Excavation at the Clark's Point site (12-Cl-3) in the Fall of 2002. Anyone who's done archaeology for a significant length of time has a pile of "things I'm going to finish someday." My experience teaching at Grand Valley this year along with my anticipation of moving outside of the Midwest over the summer has spurred me to be realistic about the things in that pile. I'm just not going to ever have the time and energy to pursue everything that I'd like to. So in the interests of looking ahead, I'm going through my filing cabinet of unfinished projects and trying to make available things that might be of use to someone else. I started with this stalled research on fetal head molding in Pleistocene humans. Now it's a couple of radiocarbon dates from an excavation that's over 10 years old. It's academic spring cleaning in the age of the internet.
The Clark's Point site (12-Cl-3) is a Late Archaic habitation site situated on a terrace overlooking the Falls of the Ohio. While I was working for the IPFW Archaeology Survey in 2002, we did a small excavation on the site in cooperation with the Clarksville Historical Society and the Falls of the Ohio Archaeological Society. My technical report of that excavation is available on my Academia.edu page (the report is here).
The site is called "Clark's Point" because it was the site of a house occupied by George Rogers Clark. The main prehistoric component of the site (and the reason I was interested in the excavation) is Late Archaic in age. The purpose of the excavation was to dig a footer for a chimney that was to be constructed on a cabin that now sits on the site. That excavation extended into Late Archaic midden deposits, allowing us to collect controlled samples of artifacts and other materials and expose a profile.
I obtained two AMS radiocarbon dates from deposits at the site after the initial report was written. It was always my intention to do a more thorough analysis of the midden and its contents and publish a paper with the radiocarbon dates. I would still like to do that at some point, but there isn't any sense in sitting on the radiocarbon dates any longer. The IPFW Archaeology Survey no longer exists (I do not actually know where the collections are at this point), and I need to move on. Anyway, here are the dates:
The Clark's Point site (12-Cl-3) is a Late Archaic habitation site situated on a terrace overlooking the Falls of the Ohio. While I was working for the IPFW Archaeology Survey in 2002, we did a small excavation on the site in cooperation with the Clarksville Historical Society and the Falls of the Ohio Archaeological Society. My technical report of that excavation is available on my Academia.edu page (the report is here).
The site is called "Clark's Point" because it was the site of a house occupied by George Rogers Clark. The main prehistoric component of the site (and the reason I was interested in the excavation) is Late Archaic in age. The purpose of the excavation was to dig a footer for a chimney that was to be constructed on a cabin that now sits on the site. That excavation extended into Late Archaic midden deposits, allowing us to collect controlled samples of artifacts and other materials and expose a profile.
I obtained two AMS radiocarbon dates from deposits at the site after the initial report was written. It was always my intention to do a more thorough analysis of the midden and its contents and publish a paper with the radiocarbon dates. I would still like to do that at some point, but there isn't any sense in sitting on the radiocarbon dates any longer. The IPFW Archaeology Survey no longer exists (I do not actually know where the collections are at this point), and I need to move on. Anyway, here are the dates:
The dates do not overlap at their 2-sigma range, and give some idea of the amount of time depth in the midden. The younger date (Beta-213841) is from nutshell recovered from a flotation sample from the upper portion of the midden (Zone D). The older date (Beta-213842) is from nutshell recovered from a charcoal-rich layer that seemed to mark the base of the midden. The locations of the samples are shown in the figures below. Further description of the sediments and cultural materials in the midden deposits can be found in the technical report (link above).
Please let me know if you make use of these dates. I hope to continue working on the Late Archaic of the Ohio Valley at some point in the future.
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