In the week before SEAC, I had the students in my South Carolina Archaeology class sorting sherds in my lab. As the first part of a group/individual ceramic project, they were getting some experience identifying vessel portion, kind of temper, surface treatment, and decoration in sherds from a surface collection from Allendale County, South Carolina (the Larry Strong collection -- the same one I used to get some data for this Kirk paper). For the second part of the project, I'm going to supply them with the combined data and ask them to: (A) match the groups to named ceramic wares using information on excellent sites such as this one; (B) create a graphic depiction of change through time in temper, surface treatment, and the frequency of decoration; and (C) address in writing several questions linking the pottery to patterns of social/technological change. 

I'm posting some quick images of most of the rim sherds (and some decorated non-rims) here so they will be able to look at them without coming back to the lab repeatedly while they're working on their projects. I know that some of you will know what these types are -- please don't deprive my students of the joy of discovery!

​Also - hi students!

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.

Day 13 saw us continue down the path toward wrapping up our excavations for the semester. The "upstairs" is going along willingly, the "downstairs" . . . not so much.

As I wrote last week, we wrapped up level excavations in Unit 4 and 6 and had just a few loose ends (final scraping and mapping of floor, etc.) in Unit 5. Today's goals were to finish the level excavations in Unit 5 and document the walls of the block by photographing and making profile drawings.  I took my own notes on the sediments in the profiles and collected a charcoal sample from one of the probable features exposed in the floor of Unit 4. The block was crowded.

Profile drawings are key to understanding the deposits from which we removed artifacts. It is often easier to understand the stratigraphy in profile (i.e., in a vertical plane) than in plan (as you're excavating through it). This is very true at this site, where the loose sand dries out quickly and makes it more difficult to move in the unit without disturbing artifacts and obscuring variation in the exposed sediments.

Drawing a profile uses many of the same skills the students learned while piece-plotting artifacts and making horizontal maps. The big difference is that one of the dimensions is elevation. The traditional way of drawing a profile is to establish a level line along the plane that you're drawing, measuring in everything in relation to that line. Setting a level line is simply a matter of stretching a string tightly between two anchoring points (typically gutter spikes or chaining pins), using a simple mason's line level to make the string level. ​

By the end of the day, the students had completed all the work in the "upstairs" block and had gotten much of the backfilling done. To protect the floors and walls until I can open the excavation again, we lined everything with landscape fabric and placed pieces of chipboard along the walls. The landscape fabric provides a marker between what's been excavated and what hasn't and, unlike plastic, allows water to pass through. The purpose of the vertical wood panels is to allow us to shovel right up to the walls when the fill is removed in the future. The whole enterprise will be filled and buried.

While everything went smoothly in the "upstairs," the "downstairs" portion of the site continued to fight back. DuVal and I visited the site mid-week to deliver a load of lumber for building the buttressing that will protect the profile wall until I can return to it again. I took that opportunity to try to salvage a decent photo of the deposits exposed in the wall after the collapse -- DuVal and I scraped it as best we could and waited for the sun to move to provide natural shade (early afternoon). It's not a perfect picture, but it wasn't a perfect situation. 

On Friday, Jim Legg completed his profile drawing of the intact north wall of Unit 9 and drew the profile exposed by the wall collapse. You can't really tell from the photo, but the surface is fairly irregular. In order to make it possible to build a wooden structure to protect the profile from further damage, I had some students cut back some portions of the lower zones to produce a surface closer to a vertical plane.  We screened the sediment. I was hoping that perhaps we'd finally get a diagnostic artifact from those lower zones. But, alas, no.

By the end of the day this coming Friday, the excavated portion of the "downstairs" profile wall will be protected behind wooden buttressing, one way or another. We'll line the wall with landscape fabric, install vertical wooden panels, and then fill the space between the two with sand. It would have been a lot easier to do this, of course, if the Unit 9 wall had not collapsed. The more irregular the wall, the more sand is required to fill in the spaces. More sand means more pressure on the wall, which requires more strength. The Unit 1 and 2 walls were already uneven, and the bottom part of the reconstructed buttressing there suffered a blowout during backfilling. I think we'll end up piling sand on the bottom portion of the buttressing to counter-act the pressure pushing outward. If there's one thing we have a lot of, it's sand.

Finally, I was happy to get a group photo with everyone in it. Good job, 2017 Broad River Archaeological Field School!

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.

Our tenth day in the field was unusual in that the focus of the day (for me, anyway) was a site visit by the board of the Archaeological Research Trust (ART), the landowner and family, and other guests. As I wrote last December, funds supplied by ART are supporting staff wages in the field and laboratory, as well as the costs of expendable field supplies and the lumber required to build protection for the vulnerable parts of the site. It was my pleasure to show them their money in action and try to communicate why what we're doing is worthwhile.

In terms of the archaeology, we're now to the point were we need to dial in the exit strategy for the semester. We've got four field days remaining, weather permitting.

"Upstairs," the last day will be spent backfilling the units and making sure everything is buttoned up and protected until the next opportunity to excavate. The second-to-last day will be devoted to drawing profiles of all the unit walls. That leaves us just two more days to excavate. Although I'm very curious to see what the deposits look like below the Mack zone, I'm not prepared to alter the piece-plot strategy at this point in order to speed things up. I think continuing to gather high resolution information as we excavate the Mack component will pay off during analysis. At the rate we're going, we may finish just one more 10 cm level in each of Units 4, 5, and 6.

"Downstairs," the end game will include cleaning, photographing, drawing, and describing the 5 m-long, 2.2 m-high profile that will be exposed when Jim Legg completes the excavation of Unit 9. With only one or two more levels to go to expose the base of the profile in Unit 9, we hope to be prepared to remove the wooden buttressing from Units 1 and 2 and clean and photograph the entire profile after one more day in the field. Drawing the profile will take at least a day. Constructing the buttressing to protect the entire 5 m will take at least part of a day. With luck, we'll be done with the downstairs before we're done upstairs.

I'm also starting to formulate my future plans for work at the site. I'll write about those plans when they're done cooking.

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.)

Last Friday marked the halfway point of the field school. We have accomplished a lot in seven days of work, and it's a pleasure to watch the students continue to become more and more comfortable and competent with the strategies, methods, and techniques of basic archaeological excavation.

In the "upstairs" portion of the site, excavations in Units 4 and 6 continued into the deposits beneath Zone 2. In Unit 6, we dealt with a small feature (designated Feature 6) that appeared beneath Zone 2.

A cultural "feature" is basically an immovable artifact -- an "in place" deposit created by human activity. In this part of the world, cultural features include the remains of such things as hearths, storage pits, cooking pits, postholes, burials, etc. Because intact features contain a record of a discrete set of human activities that occurred over a relatively short span of time, they hold valuable clues about what people were actually doing at a site. We love features because they give us specific information that other kinds of deposits cannot.

As you can see from the photo above, Feature 6 was a rather unspectacular stained area that contained a moderate amount of charcoal. We used standard feature excavating techniques to document and remove the feature: (1) mapped and described it in plan view; (2) bisected it to expose a profile, screening the sediment through 1/4" mesh; (3) documented the profile; (4) removed the remaining portion of the feature as a flotation sample. There wasn't much cultural material in the feature, but there were lots of large chunks of charcoal. In profile the feature appeared to be a shallow basin with a fairly regular shape, and there was no evidence that it was a root stain or rodent burrow.

The excavation to expose Feature 6 in profile went down to about 90 cmbd (centimeters below datum), so that seemed like a good target for the bottom of level 7 in Units 4 and 6. By the end of the day, Unit 6 was well on the way to being there, with no sign of cultural features. We're using a shovel-scraping methodology that, hopefully, strikes a good balance between speed and control. I want to go slow enough to recognize cultural features if they're present, but fast enough to end up with some good data on what we're dealing with as far as the horizontal and vertical distribution of prehistoric materials.

Meanwhile, in the "downstairs" portion of the site, work resumed on the excavation of Unit 9 (the 1m x 3m unit placed to extend the profile wall. As excavations near the top of the (supposed) Middle/Late Archaic zone, Jim Legg dazzled the students with yet another paisley shirt. Work also continued in Unit 7, a 1m x 2m unit being excavated to explore what lies beneath the exposed profile.

The last level of Unit 7 contained very little material. It did reveal, however, that the lamellae (the dark bands of sediment caused by the downward migration and accumulation of clay particles) appear to end rather suddenly. The base sediment remains coarse sand. It's possible that the abrupt ending of the lamellae is telling us something about the level of the water table: saturated sediment would presumably not facilitate the downward migration of clay particles. This will be something we can investigate with sediment analysis once we've got a nice profile exposed that we can sample. In the meantime, I've got my fingers crossed that we don't get a significant rainfall that presses the pause button on Unit 7.