#dirtmaker

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A field trip with Brett Riggs & Jane Eastman

This morning I met up with an Archaeology Club from Fort Bragg who were touring Kituwah sites with Jane Eastman and Brett Riggs. We started out with a bit of a lecture. Jane & Brett showed us James Mooney’s 1882 Quad Map of the area and explained the sites we would be visiting.

Then we walked out to the Killian Complex and the open space that was the site of the Cullowhee mound. The mound was originally plundered by someone sent down by the Valentine brothers of Richmond, VA. The farmer who owned the land allowed them to excavate it as long as they lowered it enough that he might plow it. Cullowhee was an interesting town site in that it is about 80-90 feet above the river, which is unusual, but it is surrounded by water and while the town was up pretty high agriculture was likely focused in lower lying fields. From the mound, at the foot of Buzzard’s Roost you would have been able to look up and see the surrounding mountains. Cullowhee at that time would’ve had a population of about 200-300 people.

As we drove over to Judaculla rock Brett explained the meaning of Tuckasegee, which means place of the Box Turtle. He pointed out that box turtles are not aquatic and that they are associated with thunder, which is related to the beings from the upper world that reside near here.

Judaculla rock is near one of the sources of the Tuckasegee and also is a vantage point for Balsam, a doorway to the upperworld. Recently when they were uncovering silt from the base of the rock they discovered that a spring runs from underneath it.

The rock is a singular composition that tells a story. About a third up from the bottom is a diagonal line that points to sacred space but also separates the beings of the upperworld (above the line) and other beings. Above the line are bilobed creatures, some with plumes, these are thunders, which can take on human forms but also the form of woodpeckers.

The rock is not only a representation but also a part of and map of sacred space.

There are red cedars all around the rock, a tree not normally found in such numbers in the area and a sacred tree to the Kituwah, associated with medicine.

There are petroglyph sites associated with Judaculla all the way down to Georgia. Judaculla taught the Kituwah the language of the animals & birds and then left. He was known as the slant eyed giant, as in rattlesnakes or cats. Which also associates him with the underworld because he is a being of all worlds.

We walked down from the rock through a pasture to the nearby creek where two boulders have many small depressions carved into them where medicine might have been made.

Then we got on the bus and headed to the Kituwah mound. Along the way Brett told a story about a recent discovery. There is a Cherokee name, Enola, which means fishercat. So in an old census document they found a name that was recorded as Enola or catamount. So now they believe this is what catamount used to mean in these parts.

We drove through Dillsboro, known for its timber and clay in the old days.

We didn’t have time to stop but passed by the Birdtown Mound, Birdtown is its 18th Century name, after the removal in the 1830s the various Cherokee tribes ended up in different places with different names, this was when Painttown, Wolftown, Birdtown, PrettyWoman’sTown came about. The Birdtown clan was previously called “Where its Chopped” according to Mooney’s records.

A lady named Polly used to live in these parts. But you can’t say Polly in Cherokee, so that’s where Qualla came from.

The Cherokee had claim to the land where Kituwah mound is located but the state wouldn’t recognize it. So from 1821-1996 they were separated from their birthplace. 7 holy men were directed to go to the highest point in their world (Klingman's dome) and there an emissary gave them the 7 laws and fire to bring to earth. This fire was brought to Kituwah mound. The mothertown of the 7 mothertowns, other towns thought of as daughtertowns.

When the family who owned the land around Kituwah decided to sell they gave the first option to the Eastern Band. Who bought it. Brett worked with the Eastern Band on several archaeology projects. They used magnetic imaging to investigate the mound’s contents.

Townhouses, which served as both temples and city halls, had a large central hearth that held the sacred fire. When a townhouse became worn down it was burned and a new one built on top of it. The magnetic imagery showed that the central hearth went deep into the mound. This column of ashes and coals meant that the fire brought down from the upperworld was still there, in coals deep in the hearth.

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A botany and soil walk with Kathy Mathews, JP Gannon, and Greg.

This afternoon I attended the awards ceremony for the juried undergraduate student show.

Afterwards at four I went up the hill with Greg, Kathy Mathews, and JP Gannon met us up there. Jp talked about soil a bit first. http://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/app/WebSoilSurvey.aspx You can find the maps he brought along here but I haven’t been able to dig my way down them yet. We discussed the soil type, its EvD, which is Evard-Cowee complex which in taxonomic class is fine-loamy, parasequic, mesic Typic Hapludults. Part of this name, I believe the last half of Hapludults means that the soil is very old. As in made of very old rock.

We have been talking about installing a grindstone on the hill to help increase the remineralization of the soil after learning from Dave that the soil here has been largely depleted of minerals by erosion resulting from human land use. I discussed this idea with him and he said that liming or using dolomite in a forest was a way of helping this kind of soil.

Next with Kathy we identified many plants but before that we talked about climate change for a bit, Kathy was saying that it was more about late fall cooling leading to less colorful leaves, not sure what the potential impacts of this might be.

We identified many species of plants including:

bellwort (Uvularia perfoliata)

black cherry (Prunus serotina)

black cohosh (Actaea racemosa)

black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

black oak (Quercus velutina)

Carolina vetch (Vicia caroliniana)

common greenbrier (Smilax rotundifolia)

deerberry (Polycodium candicans)

Dutchman's pipe (Aristolochia macrophylla) (Isotrema macrophylla)

Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)

Eastern white pine (Pinus strobes)

flame azalea (Rhodedendron calendulaceum)

frost grape (Vitis vulpina)

hearts-a-bustin (Euonymus americanus)

hound tongue / wild comfrey (Cynoglossum virginianum)

Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica)

low bush blueberry (Vaccineum pallidum)

may apple (Podophyllum peltatum)

musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana)

narrow leaf vetch / purple vetch (Vicia angustifolia)

northern red oak (Quercus rubra)

purple Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum)

red maple (Acer rubrum)

Solomon's Plume / false Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum)

Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum biflorum)

sourwood  (Oxydendrum arboreum)

Southern red oak (Quercus falcata)

3-lobed violet (Viola palmata)

tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera)

Virginia Pine (Pinus virginiana)

white oak (Quercus alba)

white pine (Pinus strobus)

wood rush (Luzula multiflora)

Catesbys Trillium (Trillium catesbaei)

cinquefoil (Potentilla simplex)

deer tongue witch grass (Dichanthelium clandestinum)

hooked buttercup (Ranunculus recurvatus)

Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)

Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana)

mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa)

poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans)

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Western Carolina Hydrological Research Station and Gribble Gap: A walk with Dave Kinner and Mark Lord

We met up with Dave Kinner, his son, and Mark Lord to get a tour of the Western Carolina Hydrological Research Station. The Research Station involves rainfall measurers, water-table sensors, creek flow monitors, etc. These sensors are along the Gribble Gap watershed and creek and other locations. Because the school transit system brings students within easy walking distance of the monitoring equipment they both talked about how incredible it was to get undergraduates out in the field doing science. As they showed us the various kinds of digital sensors they joked about the struggles with “unattended monitoring” and the constant attention and maintenance they require.

We walked along Gribble Gap creek and saw several disturbance Indicators:

-Tunnels form for water in loose debris under root level

-Tunnels are ephemeral features, geologically, and will settle with time and weather.

-water here goes from the Tuckasegee into the Ohio to the Mississippi

-Gullies are created by erosion in aftermath of logging

We headed up a steep hillside, carved with an gully at least 60 years old, its age revelead by a tree growing in its center.

Trees affect the water table. Over the winter, it rains more and the trees are “off.” The water table rises. It peaks in April. After that, there is less rain and the trees are pumping out moisture. The water table lowers.

“Geologically I see this area as human.” - Dave

We discussed the way the landscape on Gribble Gap had been shaped by recent human land use. The land was used for agriculture up into the 60’s. The near absence of stumps reinforces the oral history of this land being used for agriculture.  A forest then grew and was logged again in the late 90s. After this a scrub forest grew, the one we see now.

75% of topsoil disappeared after initial logging - before Dust Bowl inspired the Soil Conservation Service, most people didn’t think about these things. The organics replenish in a few decades - they are like sugar, consumed immediately by plants and stored there to return to the cycle when the plants die. The minerals replenish after centuries from degrading bedrock, which is essential for high-quality topsoil that really supports life. We joked about an organic surface form of fracking that could harvest shale oil and weather rock.

On the orange trail we were introduced to Gribble Gap’s mica mine.  To enter this ~50 ft hole you have to slide under a tree. Before we turned on my cell phone light we didn’t know we were completely surrounded by spider crickets. Dave told us mica was used for windows and is associated with big quartz deposits.

On the double switchback we’ve chosen for our site we saw a really sweet example of a tree throw: when a tree falls and uproots rocks, flipping them over or throwing them down the hill. Dave also told us that the small patch of exposed bedrock on our site is pretty unusual in the area. Usually the bedrock is beneath the surface or exposed by human excavation.

As the conversation continued we had to ask the million dollar question: Does the earth breathe, geologically? There are some poetic bits to work with here:

-Isostasy - as an area erodes away, the earth’s crust becomes slightly lighter, and the buoyancy of the magma mantle lifts it slightly upwards. Geologists think the center of isostasy in this area might be Mt. Mitchell

-As rocks decay they give off gasses.

By the end of our hike with Dave & Mark we were thinking a lot about how we could tie our breathing theme to the geology. Our site has so much interesting land use history and less old trees than we had originally imagined. 

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When I talked to Dave he had mentioned a warming hole in the area where the average annual temperatures were not rising in the same way as global climate change. We were really excited to find out if the warming hole was a local phenomenon but found out it is the entire South East United States. I discovered this while talking to Ben Tanner.

Part of the reason this was on Ben’s radar is that he does wetlands research and he looked at a peat deposit in nearby Panthertown Wetland to see if this warming hole was present during the Mid-Holocene Thermal Maximum, a period 7,000 to 3,5000 years ago when solar variability caused global warming. They determined that warming did occur here during that time which means that this is a phenomenon speicifc to current global warming patterns.

We then went on a tangent where I asked if current micrometeorological phenomena (like el nino) were present thousands of years ago. The answer is yes and one of the studies that proved it was by Fred Andres in which he examined the ear bones of ancient fish and was able to provide proof of similar weather variations (published in Science).

We then bounced about a bit. They recently discovered a 12,500 year old wetland near Speedwell, I asked about the average age of wetlands in the area and he said that there really isn’t a known one and it would be skewed because people only write about the old ones.

All dates in years ago

Horsecoke 3,900

Standing Indian one from 14,000-9000, disapeears after that

Pink beds-700

Al Karka?- 6,000 (he thinks this is actually a rhododendron/laurel slick, the acidic production of the plants somehow helps maintain organic material in a way that makes it look like a wetalnd

Then another one on the BRP that is 3,500

You will note that most of these start around the end of that Mid Holocene Thermal Maximum, there is a thought that most wetlands would be that young or conversely have disappeared at the beginning of that period

We looked at a study he did, "Sedimentary Proxy Evidence of a Mid-Holocene Hypsithermal Event in the Location of a Current Warming Hole, North Carolina, USA."  and talked about the pollen count and how that could give us a sense of the change in trees, then he told me about a thesis that contains more detailed pollen analysis.

He said for future models we would want to contact the National Climate Data Center in Asheville.

Because we are in an area of erosion not deposition if you wanted to get a better sense of certain histories you’d have to go find the rocks in the mississippi or the gulf of mexico.

We talked about tectonics, and isostasy, and the Wilson Cycle and divergent Plate Boundaries

Then we went down a crazy path, when I mentioned lungs it made him think of the Carboniferous period when plants developed lignin and it killed the soil microbes that previously turned O2 into CO2, when this happened the O2 levels in the atmosphere spiked and giant bugs etc evolved.

(Illustration from As the World Warms, Part of the American Southeast Cools)