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 report that the 2020 season of the Broad River Archaeological Field School has begun. We spent our first day in the field last Friday and will return to work on site 38FA608 most Fridays this semester. This will be the third season of field school at the site, and it is the biggest group so far: I have ten undergraduates, a graduate student, two staff that I hired, and several folks from the Heritage Trust Program at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources that will participate as their schedules allow.

We spent the first couple of hours of the field school in the classroom introducing ourselves, going over the syllabus, rounding up forms, and talking about expectations, etc. I gave a presentation on what we've done at the site so far. Then we loaded up the screens and some other equipment and got everyone out to the site by about 10:45.

My main goals for the first day were to: (1) relocate the block and remove a good portion of the backfill from it; and (2) assess and deal with some slumping of the unexcavated/unprotected portion of wall that that occurred since the last field school in 2018. 

By the end of the work day on Friday we had reached the floor of Unit 6 in the block. I estimate it will take us at least two more hours to remove the remainder of the backfill from the block.​

The slumping that had occurred at the wall included Feature 5, which was unfortunate. I had documented the exposed portion of Feature 5 in my profile of the original machine cut surface, but we had not yet been able to excavate units to straighten that section of the wall so that it could be better protected. In profile, Feature 5 appeared to be a shallow pit lined with fire-cracked rock (FCR) similar to the nearby Feature 4 (which remains partly unexcavated). Given its stratigraphic location, it almost certainly dated to the Late Archaic period.

We're in the process of removing the slumped sediment and screening it. We've recovered a lot of large pieces of FCR that would have originally been in Feature 5 as well as a Savannah River point. The slumped sediments also contained a complicated stamped rim sherd that would have come from above the level of the feature.
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This year, as in previous years, each week several students will write blog posts about their work. Those posts can be found here.  I will be producing weekly videos as well. I'll post those videos here.  Here's the first one:

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!

As promised, Jim Vieira visited Columbia earlier this week to participate in my Forbidden Archaeology (ANTH 227) class. I gave him the floor on Monday to talk to the class about whatever he wanted to. The students were required to write a short (2-3 page) summary/critique of his presentation and prepare several written questions for Wednesday's class. I tried to mostly stay out of the way.

Overall, I think the whole thing went pretty well. Vieira's presentation gave them plenty to chew on, including things we had discussed in class (Atlantis claims, the nature of science, the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis, the nature of myths, the cross-cultural comparison of iconography) and things we hadn't (androgynous fish gods, quantum theory, ayahuasa, Linus the cat), and they asked some good questions. I videotaped the whole thing if you're interested. There's only one camera and Vieira is the only one with a microphone, but you can still get a pretty good idea of how it went down.

The main goal of this course is for the students to come out of it with some skills evaluating claims about the human past: how do you determine if an explanation is credible or not? how do you evaluate evidence that's offered or bring new evidence to bear? can you derive expectations from a claim that you can compare to what you can observe in the world? what assumptions are embedded in a claim and are those assumptions reasonable? given two different explanations, can you determine which one is more credible? how?  These questions all have to do with the nature of archaeology as, ultimately, a material science.

As I tell my students and anyone else who will listen, the key to being in the scientific loop is having/finding/using some mechanism to evaluate whether your ideas make sense or not. As long as you're doing science, it ultimately doesn't matter where an idea originates: an idea that comes to you in a dream may be right or wrong -- the trick is knowing how to figure out which it is. In most cases, the stories we tell about the human past are linked to things that happened in the material world and therefore are accessible through archaeology. Whatever the real story is, it ultimately has to be consistent with all the material evidence that's available. Misinterpreting evidence, ignoring evidence contrary to your story, and using fake evidence are all tickets to getting the story wrong.

It is my experience that many on the "alternative" side are so invested in the stories that they're selling that they are unwilling to change their stories as new evidence is produced, old interpretations are shown to be incorrect, and some "evidence" is shown to be fraudulent. Generally, those are not people that are wiling to have a conversation about evidence. 

​Jim Vieira is not one of those people. He and I land in different places on any number of subjects, but we have yet to find a topic that we can't discuss. Outside of class, he and I spent a lot of time talking about a wide range of subjects connected to the ancient past. The conversations were always easy and almost always entertaining, and Jim and I both think that there would be outside interest in listening to that kind of communication between a professional archaeologist and someone coming from the "alternative" side of things. I proposed that we do an occasional YouTube program something along the lines of "The Mystery Hour with Andy and Jim." Hopefully we can make that happen in some form.

And here are some photos from our hike in Congaree National Park: a water moccasin along the trail and Jim using his supernatural fish god powers to levitate an acorn. I will not share with you the esoteric life coaching I received during this three hour adventure. You're welcome.

I'm happy to announce that Jim Vieira will be doing his second tour of duty as a guest in my Forbidden Archaeology class. He'll be with us for two class periods in mid-October. During the first class period he'll give his presentation; during the second the students will ask him questions. In between class periods he and I will discuss double rows of teeth, the secrets of the vast academic conspiracy of which I am an important part, and great moments in the history of stone masonry. I'll also make him walk through my art exhibit downtown.

The second student project video from this year's Forbidden Archaeology class is now posted on YouTube. In this video, three students discuss some of the evidence that's bandied about for the extra-terrestrial origin of the Anunnaki. They've already gotten their first thumbs down. Enjoy!

Tomorrow I'll be posting one on the Nephilim, but I won't write a blog post about it. Check my YouTube channel tomorrow morning if you're interested. [Update: here it is.]

As I mentioned earlier, we're making videos in this year's iteration of my Forbidden Archaeology course. The twenty students in the class split up into seven groups and have been working on developing their topics, doing their research, and preparing their scripts.

Last Monday, we taped the speaking parts for the first video and I edited it together over the break. The videos briefly explores the history of ideas/claims that the earth is hollow, and then discusses reasons why that can't be true. Here it is:

I had several goals in mind when I designed this video project. First, it was one opportunity (among several in the course) for students to go through the process of understanding the history/context of a claim and evaluating it based on evidence. Second, I wanted them to think about how to present a message in the format I gave them and all the constraints that come with it. Third, I wanted to produce what I call "persistent resources" that can live independently online and be found by curious people looking for information. I chose the video format because my sense is that we can reach a different audience than would be possible using writing.

Like many of the things I've done so far in my brief teaching career, this is an experimental project. I hope these videos turn out well, I hope the students get something out of it, and I hope they prove to be useful resources for others as well.

This year in Forbidden Archaeology, the students are making videos as group projects. They are currently working on finishing up their scripts, and we'll start taping segments next week. There is a range of a topics, but all have something to do with "fringe" claims about the human past. Barring any total breakdowns, there will be seven student videos in all. Hopefully I'll be able to start posting them in December.

As I was planning out what to this semester, I decided that making videos would be a way for the students to work on several different elements of critical thinking and communication. It would also give us an opportunity (I hope) to engage with a different audience than the 2016 class did with their blog posts. It's an experiment, so I won't really know what the broader impacts are until the videos are done and we see what the reaction is.

I made an example video so the students could get a better idea of what I was thinking of in terms of length, graphics, etc. I chose to talk about the "red-haired cannibal giants" of Nevada, and I threw this video together in a few hours on Friday afternoon. Enjoy!

You may have noticed that I haven't been regularly blogging about the course this year. That's by design. After wearing myself out the first time around in 2016, I decided I would put less effort into intensive public/fringe interaction. I think it has worked out well. I'm enjoying teaching the course much more. There will be still be student writing online to read eventually, and we'll be making videos this year. I'm just not killing myself to invite everyone else into the classroom.

​On Friday we finished our section on Atlantis in this year's edition of Forbidden Archaeology. We spent most of the class watching and discussing a talk by Graham Hancock titled "Is the House of History Built on Foundations of Sand?"  I wanted the students to watch carefully as Hancock made his case, asking them to think about his logic, the structure of the talk, and the evidence he presented to support his claims (many pieces of which they have already been exposed to).

I have not paid a whole lot of attention to Hancock in the past. I haven't completely read any of his books, and I think that this was the first time I have ever listened to an entire talk. He spent the first portion of the talk discussing the recent evidence for the hypothesis that an impact by a comet or meteor triggered the Younger Dryas. (The Younger Dryas is an anomalous cold period that occurred about 12,900-11,700 years ago during the transition from glacial to inter-glacial conditions.) He spent the last part of the talk highlighting some purported evidence (e.g., Gobekli Tepe, the Sphinx) supporting the claim that refugees from Atlantis occupied the Near East after fleeing their island's destruction.

The linkage that Hancock makes between the hypothesized extra-terrestrial impact that triggered the Younger Dryas and the destruction of Atlantis is, when you listen closely, peculiar. Following a quotation of Plato's description of Atlantis disappearing into the sea "in a single day and night of misfortune," Hancock describes the cataclysmic effects of extra-terrestrial impacts on the earth. He first discusses the idea that a comet wiped out the dinosaurs. He then moves on to the Younger Dryas impact research, repeatedly referring to "the cataclysm" of the impact. 

So a comet or meteor wiped out at Atlantis?

No, the dates are all wrong for that. The Younger Dryas starts at about 12,900 BP (10,950 BC). Believers set the date of the destruction of Atlantis at 11,550 BP (9,600 BC). So, apparently, all the extra-terrestrial fireworks did nothing to the Atlanteans. They prospered for another 1300 years, conquering the world and mining orichalcum while the planet suffered a return to full glacial conditions.

After all the attention paid to violent cataclysm, Hancock actually attributes the destruction of Atlantis to sea level rise at the end of the Younger Dryas. Sea levels are lower during glacial periods because more of the Earth's water is tied up in ice sheets. Sea levels rise in inter-glacial periods because more of the Earth's water is in liquid form. As far as the culprit in Atlantis demise at 9,600 BC, Hancock points specifically to "a dramatic pulse of sea level rise" known as Meltwater Pulse 1b.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that, although there is debate about the magnitude, timing, and cause of Meltwater Pulse 1b, no scientist thinks it was so sudden or so rapid that it could have swallowed up a continent "in a single day and night of misfortune." Estimates of sea level rise range from about 6 to 28 meters, occurring over a period of several hundred to over a thousand calendar years. At least one study suggests the pulse didn't even start until hundreds of years after the purported submergence of Atlantis.