ramp up production of the PPE and medical equipment that it was obvious we would need . . .  If we had figured out how to use technology to track the spread . . . If we had done those things and had the leadership and the guts to go on complete lockdown early, we could have shut this down and gotten the situation under control before there were hundreds of thousands of cases and tens of thousands of deaths. We would have been out of the woods much sooner, with much less economic pain. But instead, we are where we are. It's not that no-one saw this train coming. It's that we didn't have the leadership and collective intelligence to figure out how to step out of the way. 

You know when you yell at the idiot in the horror movie not to open the door to the basement? That's every scientist in this country a month ago.

I am thankful that I still have my job and that my family is in relatively good shape. No-one is sick, we're not going to go hungry, and we can pay our bills. My wife and I are doing the best we can to keep our two kids in some kind of routine that involves school work and exercise. I'm getting done what I need to as far as my job. We're all working to help keep my wife's business afloat in the face of all the government bungling of the "rescue" plan that's supposed to help her pay her bills while she's forced to close. No-one is sleeping well and the house is wreck. It could be much worse, but it's no picnic.

With the sudden stoppage of the field school, getting the work there to some kind of conclusion has fallen completely on me. Field archaeology is usually a team sport. So far, I've spent three days at the site on my own working on Unit 14. Next I'll tackle finishing the levels in the block. And then I'll be left to backfill. I'm not sure when I'll be able to pull all the equipment out (that's the least of my concerns right now). I've been making videos of my solo work at 38FA608 both as public outreach and to use as tools as I continue to try to teach my students something about field archaeology without actually being together with them in the field. You can find all of the 2020 videos here. Here is the latest, where I go through the steps of excavating a probable feature:

I feel bad that my students' field experience has been so abruptly abbreviated. I know that this situation has shaken some of them, as they have had to adjust to the online learning model just as rapidly as their professors have. I've tried to create assignments for them that will teach them something about how and why we do things the way we do them, but there really is no substitute for actually doing fieldwork in the field. It's a real bummer. I hope that those that wish to will be allowed to take the course over again next spring. That's presuming, of course, that our government can find its footing and get this situation under control by then.

During our spring break, I worked with Stacey Young and other SCIAA personnel to excavate several units in the "basement" portion of 38FA608. That work was funded by an internal grant program. The goal was to explore the deeply-buried deposits at the site, hoping to positively identify an Early Archaic component. We got the fieldwork wrapped up just as things started to hit the fan. I'll make a video of the work and write more about it when I get the chance.

As an "essential employee," I do have access to my lab on campus. That means I can come and go as required to get materials that I need to do my job at home. I've gotten my computer modeling stuff going on my laptop, and have been chipping away at some demographic modelling work that I was originally going to do for the physical anthropology meeting that was cancelled. I have several papers in progress that I can work on if/when I have the time. I have taken to washing artifacts in my backyard as my kids play in the inflatable pool. I take walks in the morning to try and get some exercise before most of the rest of the world is up.

At the beginning of all this, I thought I'd be able to settle into a moderately productive routine at some point and be able to start getting ahead rather than just treading water. I'm an optimist, and I think that maybe that's still possible. It certainly hasn't happened yet, however. If I can get to the end of the day with the family and the house somewhat functional and feeling like I haven't fallen so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up, that's a win. A little bit of bad TV and/or drawing a picture at the end of the day are what passes for recreation.

I'll keep you posted as I finish up work at 38FA608. I'm hoping to find a way to provide a live feed on backfill day, which should be epic. I could really use some company out there, even if it's to jeer while I sweat my ass off. Stay tuned!

Over the last few months I have completed a draft of an interim report of the 2015-2018 work I've been directing at 38FA608. As explained in the report, it is mainly a descriptive effort that provides basic details about the various stages of the work we've undertaken, the excavation methods employed, the units excavated, and the materials recovered so far. The report discusses the initial discovery and documentation of the site, the 2017 and 2018 seasons of field school, and the backhoe trenches that were excavated as part of the Big Broad Trenching Project.

If you've followed what's been going on at the site through my blog and the videos, you'll find much of what's in the report to be familiar. There are things you haven't seen, also: descriptions of each feature, for example, images of all the projectile points recovered so far, and some images of the prehistoric pottery. I also report the four radiocarbon dates that have been obtained so far and the single OSL date.

What you won't find in this report is analysis. The report is written, rather, to present and organize information about the excavation work at the site so that analysis of the materials and deposits can be undertaken. Those analyses are what's next.

This is a draft report, meaning that the information in it is subject to change. I have been through the contents several times, but there are certainly still errors and omissions. I will make supporting documents (including raw data) available in the "Documents" section of the Broad River Archaeological Field School website as I have time. 

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!

In addition to spending a lot of time with my kids and building a new website for my art, I spent some time over the break re-acquainting myself with video editing software and working on tactics and strategies for making videos. I bought a GoPro knock-off to use for making time lapse videos of both artwork in progress and this spring's field school excavations (starting next Friday). I hope to also be able to incorporate videos into next year's Forbidden Archaeology class.

Anyway, I made a few short art-related videos over the break to do three things: (1) start climbing back up Adobe Premiere's steep proficiency hill; (2) increase my comfort level talking with/to a camera; and (3) build up a tolerance to hearing myself talk.  I hope the third one isn't as painful for you as it is for me.

 don't plan on writing a blog post every time I post a video, so if you're interested in keeping tabs on what I'm doing on that front please subscribe to my YouTube channel. 

Here are my first three videos:

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.

After getting our excavation areas cleared and our units set up on Day 1, we were in good shape to start excavating first thing on Friday morning. I gave the students a brief tour of the unit excavation forms we'll be using and explained how redundancies in the information recorded on their forms, in the field specimen (FS) log, on the bags, and in their notes help catch paperwork/provenience errors early in the process. Each student was issued two Sharpies with the challenge of keeping track of them for the duration of the field school.  The first one is free, but replacement Sharpies cost $100/each.

Most of the students worked with me and DuVal Lawrence in the "upstairs" part of the site, excavating the first levels of the units in the 4m x 4m block. Jim Legg and one student worked "downstairs," beginning excavations with the goal of creating a 5m profile wall along the 1000E line. Here is the updated unit map showing the placement of Unit 8 in the "downstairs" portion of the site:

Unit 8 is a 1m x 2m unit, the east side of which is on the floor of the "downstairs" and the northwest corner of which cuts into the existing vertical wall. Legg established the unit outlines using the two permanent datums that I put in downstairs (designated by the circled x's in the map above). He excavated through the deposits in 20 cm levels, screening the sediments that were removed. The darker zone associated with the presumed Middle/Late Archaic component is clearly visible in the freshly-excavated wall.

As you can see in the photograph of the Unit 8 excavation, the profile is capped by a sediment zone that contains abundant roots. That zone provided the students with their first "shovels in the ground" excavation experience as we began excavation of three of the units (Units 4, 5, and 6) in the 4m x 4m block that we laid out on Day 1.

I split the students into three groups and gave each group the task of excavating the southeastern 1m x 1m quadrant of their 2m x 2m unit. We went over the basic procedures of getting paperwork set up, labeling bags, double checking coordinates, and taking beginning depths. For the block excavation, we're controlling elevation using a rotating laser level sitting on a concrete block of known elevation (designated Datum 2017A).  Level 1 of Units 4, 5, and 6, will end at 40 cm below datum. I chose that depth to produce a level surface across the block that is still within the upper zone at the site -- these were the first ever levels excavated by these students and it's important to give them some experience with basic unit/level excavation techniques before we get into the intact deposits that (I think) will begin pretty close to the surface.

As of now, my plan is to concentrate our efforts on Units 4, 5, and 6 for the time being. With two sides exposed in profile, Unit 3 could then be excavated by natural/cultural sediment zone rather than in arbitrary levels, and could also serve as a "step" to get down into the other units. This would let us avoid putting stress on the southern and eastern sides of the block, preserving those walls for profiling.

In terms of artifacts, the first levels in block yielded low quantities of historic-period debris (a shotgun shell, a couple of pieces of iron, etc.). The first level of the NW 1/4 of Unit 4 did produce a prehistoric body sherd, however, which was a bit of a surprise. Based on the profile revealed in the vertical cut, I didn't expect to encounter prehistoric material until we penetrated what appeared to be a recently-deposited "cap" of lighter-colored sediment. I really don't understand the upper zones of the site yet, so these first levels will be interesting. It's possible that there's a well-preserved Mississippian or Woodland component near the surface, and it's also possible that material from deeper has been brought closer to the surface through natural mechanisms (animal burrows, tree falls, etc.). I hope to be at least starting level 2 in the block units by the end of next Friday. 

The first day in the field went pretty well. We accomplished all the goals I had for Day 1: getting the screens put together, clearing brush and leaf litter from the excavation areas, laying out the units, and getting everyone acquainted with the site and each other. As a native Midwesterner, it was a truly bizarre feeling to be starting an excavation on a 75 degree day in mid-January. The winter weather here is amazing.

After a few preliminaries at SCIAA ("be here on time, don't be a jerk, everything you do matters") we headed out to the site, arriving before 10:30. As I've briefly discussed previously (e.g., here and here), the portion of the site we're working on contains at least 2 m of prehistoric archaeological deposits stratified within in a natural levee along the Broad River. What we know about the site so far is limited to the information I've gathered by documenting deposits exposed in the existing vertical cut (produced by mechanical excavation at some point in the past presumably to borrow sediment) and excavation of two partial units that I placed to start to produce a straight profile and document the buried (Middle Archaic?) deposit of chipping debris that constitutes Feature 1.  

For the 4 m x 4 m block on the "upstairs" (Units 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the diagram below) I gave the students the task of trying to figure out how to find the unit corners using two permanent datum points (N 1000 / E 995 and N 995 / E 995) that DuVal Lawrence and I installed earlier in the week. Locating and marking the corners accurately requires several steps, so I wanted them to go through the thought process of figuring out how to do it (and check it) using multiple triangulations. That was fun.

The following image is just a photograph of my basic map showing the locations of the units we've laid out. The profile drawing shown above curves along the line labeled "cut." I excavated Units 1 and 2 last spring to start the process of producing a straight north-south profile. Jim Legg will continue those excavations with a series of units to the north of Unit 2, establishing a plumb profile wall along the 1000 E line. Units 3, 4, 5, and 6 will be used to expose the deposits in plan, coming down from the apex of the levee.  Unit 7 will be used to investigate what, if anything, is below the deposits visible in the exposed vertical cut. 

Weather permitting, next Friday we'll be putting shovels in the ground. Stay tuned!

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).