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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment