It's been a pretty busy spring. I've been working on papers, keeping things going in my lab, and teaching the field school. I just got back from a visit to Texas A & M, where I gave two presentations dealing with my work on Paleoindian and Early Archaic demography, complex systems theory, etc. It was a good visit and I'll write more about it if I get a chance.

Last week was Day 7 of the Broad River Archaeological field school. If you haven't been following along, you can catch up with the videos here. We have been battling a wet spring in several different ways, but overall it's going well. We're making good progress on the excavation and things are going pretty smoothly considering the various challenges we've faced this semester. Things will likely continue to get more complicated as we get farther down in the units and into more complex deposits.

We've also got a good luck charm this year. It may look creepy, but it says "good luck charm" right there on it, so . . .

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!

I wanted to pass on the online version of this article ("The Fine Scale of Time" by Megan Sexton) that ran in the USC Times earlier this fall. It's a short piece about my work at 38FA608.  The photo is me examining some of the conjoining lithic debris from the Guilford-age deposit at the site. Enjoy!

Back in June, I wrote about a week spent along the Broad River with colleagues from the South Carolina Heritage Trust and some of my own students doing fieldwork associated with a research grant I received from USC. I have finally completed a video showing some of that fieldwork. I plan on doing another one explaining the analysis and results (which will be completed this calendar year or soon after). Enjoy! 

For those of you that enjoyed the weekly videos from last spring's Broad River Archaeological Field School, I wanted to make you aware of this compilation of the entire season into a single 2:16 presentation. It will be a good refresher for me to watch the whole thing, as I'll be spending much of this semester working on analysis and write-up of the data from the first two seasons of work at 38FA608. Enjoy!

I spent this week along the Broad River with colleagues from the South Carolina Heritage Trust and some of my own students doing fieldwork associated with a research grant I received from USC. The grant, titled "Finding the Family in South Carolina Prehistory," was focused on exploring the potential for buried archaeology in alluvial landforms in the vicinity of 38FA608. Several seasons of hand excavations there have revealed about 3 m of stratified cultural deposits spanning at least 6000 years, all protected within a sandy "natural levee" deposit.

I believe I've mentioned the grant before, but only in passing. In brief, the strategy was to use a backhoe to excavate a series of short trenches spaced about 100 m apart along about a mile of deposits. The sediment sequences revealed in the walls of those trenches provide information about how the alluvial landscape along this section of the river formed and developed and which areas have (or have the potential to contain) well-preserved archaeological sites. We cleaned, drew profiles, described sediments, and photographed a wall of each trench. Carbon was scarce, but I obtained a few small samples from buried strata that I think will help me construct a preliminary depositional chronology. I'm most interested in locating sites with good potential for preserving evidence of family- and group-level behaviors in the Early and Middle Holocene (hence the name of the grant), but I want to be able to tell the rest of the story as well.

The weather was not our friend early in the week. We got soaked by heavy rain all day on Monday, and intermittently on Tuesday afternoon. The remainder of the week was better, perhaps even relatively pleasant by the standards of South Carolina in late May. 

It was a hectic week, but we got everything done and learned a tremendous amount in a short time. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Sean Taylor at the South Carolina Heritage Trust for kicking in resources (both human and machine) and expertise at his disposal. I'm also thankful for the continued generosity and hospitality of the landowner. The analysis of the materials and information will begin immediately, starting with cleaning/cataloging the artifacts we collected, digitizing the profiles, and selecting samples for radiocarbon dating, etc. I still have a day or so left in the field to map in some trench locations and take a few final notes. I'll write about it as I have time, and will produce one or two videos showing what we did. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy some photos from our week and some of my initial thoughts on what we saw:

The second full season at 38FA608 is in the books. Last Friday, we backfilled the block (almost) and finished up with Unit 13 (excavated one last level and re-drew the profile to include the lower deposits). Chris Moore and Mark Brooks visited the site to enjoy JJ's fish fry and collect a column of sediment samples from the profile. We recovered a Morrow Mountain point in context in the last level of Unit 13, in the "correct" position below the Guilford component.

We didn't have time to get everything buttressed up, so DuVal and I will spend tomorrow putting the site to bed and schlepping equipment back to campus.

Cheerwine is now the official drink of the Broad River Archaeological Field School.

At some point I'll probably edit all the videos together to make a feature-length film to show to next year's students.

This was a good group of students and I'm proud of all of them. Enjoy the video of our last day in the field!

We've only got two more days left in the spring 2018 season at 38FA608. The weather looks good for this Friday, so I may end up threading the needle with yet another season with no time lost to rain.

While we're in good shape to finish up in the block on Friday, Unit 13 is going slower than I'd hoped. It just won't stop being interesting. As you will see in the video from Week 11, I took two students out for an extra day to work on the Late Archaic deposits and try to keep things moving along. There is still work to be done before we reach the Middle Archaic zone, and there's no telling what we'll run into down there. If the broad pattern of field archaeology holds, we'll find something extremely interesting this Friday that will bring the whole endeavor to a screeching halt.

The video for Week 11 is a long one, as it includes footage from an extra field day. I resisted the temptation to pose on a lawn chair in the back of the pickup truck. Enjoy!

We had an eventful day in the field last Friday, so this week's video is longer than usual. Every project like this reaches what feels like a "hinge point" where you can start accurately sizing up what you can and can't get accomplished.  We won't be able to do everything I wanted to do at 38FA608 this semester, but we'll be able to do a lot of it. Fingers crossed the weather continues to cooperate.

We finally took the large rocks out of the floor of Unit 5. One of them turned out to be something unexpected (I won't spoil is so you can enjoy the moment with us on the video). The other turned out to be . . . well, watch the video for that also.

My arms and hands began blooming with poison ivy rash at about 2:00 on Saturday morning. Last week it took a couple of days before I started to feel the irritation. My folk theory is that the lack of rain allows the oils to build up and concentrate. Spring is aggressive and early here: plants and animals move into the excavation areas during our week-long absences from the site.

Enjoy the video!