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:
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:
Monday: Excavating Trench 4 at the far north end of the landform containing 38FA608.
Monday: Rainforest selfie.
Tuesday: Trench 3 shows what appears to be a sediment sequence similar to that at 38FA608 (A horizon underlain by sandy loam with increasingly thick lamellae) buried beneath a thick "cap" of alluvium. If this landform was used by human groups, the entire record may have been buried prior to historic use the area (resulting in a well-preserved buried record with no surface archaeology).
Tuesday: the Trench 8 profile shows well-developed lamellae but no buried A horizon. Sediments in this area appear to have been truncated, removing the upper zones. Artifacts are common on the surface here, but probably represent a palimpsest of materials left behind as the upper deposits were deflated.
Wednesday: Robert using the Dingo to backfill. This handy machine let us fill trenches after documentation while the backhoe was being used to cut new ones.
Wednesday: it's egg-laying season for the turtles. We watched this one dig the hole to lay her eggs in. A raccoon found the nest and ate the eggs overnight.
Thursday: Will and Scott profiling a trench in the northern end of the project area. Several trenches in this area had thick deposits of coarse, loose, laminated sand capping more compact deposits beneath.
 Thursday: we used the backhoe to cut a trench (Trench 25) down in the "basement" of 38FA608. I was surprised to see more sand (with lamellae) beneath the seasonally-saturated sediments we encountered at the bottom of Unit 11 last May. And there is more sand underneath that. |  Firday: this is my "I hope we get all this s@#! done" face. I started the day by documenting the Trench 25 profile and took some samples for OSL dating from the lower sand layers. |
Friday: there was no evidence of human occupation in Trench 5, but there was a sequence of 16 zones that mostly alternated between coarse, loose, sand and more clayey, more compact lenses of sandy loam. I collected two small chunks of charcoal (marked with pink flagging tape in this photo) from zones in this profile that were separated by about a meter, hoping that dates from those will give me some idea of how much time is represented by depositional sequences like this. Other trenches had shorter sequences of alternating sand/clayey sediments sitting on top of what might be "good" sediment sequences that could contain archaeology.
Friday: rain upriver caused the Broad to rise dramatically by mid-week. This backwater channel was filled on Thursday and Friday. It was nice to get a first-hand look at the flood dynamics in action: this episode will surely have some impact on the landscape.
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