I recently announced the return of the Broad River Archaeological Field School for the spring semester of 2018.  Student registration begins in November, and the logistical and strategic wheels are in motion.

This week I received radiocarbon dating results from two samples I submitted to Beta Analytic. Radiocarbon dates are not cheap (about $600 for an AMS analysis that returns an age estimate from a very small sample), and I am grateful to a private donor who supplied funds to date one of the samples from 38FA608.

Here are the date results on a generalized figure of the stratigraphy at 38FA608 as I currently understand it (based on profiles of Units 1, 2, 9, 11, and the original machine cut):​ 

The date for Zone 7 -- from a single piece of charcoal that Jim Legg picked out of the profile of Unit 9 -- came back right at the Middle/Late Archaic transition. It's a date that's consistent with Zone 7 being related to the Guilford point fragments that we've gotten from the site (only one of which has actually been found in situ).  Thus my original suspicion of a Middle Archaic age for Zone 7 is supported.

The date for the Zone 19 sample, however . . . was a bit of a surprise. It also came back as Middle Archaic in age, about 700-800 calendar years older than Zone 7.

I only wrote briefly about Unit 11, which I and several volunteers put in after field school to get our first good look at what is beneath the deposits exposed by the original machine cut.  There wasn't much material until we neared the boundary of a seasonal water table. Right above that, there were some large cobbles and a very light scattering of small, angular quartz fragments. As I wrote back in May, none of the cobbles appears to have been modified (at least based on a macro inspection), and none of the pieces of angular quartz is a slam dunk for a human-made stone tool. Other than human deposition, however, I can't think of a good explanation for how that material got there -- it is so unlike its sandy matrix in terms of size that it could not have been transported by the same mechanism.

I dated a single piece of charcoal plucked from the wall of Unit 11 (FS 1318) from a zone beneath the "cultural" material in an attempt to learn something about where those deposits might be in time. Given what seemed to be a fairly regular accumulation of the sand from the Middle Archaic though the Woodland period, I was expecting an Early Holocene rather than a Middle Holocene age -- I thought we might be looking at the edge of an Early Archaic deposit. 

​There are two main possibilities for the date: (1) it accurately dates the age of Zone 19; or (2) it doesn't.

It's possible that that piece of charcoal worked it's way down through the sand from a higher elevation, perhaps through bioturbation (movement by animals or roots). There's no obvious signs of intrusion from where the sample was taken, but that doesn't mean much in these old sands: we wouldn't necessarily expect that subtle signs of intrusion would be discernible in these kinds of sediments after 6000 years. 

So the date could be "bad" in the sense that it isn't giving us the age of the deposit. I think it's entirely possible, however, that it is accurate. While the idea of a slow and steady accumulation of sand over the course of the Archaic is appealing, there's no reason to assume that that's how it went down. It's possible that rates of deposition varied. The levee could have aggraded more rapidly during the Middle Holocene, perhaps as a function of both Middle Holocene climate and the lower elevation of the existing surface at that time (making it easier for the landform to be over-topped by flood waters). 

If Zone 19 really dates to around 4700 BC, the deposits in Zone 15 could be related to a deeply-buried Morrow Mountain occupation. 

Investigating the deep deposits at 38FA608 is a top priority for excavations in the spring. Stay tuned!

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.

I've spent the last couple of weeks on a family vacation to northeast Ohio, southeast Michigan, and the Upper Peninsula. I'm back in Columbia now, armed with a long mental list of things I'd like to do and talk about over the next few months. As I know from past experience that my eyes are often bigger than my stomach, I'll keep the specific list to myself for now. I'll just say it includes some real archaeology, some fake "archaeology," some ecological observations, some politics, some music, some art stuff, and possibly some ponderings about a spaceship cult.

Here's some real archaeology to start.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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).