Etowah Archaeological Field School: Week 3

This past week we finished up some units and opened up some new ones. It was a tricky start to the week as we had just enough rain to keep our geophysical guru Chet Walker from getting going. By Thursday and Friday, we had more great data and new units to open up.

The units in Grids 1 and 2, 5, 6, and 7 were all closed out. Last week we saw the nice wall-trench in Grid 7, the small posts in Grid 5, and the single-set posts in Trey and Owen’s unit in Grids 1 and 2. This week, after digging down past a meter, Anna, James, and Tim came down upon a big chunk of daub and then a couple of single-set posts and a shallow pit feature. This was as we had hoped given the magnetic signature of the anomaly investigated.

The unit dug by Grant and Ben in Grid 6 continued to be confusing. At 70cm down they came down upon a fairly wide trench feature. This could be a wall-trench, but it is wider than the one found in Grid 7 and does not contain any evidence of posts. This trench feature doesn’t show up in the magnetic or GPR data, but might have been masked by the single-set post building apparent in those data.

As a way to clear up this confusion, we opened up another 1-m unit on the south side of this same anomaly. Within 20cm, Grant and Tim came down upon some burned daub, a piece of burned cane, a smashed pot, and a whole pot all sitting on a surface. This is obviously the floor to the building that shows up in the gradiometer data that we somehow missed in the first test unit excavated on it. The smashed pot looks to be a Wilbanks Complicated Stamped vessel, while the whole pot is a plain jar with a strap handle. Grant and Tim took the whole vessel out on Friday but still have the mass of sherds to map and excavate. I doubt we will see the wall posts in this unit so we will have to expand it to the south. We have great datable material and lots of daub, now I need to confirm that the wall is made of single-set posts.

At the insistence of my graduate student, Amy, we opened up 1x2m unit on the edge of southernmost anomaly in Grid 6. It is unique in that it is defined by magnetic lows instead of highs. I still suspect it is a wall-trench building, but the proof is in the dirt. At this point, they have encountered some stratigraphy that may be indicative of a wall-trench but we’ve found no real trench features or posts. Perhaps tomorrow will tell. In this unit, they did find a very nice discoidal made of stone. It came, as have most of the artifacts in this unit, from the southernmost part where the suspected trench may be.

 Late last week we opened up a unit on the anomaly in Grid 4. It is a little unusual, but should represent a wall-trench building. Unfortunately, the crew excavated down past a meter and did not encounter any features. Like the instance in Grid 6, we may have placed this unit poorly. We did encounter a basket-loaded surface at around 40 to 60 cm. This anomaly is located on the slope of a landscape feature that looks like a flood chute cut through the site by the Etowah River. Those basket-loaded fills may represent an attempt to level that chute or it may represent some other activity associated with the modification or even creation of this feature. For now we have moved on, but may return to this anomaly later.

We also opened and finished a 1-m unit in Grid 8 to investigate the large anomaly there. As the crew excavated, we could see two single-set posts that originated from the plowzone. We did not, however, find the anticipated wall-trench building. We may try again with another test unit, but for now we will move on to other anomalies in other parts of the site.

Chet really got going with data collecting on Thursday, with the help of GPR guru Kent Schneider, and finished off all the grids we need by Friday afternoon. I will show more of those data once we have them in digital format, but they include two really interesting circular buildings and two very large “longhouses.”

Friday before lunch we set in two units on a large circular building west of Mound C. This building is on the scale of the reconstructed earthlodge at Macon—big. 

We also set in a unit on one of the large, rectangular buildings. It is another big one, measuring some 30m on its longest axis.

This week we will continue working n the units we have open. We also will start some 1-m squares on three anomalies west of Mound C that look like single-set post buildings. Hopefully we will do the same on another circular anomaly located north of Mound A and also a couple of wall-trench buildings in one of the discrete neighborhoods we think we can see.

We were fortunate to have some great volunteers help us this week, including CJ Jaramillo, Dana Russell and her girls, David Kasriel, Bob and Deb Skarda, Dick Brunelle, and the incomparable Pat LoRusso. We all really appreciate the help and really enjoyed meeting and working with them all…and we all hope they will come out again to share in our efforts. This coming week we’ll have some returning volunteers and many new ones, including the much anticipated Boy Scouts.

This past week was my daughter’s turn to help us out. Like my son, she had a great time digging, screening and driving the gator. She also had a great time hanging out with the crew after work. She gave them all nicknames that I am sure they will treasure for a long time to come.

Mama has been cooking away and trying to get us free (or reduced price) tickets to all kinds of local attractions. So far we are set to go to a minor league baseball game and a couple of local museums plus the Atlanta History Center. While I went home yesterday, some of the crew enjoyed the Cartersville Rodeo —making sure to soak up all the culture Cartersville has to offer.

It was a busy week after work too. On Tuesday Dr. Reilly gave a lecture on Mississippian religion to the students, Wednesday we were all treated to a lecture on geophysical prospecting from none other than Chet Walker, and on Thursday I spoke to the Northwest Georgia Chapter of the Society for Georgia Archaeology who had their monthly meeting at Etowah. That latter meeting brought in a huge crowd of about 90 people. As always happens when I come to Cartersville, people were anxious to hear about what we are doing and what we are finding. Saturday I spoke for the Etowah Day of Discovery for Kids hosted at the park before the fine folks from the Waring Lab of the University of West Georgia organized a mock dig and staff from the park lead tours and demonstrated Native American games and weapons.

We all ended the week tired, but it is a good tired.

Etowah Archaeological Field School: Week 2

Well, the clarity I had hoped for is coming in fits and starts. We had a lot of rain this week so we really only worked about 2.5 days. In that short period of time we came down on features in most of the units open. And with one exception, those features seem to be fitting into my expectations.

The two units in Grid 1 and 2 continued through that thick midden. The one investigating the easternmost anomaly came down on a series of black stains intruding into a red clay surface. 

That clay surface should be the plaza built in the Late Wilbanks phase (AD 1325-1375). On Friday Owen and Trey began excavating the features visible at 80cm and several have turned out to be single-set posts. We’ll see if we can make a wall out of them, but in general I am happy with that result.

Anna, James, and Tim have been working in the unit located on the westernmost anomaly in Grids 1 and 2. They are still going through midden but are coming down on a large burned daub concentration on Friday. I am hopeful that they will expose features soon as well. If we are right about the daub being associated only with single-set post buildings, this unit will find what we had predicted as well. 

At about 30cm below the surface in this unit Anna, James, and Tim found a lead ball—musket shot. We had hoped it might be a 16^th century Spanish artifact, but it looks like, based on size, that it is later and somehow found its way down the soil profile (probably through plowing).

Tara and Julia came down onto red clay subsoil earlier this week in their unit in Grid 5. After laboring through fairly sterile soils, they came down on a charcoal-rich feature and 5 small stains that look like post holes. In fact, Friday they excavated at least three of those and they are indeed small (ca. 10cm diameter) and deep (30cm or more) post holes arranged in a nice line along the west wall. 

The magnetic anomaly found in this grid should be a wall-trench building. So far we haven’t seen that trench, but the posts Tara and Julia found are smaller and deeper than those in the single-set post buildings. I suspect that once we study the profile of this unit we will find some indication that the trench was there but we missed it because it was so indistinct.

In Grid 6 Ben and Grant also worked through a fairly sterile few levels followed by a relatively sparse midden. They have come down on a floor that has what looks like a wall-trench running west to east across the middle of the unit. There also appear to be at least two single-set posts along the western wall. If I have interpreted the gradiometer data correctly for this location, Ben and Grant should have come down on a portion of a single-set post building. It may be there, but clearly there also is a wall-trench building. We will explore the gradiometer data more closely to see if we can find evidence for the two buildings here.

Will and Brendon have been working in a most confusing unit in Grid 7. I thought they were digging through sloping mound fill layers. However, after some work we figured out that they have a very nice wall-trench running at a diagonal through their unit—right where the magnetic anomaly goes through the unit. This is my poster child for a wall-trench. It is straight-sided, fairly deep ca. 30 cm, and has stains from a closely spaced row of posts at its base. Like the posts in Julia and Tara’s unit, these are small, but unlike those posts they are very close together.

Johann, a visiting Jesse Dalton, my son Avery (and various guest-screeners) opened up a new unit on what I expect to be a wall-trench building in Grid 4. They have excavated to about 40 cm so far and seem to have exposed what looks like basket loaded fill. 

Topographically this isn’t a mound. Instead it looks like a flood chute cutting through the site. If my interpretation holds, then the building we are searching for may have been buried beneath intentionally placed fills designed to level out a topographic low. It will be fun to see if my predictions come true. Barring more rain delays, we should know by the end of the day Monday.

We will start a unit on Grid 8 on Monday and hopefully find another wall-trench building. It may take until the end of the week to know.

Chet Walker comes back out Monday to set in and collect gradiometer and ground-penetrating radar data on more grids. That will allow us to set up more units in other areas of the site. So far we have concentrated on areas east of Mound A. Chet will allow us to move north of Mound A and final west of it to an area where no excavations have ever been conducted.

Now that we are starting to find features, our next big challenge is dating the architecture we are uncovering. We are finding that the features we have dug do not contain many temporal diagnostics and in many cases the middens above are sparse or mixed making their contents problematic for dating. Our fallback strategy is to collect all feature fills, process them through flotation, and hope we capture enough carbon to obtain radiocarbon dates. I will bring a flotation drum back to Cartersville with me on Sunday.

The crew is settling into our communal life and the house is running pretty smoothly. Mama got some needed (and I am sure welcome) assistance with cooking from Owen who has the patience of Job and the culinary acumen to help Mama produce good food for 17. We’ve got meal ideas from lots of people and a brussel sprout recipes from Grant to look forward to this coming week. Hopefully the rain will hold off and let us get some long, productive days in this week.

My 8-year old son came with me to the site this week. He had a great time driving the gator around and around the site, shuttling grad students, photo logs, equipment, and water hither and yon. That lasted for a couple of days and then he got the digging bug. We bought him a Marshalltown trowel and he went to work with Johann, Jesse, and crew in Grid 4. The photos below tell all.

This next week my daughter will join us. Then later in the week we’ll get some Boy Scouts out for a day. Our resident Eagle Scout, Owen, will be in charge that outreach effort.

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.