Etowah Archaeological Field School: Weeks 5 and 6

If you followed this blog through the summer you know that I left it unfinished. Things got really busy the last two weeks of the field project and I didn’t keep up with the blog. A month later, here I am trying to wrap that up.

One of the most exciting things about the last two weeks is that we got some extra help from members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Cultural Preservation Office. In Week 5 Emman Spain, David Proctor, Chumona Deere, and Corain Lowe drove from Oklahoma to work with us for a week, while in Week 6 Charles Kelly, Charlie Hicks, Alan King, Robin Soweka, and Gano Perez did the same. We also were lucky enough to have some experienced volunteers in Mark Crawford, Carl Ethridge, Pam Enlow, and Kelly Ledford.

Back when I finished Week 4, Grant and Tim were working in Grid 6 on the southern expansion of the unit producing the whole pot.

In that extension, they exposed more of the smashed vessels and they also found some of those single-set posts I was hoping to find, confirming that the building that I thought was a single-set post building actually was a single-set post building. They also found some kind of strange mineral concretion that seemed to extend into sterile subsoil. We left it in place and I am still shrugging my shoulders.

On the west side of Mound A, James (now joined by Carl Ethridge) excavated a second unit to the west of the first one they started in Unit 16. As I was hoping, they found a couple of single-set posts to the east of the mass of daub. 

Similarly, in Grid 18 (the unit started by the Carter family) Owen (with help from Mark Crawford and Chumona Deere) exposed another nice daub concentration. Immediately to the east of that concentration they found a standing charred post, along with a second post hole. 

In Grid 20 we opened up units along what looked to be the north and south walls of a large structure between Mounds A and C. On the south wall (E763 line), Trey and Julia came upon what looked to be a wall-trench feature, a portion of which they excavated. Because it continued into the southern wall of their unit, I asked them to open a second unit to the south of the first. Eventually they came down on what looked to be the other side of that trench feature. However, after spending a very long time carefully excavated what we thought was a trench, Trey and Julia (now with the help of Corain Lowe) eventually learned that it was not a feature after all. Ultimately we recovered a great sample of artifacts from a rich Etowah period midden in these units but didn’t make any sense of the building identified by the gradiometer.

Unfortunately, the unit placed on the northern wall was equally confusing (N989E757). Tara and Anna found the entire floor of their original unit covered by a daub mass, so I asked them to expand to the north. My hope was that we might find the edge of the wall (whose collapse made the daub surface) and some indication of architectural form. Instead they (with the help of Chumona) found a complex distribution of large rocks, charred wood, and daub. It became clear to me that this wall (or whatever it may be) was too complicated to be figured out with a couple of 1-m units, so I decided to stop excavation and map what we had exposed. Hopefully we will have a chance to come back and expand both sets of excavations on this large anomaly. 

In Grid 15, as I already discussed, we found a small, buried platform.

It appeared from the deep test we excavated on its northern side (N999E705) that it actually was built in two stages but grew laterally rather than vertically. The first stage was made of homogeneous red clay piled to a height of about 50cm. Its flank was exposed long enough for a sandy layer to wash down it.

Eventually the platform was expanded laterally by adding an orange clay layer that overlapped the flank of the red platform. On the south side we exposed that orange expansion (along the E703 line) that extended past the original red platform some 6 meters as it gradually sloped down to the original ground surface. On the summit of this platform Ben and Luis also found a shallow pit very densely filled with charcoal and a set of narrow and deep posts that may have been set in a trench. We will run a radiocarbon date on some of the charcoal from the summit to see when the platform was built.

As we finished units on the west side of Mound A, we moved operations back to the north side of Mound A and focused on exploring more anomalies that we thought represented wall-trench buildings. We opened up units in Grid 9 to explore two suspected wall-trench buildings and also located units on four additional magnetic anomalies along the northern edge of the site. These last anomalies were identified and units positioned using 1-m interval data collected in 2008 rather than .25m-interval data collected this year. As you will see, this created some potential problems.

 

In Grid 9 Will, Emman, and Pam (and eventually a whole bunch of helpers) began excavation on a very promising anomaly (southernmost rectangular anomaly in the grid), while Brenden and David Proctor started on a second (immediately to the north). No one has yet to investigate that tempting circular anomaly defined by low rather than high magnetism. Chet predicts this is an agricultural shrine.

Brenden and David eventually exposed a very nice wall-trench with posts in the bottom. Unfortunately, Will was not as lucky. In fact, even after an expansion to the south Will’s efforts did not definitively locate any architectural features. There were some possible trenches visible in the profiles of his units and, as we will see, those may be the remains of the building visible in the magnetic data.

To the north of Grid 9 (in the vicinity of Grid 12) we set in units on three additional magnetic anomalies thought to represent wall-trench buildings. We did this thanks to the great work of SRARP’s Chris Thornock using 2008 data.

Anna and Tara started the easternmost unit and they eventually also were joined by a whole host of people. Unfortunately, their initial unit did not uncover any clear architectural evidence. However, in the north wall of that unit a possible trench was visible, leading to the opening of another unit immediately to the north. This was a complex unit made messy by a later building with a nice puddled clay hearth and a fairly continuous but sparse layer of mica. It was also made messy by the intrusion of many tree roots.

Eventually we were able to uncover a very nice wall-trench that appears to have been rebuilt and expanded, creating two parallel rows of posts. It is noteworthy that Brenden ended up doing much of the work on this wall-trench. In fact, Brenden was involved in the excavation of every wall-trench segment we found this summer. As often happens, we did not expose this feature until late in the afternoon of the last day in the field and did not finish mapping it until long after most of the crew had left the site for the day.

In the unit to the west of this, Grant and James (with help from others like Corain and CJ) opened up a 1-m unit. Within 30 cm of the surface they had found single-set posts. Excavating deeper did not produce any other architectural features, especially wall-trenches. However, like in Anna and Tara’s unit, a trench feature was visible in one of the unit’s profiles. Because we had run out of time, we did not expand this unit to explore the possible trench.

To the south of this unit was a third opened by Tim (with lots of help including from Cameron Howell on loan from the University of South Carolina). It too produced no clear architectural features but had a trench in one of its profiles. Again, because of time constraints we did not expand this unit to locate the wall-trench.

Further to the south and west (what was to be Grid 12), Ben and Luis excavated yet another 1-m unit on a suspected wall-trench building. Their experience was only slightly different from the others in the area. They did find a possible trench segment in the floor of the unit and also some possible trench features in the profile. They did not, however, find a well-preserved wall-trench with posts in the bottom.

Our experience with these four units, along with Will’s in Grid 9, left me puzzled and frustrated. The magnetic anomalies are clearly there and are so consistent and convincing that they can only represent Mississippian buildings. So why was it so hard to find the actual wall-trenches in the ground? I think there are a couple of reasons. The first has to do with the magnetic data we used to position the units. In each case, we used gradiometer data collected in 2008 at 1-m intervals. Because those data are essentially one quarter as dense as the .25m-interval data collected by Chet this year, the anomalies aren’t identified and represented as precisely. For these specific anomalies the lines of magnetic high that I considered to be the walls was considerably wider than the same lines on the .25m-interval data. That means there was a greater chance that we might actually miss the anomaly when we chose the location of a unit.

I think that explains our results in part. However, in all five areas in question we can see trench features in the profile even though we did not see them on the floors of the units. I don’t think we missed those trenches because of inexperience. I had a very well trained crew, several experienced volunteers, excellent graduate assistants—and I looked over everything. I think we missed them because they were pretty indistinct and difficult to differentiate from other soil changes apparent in the unit floors. I think the visibility of these features has something to do how long they were used, whether they were taken apart or left to decay in place, etc. We don’t really understand the details yet, but there’s a lot more to it. Most importantly, if I am right then the gradiometer may be more effective at find these kinds of buildings than traditional archaeology. Now that is something to think about.

The last area we attempted to explore was something I had called Fort de Soto. The anomalies are located just south of Mound F, which is a mound built during the time when de Soto visited Etowah. It appears to be some kind of large enclosure or possibly building. Outside of its association with a de Soto period mound, I had no other real reason to call this anomaly Fort de Soto. I will admit that I had hoped to start a friendly rivalry with Chris Rodning, Rob Beck, and Dave Moore who announced finding the earliest interior European fort at Fort San Juan.

We positioned one unit along the western wall and a second on a circular anomaly within the larger enclosure (on the N1219 line). I am disappointed to report that we found no architectural remains whatsoever, nor did we find any 16^th century European artifacts. So my hopes of scooping Rodning, Beck, and Moore will await another day. I am afraid that these excavations suffered from the same problem as those on the northern part of the site. We positioned the units using 1-m interval gradiometer data and did not have time to expand those units in hopes of finding the features that created the magnetic anomaly.

We wrapped up our excavations on August 1 and the next day cleaned out the field house and departed Cartersville. However, we were not done in Cartersville. We had left artifacts and flotation samples drying in the garage of the field house and all the units were still open at the site. About a week later, Johann, Amy and I returned to backfill and collect the artifacts and flotation samples. I rented a cargo van and the three of us spent a very long two days driving, backfilling, packing, driving and unloading. Matt somehow got out of the fun using the weakest excuse out there—his first day of graduate classes.

Now we have some 400 bags of artifacts to wash, sort, weigh, count, and rebag. We’ve also got about 20 more bags of soil to process and then some 50 flotation samples to sort and weigh. As we come across fun things or lean something new in the lab, I will do another blog post.

Etowah Archaeological Field School: Week 4

Most of our efforts shifted to the west side of Mounds A and C this week, thanks to some new data Chet Walker collected for us on a set of anomalies in that part of the site. However, things kept going on the east side as well.

Grant and Tim continued mapping and removing the broken vessel fragments in Grid 6 and then expanded to the south in hopes of finding some posts to go with what looks like a house floor. They exposed more of the broken pots, mapped and remove them and, on Friday, came down on some things that might be posts. Hopefully, things will be clearer on Monday. In addition to the whole vessel—which Grant emptied of its soil fill during the week and found nothing inside—we should have major portions of a few more vessels to reconstruct from this house. That plus some good carbon samples should allow us to date it pretty securely.

Amy and Will continued working on 1x2m unit that we placed to investigate a unique anomaly also Grid 6. Unlike most of the other anomalies, this one is defined on low magnetism rather than high magnetism.

The unit revealed some pretty confusing stratigraphy of which we never really made clear sense. It appears that some pits were dug in this area, but may have been intruded upon by natural disturbances like tree roots and rodent burrows. Maybe if we study the profiles long enough we will make some sense of it all.

On the west side, we continued the units in Grid 19 where the circular structure is located. It is a big one and very clear in the gradiometer data. 

Tara and Anna finished a unit on its east side where they came down on the very edge of a daub concentration. Just to the east of it they found a couple of nice posts and a small pit feature. On the west side of the building, Trey and Julia excavated a unit that came down squarely on an arc of daub (that fit perfectly what the gradiometer showed). Just to the east of that daub concentration they found two nice, single-set posts not unlike the ones Anna and Tara found. Their close association with the daub arc makes it pretty convincing that the building was made of single-set posts and then its walls were daubed with clay. We got a few Late Wilbanks phase diagnostics (1325-1375) just above the daub suggesting it may date to that phase. Hopefully we captured some carbon in the posts that we can data as well.

Grids 16, 17, and 18 all have very clear anomalies that should represent single-set post buildings. Brenden, Danny, and others excavated a unit in Grid 17 and came down on a very nice daub surface. 

It covers the southern ¾ of the unit’s floor and was within 20 cm of the surface. You can see some wood and grass impressions in the daub. Immediately to the north of that surface Brenden uncovered and excavated a relatively small (ca. 10cm diameter) but deep post (almost 50 cm). The fun thing about this post is that you can see its charred remains trapped within the collapsed daub wall just next to it. This really looks like the wall burned and fell to the inside of the house. Brenden found some Wilbanks diagnostics with this building as well.

James, Danny, and Nile worked on a unit in Grid 16 that looked very similar. In this case, we placed the unit on off the edge of the magnetic highs of the anomaly hoping to capture the outer wall. 

They diligently dug 70cm down only to find that we were likely too far outside of the building to find posts. They did, however, find some cool artifacts including a portion of a broken celt, two pipe bowl fragments (one stone, one clay) and some more Late Wilbanks phase diagnostic pottery. They opened up a unit immediately to the west on Friday with the hope of encountering the structure’s wall. In that unit they came down on a daub concentration and hopefully there will be posts nearby.

We had the pleasure of hosting a visit from Georgia State Senator Jason Carter and his family, including Jim Langford of the Coosawattee Foundation. We set up a unit in Grid 18 over the third of these structures. 

Jason’s two boys had a great time excavating and screening and found several pieces of a Ruddercomb Incised vessel in the midden just above a daub concentration. I suspect this house is a lot like the ones Brenden and James et al. examined. It is interesting that all three seem to date to the Late Wilbanks phase as I expected them to date to the Brewster phase (AD 1475-1550). Hopefully the Carter house (as we will now call it) and the one being worked on by James and Danny will be done early next week.

These three buildings do a pretty good job of confirming that the Type 1 anomalies Chet identified really are single-set post buildings packed with daub. This coming week I am anxious to spend more time on some anomalies that I think should be wall-trench buildings.

In the middle of the week we opened up two new units on a large complex of anomalies in Grid 20. Taken together they seem to represent one large building not unlike ones Larson excavated beneath Mound C. 

I suspect, like what Larson found, we will eventually see that there are several buildings in this anomaly. Trey and Julia began a unit on the building’s south side while Anna and Tara stared on its northern side. Tara and Anna came down on an interesting daub surface that covers the entire unit floor. 

I believe they have found some Etowah period (AD 100-1200) diagnostic pottery above that daub surface. Instead of digging through that daub, I have asked them to open up another unit immediately north of their original unit. I hope that we will be able to make more sense of this side of the building once they finish it.

Trey and Julia came down upon a dark and fairly artifact-rich feature on the unit’s south wall.

In it they found plenty of Late Etowah phase (AD 1100-1200) diagnostics as well as part of a ground stone artifact (maybe a celt) and a worked stone piece that might be part a stone gorget. This feature continues into the south wall of the unit so we cannot see its shape. It looks like it might be a trench, but we will not know until we expand to the south. One post is visible at the bottom of the feature and in its profile.

The surprise of the summer (so far) has come out of the units in Grid 15. As the gradiometer data shows, this looks like a large, rectangular building. We located units at its edge on both the north and south sides. 

On the north side, Owen and James came down on a solid clay surface that was red in the south and orange in the north, split by a narrow band of brown sandy soil. On the south, Luis and Ben found the same thing except they exposed mostly red clay. Puzzled, I got out my archaeological crutch—a one-inch push core. Using it, I discovered that the clay surface extended a few meters north and south of my units and disappeared. More specifically, it sloped down until I couldn’t find it in my cores.

Suspecting we were dealing with a clay platform and not just a building, I asked Owen and Johann (with the help of Boy Scouts, Josh, Mr. Blair, and Barbara) to extend the northern unit through the clay platform while Luis, Ben, and Debbie were tasked with extending their unit to the south in hopes of exposing that outer slope of the platform.

Below is the final profile of the northern unit and the effort it took the create it.

You can see the homogenous red clay layer slope down and disappear beneath an orange layer that over laps it. In between is that brown sandy soil. Beneath it all is an incredible blue-gray silty clay layer with lots of charcoal flecks and some artifacts. At the very bottom the red clay subsoil was finally found (at 140cm). The red clay surface looks like the first stage of this platform. I think the brown sandy soil is wash from its exposed surface that went down the flank. The orange clay represents an expansion of the platform after it had been in use. Interestingly, there are no plow scars visible on the surface of the platform, which tells me that its summit was not destroyed by plowing. It also tells me that the expansion of the platform only happened laterally—they wanted a bigger surface. The blue-gray layer at the bottom is a puzzle. It was put there by people and its color looks like something that was taken from a submerged setting. The fact that it is flecked with charcoal and has artifacts throughout suggests that people used it before it was deposited at the base of this platform.

The southern expansion is still going, but one good looking charcoal-filled feature is visible on the platform surface as are a couple of potential posts. The presumed slope of the orange expansion hopefully will be exposed tomorrow. Then we will investigate the features present on the summit and try to understand when and why this platform was built.

To say the least, it was another great week. The crew is doing a great job and we had more wonderful volunteers to help us out. Debbie Wallsmith and her son Danny Congleton along with Mr. Blair and Nile Freeman came back out for more. We had Boy Scouts from several troops brought by Amy Morris (Jacob Morris and Bradley Pilcher along with friend Mark LaSalle) and Shea McClure (Jordan Mercure and Jackson Counts). Barbara Flack helped dig that deep unit on the platform. Maricruz Salizar came out on Friday and we somehow lured John away from volunteer grass cutting at Etowah to dig with us. As I already mentioned, we also hosted Georgia state Senator Jason Carter, his parents, and two sons as well. Although I missed my teacher and friend, David Hally also paid a visit to the site on Friday.

This coming week is going to be even better, even busier with guests and volunteers. With only two weeks left, the push is on to get as much done as we can.

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.