My new home. It's been two weeks since my last blog post.
I've spent much of that two weeks away from my computer, which has been a nice change. Since the semester ended, I've been working in the field, doing stuff around the house and with my family, and prepping my office for a move. Today I'm relocating from the main SCIAA building to a larger, nicer office suite right in the heart of campus. I'll have plenty of room to ramp up my research, process and analyze artifacts, store collections I'm working on, and (hopefully) start getting some student work going. It's really an amazing thing to have the space -- it's larger and nicer than many fully functional archaeology labs where I've worked in the past.
I've spent much of that two weeks away from my computer, which has been a nice change. Since the semester ended, I've been working in the field, doing stuff around the house and with my family, and prepping my office for a move. Today I'm relocating from the main SCIAA building to a larger, nicer office suite right in the heart of campus. I'll have plenty of room to ramp up my research, process and analyze artifacts, store collections I'm working on, and (hopefully) start getting some student work going. It's really an amazing thing to have the space -- it's larger and nicer than many fully functional archaeology labs where I've worked in the past.
A 6000-Year-Old Moment Frozen in Time?
Archaeological sites are places that contain material traces of human behavior. While the human behaviors that create archaeological sites are ultimately those of individuals, we usually can't resolve what we're looking at to that level. Traces of individual behaviors overprint one another and blend into a collective pattern. The granularity of individual behavior is usually lost.
Usually, but not always.
I spent portions of the last couple of works doing some preliminary excavation work at a site I first wrote about last October. Skipping over the details for now, documentation of an exposed profile measuring about 2.2 meters deep and 10 meters long showed the presence of cultural materials and intact features at several different depths. The portion of the deposits I am most interested in is what appears to be a buried zone of dark sediment, fire-cracked rock, and quartz knapping debris about 1.9 meters below the present ground surface. 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, I'm guessing that buried cultural zone dates to the Middle Archaic period (i.e., about 8000-5000 years ago).
Archaeological sites are places that contain material traces of human behavior. While the human behaviors that create archaeological sites are ultimately those of individuals, we usually can't resolve what we're looking at to that level. Traces of individual behaviors overprint one another and blend into a collective pattern. The granularity of individual behavior is usually lost.
Usually, but not always.
I spent portions of the last couple of works doing some preliminary excavation work at a site I first wrote about last October. Skipping over the details for now, documentation of an exposed profile measuring about 2.2 meters deep and 10 meters long showed the presence of cultural materials and intact features at several different depths. The portion of the deposits I am most interested in is what appears to be a buried zone of dark sediment, fire-cracked rock, and quartz knapping debris about 1.9 meters below the present ground surface. 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, I'm guessing that buried cultural zone dates to the Middle Archaic period (i.e., about 8000-5000 years ago).
A buried assemblage of quartz chipping debris, probably created by a single individual during a single knapping episode. I did quite a bit of thinking to come up with my plan to both stabilize/preserve the exposed profile and learn something about the deposits. After I cleaned and documented the machine-cut profile as it existed, I established a coordinate system and began systematically excavating a pair of 1x1 m units that cut into the sloping face of the profile above the deposit of knapping debris visible in the wall. Excavating those partial units allowed me to simultaneously plumb the wall and expose the deposit of knapping debris in plan view. While there is no way to know for sure yet, I think I exposed most of the deposit, which seemed to be a scatter of debris with a concentration of large fragments in a space less than 60 cm across (an unknown amount of the deposit was removed during the original machine excavation, and I recovered numerous pieces of quartz debris from the slump beneath the deposit). My best guess is that pile of debris probably marks where a single individual sat for a few minutes and worked on creating tools from several locally-available lumps of quartz. I piece-plotted hundreds of artifacts as I excavated the deposit, so I'll be able to understand more about how it was created when I piece everything back together.
I did what I came to do. The site I've been working on would be a great one for a field school. It is close to Columbia and has all kinds of interesting archaeology -- great potential for both research and teaching. This May I was out there by myself. It took just about every move of fieldwork jiu jitsu I know (and several that I had to invent on the spot) to do what I did to stabilize the site and get it prepped for a more concerted effort, but I think it's in good shape now. Once I get moved into my new lab space I'll be able to start processing the artifacts and doing a preliminary analysis. I'll keep you posted.
The Anthropology of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands?
Earlier in the month, I had the privilege of visiting the archaeological field schools being conducted at Topper. I wrote a little bit about the claim for a very early human presence at Topper here. The excavations associated with that claim aren't currently active. Field schools focused on Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene (Mississippi State University and the University of West Georgia) and Woodland/Mississippian (University of Tennessee) components at Topper and nearby sites have been running since early May. Seeing three concurrent field schools being run with the cooperation of personnel from four universities (and many volunteers) is remarkable.
Earlier in the month, I had the privilege of visiting the archaeological field schools being conducted at Topper. I wrote a little bit about the claim for a very early human presence at Topper here. The excavations associated with that claim aren't currently active. Field schools focused on Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene (Mississippi State University and the University of West Georgia) and Woodland/Mississippian (University of Tennessee) components at Topper and nearby sites have been running since early May. Seeing three concurrent field schools being run with the cooperation of personnel from four universities (and many volunteers) is remarkable.
On the day of my visit, I gave a talk titled "The Anthropology of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands?" I argued that not only is it possible to do the anthropology of prehistoric peoples, but it should be a fundamental goal. Skipping over the details for now, I argued (as I have elsewhere) that complex systems science provides a set of tools for systematically trying to understand how history, process, and environment combine to produce the long-term, large-scale trajectories of prehistoric change that we can observe and analyze using archaeological data. I talked about each of the components of my three-headed monster research agenda. And I got to eat various venison products prepared under the direction of my SCIAA colleague Al Goodyear. And I got to see alligators swimming in the Savannah River. As a native Midwesterner . . . I anticipate that working near alligators will remain outside my comfort zone for some time to come.
The Savannah River: there are alligators in there.
When Did Humans First Move Out of Africa?
Archaeologists love finding the earliest of anything and people love reading about it. While we often want to know how/when new things appear, identifying the "earliest of X" often gets play in the popular press that is disproportionate to its relevance to a substantive archaeological/anthropological question. And you can never really be sure, of course, that you've nailed down the earliest of anything: someone else could always find something earlier, falsifying whatever model was constructed to account for the existing information and moving the goal posts.
Exactly a year ago, I wrote about the reported discovery of 3.3 million-year-old stone tools from a site in Kenya. Those tools are significantly earlier than the previous "earliest" Oldowan tools. I think they're really interesting but not particularly surprising: several other lines of evidence (cut marks on bone, tool-use among chimpanzees, and hominin hand anatomy) already suggested that our ancestors were using tools well before the earliest Oldowan technologies appeared.
I anticipate that we still haven't seen the "earliest" stone tool use.
A recent report from India argues that our ideas about the "earliest" humans outside of Africa also miss the mark. (Note: when I say "human" I'm referring not to "modern human" but to a member of the genus Homo.) This story from March discusses a report of stone tools and cutmarked bone from India purportedly dating to 2.6 million-years-ago (MYA), blowing away the current earliest accepted evidence of humans outside of Africa (Dmanisi at 1.8 MYA) by about 800,000 years. With an increasing number of Oldowan assemblages dating to about 1.8-1.6 MYA are being reported outside of Africa (e.g., in China and Pakistan), would it be that surprising to find evidence a migration pre-dating 1.8 MYA? Probably not. Do the finds reported from India cement the case for human populations in South Asia at 2.6 MYA? Not yet: the fossils and tools reported from India so far (as far as I know anyway) don't have a context that allows them to be convincingly dated.
Archaeologists love finding the earliest of anything and people love reading about it. While we often want to know how/when new things appear, identifying the "earliest of X" often gets play in the popular press that is disproportionate to its relevance to a substantive archaeological/anthropological question. And you can never really be sure, of course, that you've nailed down the earliest of anything: someone else could always find something earlier, falsifying whatever model was constructed to account for the existing information and moving the goal posts.
Exactly a year ago, I wrote about the reported discovery of 3.3 million-year-old stone tools from a site in Kenya. Those tools are significantly earlier than the previous "earliest" Oldowan tools. I think they're really interesting but not particularly surprising: several other lines of evidence (cut marks on bone, tool-use among chimpanzees, and hominin hand anatomy) already suggested that our ancestors were using tools well before the earliest Oldowan technologies appeared.
I anticipate that we still haven't seen the "earliest" stone tool use.
A recent report from India argues that our ideas about the "earliest" humans outside of Africa also miss the mark. (Note: when I say "human" I'm referring not to "modern human" but to a member of the genus Homo.) This story from March discusses a report of stone tools and cutmarked bone from India purportedly dating to 2.6 million-years-ago (MYA), blowing away the current earliest accepted evidence of humans outside of Africa (Dmanisi at 1.8 MYA) by about 800,000 years. With an increasing number of Oldowan assemblages dating to about 1.8-1.6 MYA are being reported outside of Africa (e.g., in China and Pakistan), would it be that surprising to find evidence a migration pre-dating 1.8 MYA? Probably not. Do the finds reported from India cement the case for human populations in South Asia at 2.6 MYA? Not yet: the fossils and tools reported from India so far (as far as I know anyway) don't have a context that allows them to be convincingly dated.
My Conversation with Scott Wolter
Forbidden Archaeology (ANTH 291-002): It's going to worthwhile. I had a pleasant conversation with Scott Wolter yesterday. I emailed him to touch base about his participation in my class in the fall, and we ended up talking for about 45 minutes. It was the first time we've spoken and we had more to talk about than we had time to talk. We talked about the Wolter-Pulitzer partnership, of course, but I'm not going to go into the details of our discussion (I just invite you to read for yourself Pulitzer's bizarre word salad blog post from Wednesday containing his reference to me as "some back woods rural South Carolina Pseudo-Archaeologist who never worked in the field, but only learned from books"). My sense is that Wolter is someone with whom I can have a frank and vigorous discussion about the merits and interpretation of archaeological evidence and how it is used to evaluate ideas about the past. I'm looking forward to his participation in my class. My plan is to start a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money to fly him down here so he can interact with the students on a face-to-face basis.
And now the movers are coming for my filing cabinets. And now my chair is gone. And now you are up-to-date.
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