Etowah Archaeological Field School: Week 1

As first weeks go, this one was pretty eventful. I have to say that I am tired and sore and very glad to be an archaeologist again. I’ve got a great student crew, two stellar grad assistants, and a valued co-director in Kent Reilly. And as if that wasn’t enough, we are digging at Etowah!

All 14 of us (that number will rise this week) are living in one house, so this is as much an experiment in communal living as it is an archaeological dig. So far things have gone very well. It helps to have three bathrooms, two grad students and a co-director to keep the madness under control, and a cook to prepare our dinners. Speaking of our cook, I think it is fair to say that our experience to this point has been shaped by Miss Claudene. She is impossible to fully appreciate without knowing her.  She lives next door to us and has completely and utterly adopted us and our cause. She insists on being called Mama and speaks of herself in the third person most of the time. She spends a few hours each evening with us, knows us all by name, and has already begun dispensing advice, giving gifts (I got a book on Scotland for my son), and looking for boyfriends (for some of the female crew members). She’s spent her spare time the last few days calling local museums, minor league baseball teams, and movie theaters trying to get us free tickets. She’s also convinced a friend to let us swim in her pool. She is our Mama.

Mama is really emblematic of my experience working at Etowah. I am, and always have been, so lucky to have wonderful people in Cartersville who not only take an interest in what I am doing but truly take me and my crew in. They look out for us, take care of us, and invest personally in us. That goes for Mama, but it goes for the staff at Etowah, too. Keith and Gary and park superintendent Steve have helped us in too many ways to recount—loaning equipment, sun shades, tools, a gator, mowing when we need it, getting an ice machine, letting us cut trees to make screen legs…the list goes on (and will continue to grow). It also goes for other people in the area who love Etowah and archaeology—our landlord Chris took the chance of renting a house for two months to 15 archaeologists…something no one in their right mind would (or should) do. This all makes the archaeology better, but more importantly it makes our time in Cartersville about much more than archaeology—something we will all carry with us for a long time.

This week we began excavating 1-m squares located to encounter the walls of individual Mississippian houses. Those houses were identified using a gradiometer (which measures subtle changes in magnetism in a soil profile) and, to a certain extent, also ground-penetrating radar. Below is an image showing the grids (as we have numbered them) and their respective magnetic anomalies. We currently have test units investigating anomalies in Grids 1&2 (two unts), 5, 6, and 7. One of the main goals is to see if we can confirm what we think we see in the magnetic data—two different kinds of buildings. Those building types are defined by single-set post and wall-trench construction styles. Grids 1&2 and 6 contain anomalies that we think correspond to wall-trench buildings, while Grids 5 and 7 contain single-set post buildings.

We are excavating in 10-cm levels and so far most of the units are down to 40 or 50 cm below the surface. None have been excavated down to the point where we can know for sure if the kinds of buildings I expect to be there are actually there. The two units in Grids 1&2 are going through a fairly thick Brewster phase (AD 1475-1550) midden producing lots of broken pottery sherds, some animal bone, charcoal and a few flaked stone tools. Hopefully when those units go through that midden, we should find a couple of Brewster phase houses…if our expectations are right. Grid 5 looks to contain a beautiful wall-trench building. Two of the ladies on our crew have been working on this unit, which had a fairly thick, fairly sterile flood deposit overlying a sparse clayey midden. I am hopeful that they will get through that midden to subsoil early next week. Again, if I am right we’ll find a nice wall-trench segment there. Grid 6 has three anomalies and we are working on the one in the upper right. The guys digging there have gone through a similar fairly sterile flood deposit and are now working in a nice midden dating, I think , to the Wilbanks phases. They’ve got big chunks of daub (burned wall plaster made of red clay) and burned wood in their current level giving me hope that they are coming down on a burned single-set post building. The guys in Grid 7 appear to be working on a wall-trench building based on the gradiometer data. Theirs has been the most complex unit in terms of soil layers and I really am not entirely sure what is happening. I have a suspicion that they may be digging through redeposited mound fill dragged there from Mound F by years of plowing…but it still isn’t entirely clear. They may have two posts along the western wall of their unit…single-set posts and not the wall-trench I was expecting. We should figure this unit out early next week as well.

My plan was to place single 1-m units, using those gradiometer data, right on building walls. That strategy sounds nice, but the correspondence between the archaeology and the magnetic data may not be that straightforward…so we may have to open up more units on the same buildings to make sense of them. I think after this next week we should be in a much better position to understand how well our strategy is going to work. 

Mama and the rest of us have the weekend off, but Monday and, hopefully some clarity, are just around the corner.

An Unconventional Upbringing

I have a friend, someone who has been my friend for almost 25 years, who has recently take n to repeating something his wife recently observed about me—that I am unconventional. The last time he repeated it I reminded him that he knows my father (and that should explain a lot). Whatever unconventional tendencies I may have, I lay squarely at the feet of my father.  In honor of Father’s Day, I will relate a few stories that help explain this unconventionality.

When I was about 5, my parents moved my brother and me from the suburbs of Philadelphia to rural New Hampshire. I never really pressed them as to why we did it, but I am pretty sure it is because they (probably mostly my dad) wanted to blend into the woods and be earth-loving hippies—you know, grow a garden, raise chickens and pigs, hunt and fish. My dad was (and still is) an unconventional hippie, though. Both my parents always railed against the establishment, organized religion, etc. but neither ever hated on our country the way some did at that time. My dad was (and is) something of a patriotic hippie, if that makes any sense. Growing up, every Fourth of July he would wake the entire family by playing Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue on the record player as loud as he could and lighting off a pack of firecrackers. That would be followed by a loudly stated, “Happy Birthday, America!” Every Fourth of July, after being awakened in that manner, we would roast meats, shoot guns, and light off fireworks.

Anyway, back to New Hampshire and my unconventional upbringing. We had pigs and chickens and eventually a horse, all of which my brother and I had to help care for. The pigs were a hoot because we used to climb over the fence into the pen and try to ride them. It seemed like we had the pigs forever, but it was probably just part of a year—long enough to fatten them up. Then it came time to butcher one. My dad shot it, gutted it and hung it from a tree. I can remember that giant pig carcass hanging from the tree dripping blood. When it had drained sufficiently, my dad used our sledding saucers to haul cut up pig carcass to the house. The blood got all over the saucers and on the fabric straps that served as handles. While the blood washed off the saucers, it never came off the handles. It was a lasting reminder of the slaughtered pig.

While we lived in New Hampshire my dad was a general contractor: plumber, electrician, and carpenter. One of his regular gigs was closing down a summer camp, getting it ready for the winter. My brother and I would go with him and help shut off water valves and dump antifreeze in toilets. The camp was like an abandoned city with roads, cabins, a lake, etc., and we had a little (gas-powered) minibike that I rode all around. It was a blast. And every minute was like a scavenger hunt because the campers left all sorts of stuff behind—sports equipment, clothes, and sometimes even money. My brother and I would scramble over each other to be the first to get into the cabins. I remember raiding the chocolate chip stash in the camp kitchen and taking the camp’s kayaks out on the lake. It was our own private camp. I loved closing down Camp Merrimack.

It seems like I went to work with my dad a lot. I remember one job where he was doing something on a house. I went with him and ended up in the basement of that house. I found a cat with a litter of kittens down there and decided I wanted one of the kittens. I told my dad and he said if I could catch one I could have it. I am sure that was a throw-away response—he didn’t really expect me to catch one of those wild kittens. The next day I went back to work with him and took a bird cage we had with me. In that birdcage I put some cat food and stuck it in the basement…then I waited. When a kitten went in to get the food, I pulled the door closed with a string I had tied to it. True to his word, my dad let me take the kitten home and it became one of our pets. I think its name was Puff.

Later we moved back to Pennsylvania and ended up on a mostly wooded 120 ac tract—in the woods again. We had our usual assortment of animals: chickens, sheep, ducks, etc. On a whim, my dad decided he wanted to try to incubate and hatch an egg laid by one of our ducks. He took one and put it in an electric frying pan. Using a thermometer, he made sure the temperature remained the proper, constant temperature and low and behold a duckling was hatched. After he hatched, he lived in our house for a little while and during that time imprinted on my dad and the rest of us as his family. When he got big enough we put him outside with the rest of the ducks. He didn’t really think he was a duck, though, and spent most of his life right outside of our kitchen door. Whenever we opened the door, he tried to bust into the house. Eventually some animal ate him.

Speaking of the sheep, we had one particularly old ewe named Emma who got very sick. We actually moved her from the barn into an unfinished bedroom in the back of the house to convalesce. As I remember, Emma stayed back there a long time but eventually died.

It was a great way to grow up because there was always some adventure, big or small, just around the corner. Looking back on it, I am not sure how my mom handled it as well as she did. I learned more important stuff from that unconventional childhood than I ever learned in school or could have ever learned in suburbia. I learned a lot about independence and self-sufficiency and I learned a lot about living things, human and otherwise. So, thanks Pop for your gift of an unconventional life.