#kyidylcl

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 4

(As before, if you’re only seeing this part 4, the rest of them have the tag KyidylCL)

THE ARTEFACTS

Ok, so I’ve talked about the site and what we’ve been digging in and such, but I’m gonna be honest with you guys: I like lab work exponentially more than field work.  So I am the one who has been processing the vast majority of the finds and ergo have lots of stuff.  That’s why I sometimes make jokes about the stuff in my basement - I’m storing the majority of it here in my basement.  I’ve gotten the question before about ownership, so here is how that works.  The dig is on private land so anything we get technically belongs to the owner of the land.  Now, as far as I know, he has no interest in keeping any of it so it’ll likely end up in the hands of the arch society, who will basically just be custodians of it but not owners.  It might end up in a museum, too.  I don’t really know, but that determination won’t be made until we’re finished, and not by me.  

So every site has its own sort of categories of stuff that you find depending on who lived there (although for ease, archaeologists often categorize this stuff based on location and time - more on that later.).  For our site the majority of it falls into these categories: animal bone, shell, lithics, pottery, charcoal, modern contaminants, and artefacts.  And, to lend a bit of clarity here...lithics are anything made of rock.  So they include fire cracked rocks, flakes from stone tool making, material that was used in construction, material that was crushed to make temper for pottery paste (more on that later, too.), etc.  If it came from a rock it’s a lithic.  

And imma tell you a secret: I hate lithics.  Everyone has their thing, their category of human refuse that they simply do not like.  A prof of mine hated teeth and pottery.  That’s just how it is, and mine is lithics.  I think they’re boring, I can’t tell a flake from a blade, I don’t give a single fuck what material they are, I don’t care about the style or craftsmanship...I just don’t care.  I call them all rocks, and I do it so much that everyone on the site has started accidentally calling them rocks, too, which amuses me.  Rocks, to an archaeologist, means “stone that wasn’t altered or used by people”.  They’re worthless.  Not that I think lithics are worthless - far from it - I just really hate them and this site has so.  goddamned.  many.  Lucky for me, we have a Rock Guy aka someone who really loves lithics and actually has gotten pretty good at flint knapping and just, y’know, is really into rocks.  

And to clarify about artefacts.  When you’re out in the field everything you find is either an artefact or a find.  The collection of these things is called an assemblage.  When you’re doing lab work and sorting through it all later on an artefact is, well...like a thing.  I’m explaining this poorly....it’s a complete object with a specific function.  So, a whole pot = artefact, broken pieces = sherds (not shards, sherds.). Complete arrowhead = artefact, flakes or a broken one = lithic.  Artefacts also tend to be somewhat unique, or at least something you don’t have a lot of.  They don’t always have to be complete, anything that is a specific object can go in here.  Like, for example, this piece of pipe we found: 

To recap, we’ve got pottery, charcoal, lithics, shell, bone (animal - we haven’t found human. But I’m just gonna say bone.), and artefacts.  If you are sensitive to things like that, this is your warning that this post is going to have pictures of animal bone and you should scroll quickly.  

Now, for reference, this is what it all looks like before I clean it and after it’s been dying out for a day or two (the ground has natural moisture, so I basically just open the bags and let them air out.): 

And, yes....I am cleaning them off on an actual antique blotter with real silver edges that my mom gave me for this express purpose.  A factoid I’m only sharing because it amuses me in that sort of “bet they never envisioned this use for this thing” sort of way.  Normally, if I was in a real lab, you’d do this over a metal tray.  When you’re working with an assemblage you never hold it over empty space, you always hold it over the bench and preferably over whatever your work surface is.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t dropped my fair share of stuff anyway, but most of it just lands on the work surface and not the floor, which is why you hold it over a work surface.  But anyway, as you can see, it just looks like a brown, dirty mess.  I usually do a quick sort of the stuff I know for sure what it is and then I wash it with a soft toothbrush and some water.  The rocks I just submerge and swoosh around because they’re rocks and I can’t really damage them and there’s SO FRIKKIN MANY that I refuse to clean them individually.  

So now that you’ve gotten through that long-winded but necessary explanation of terms, where are we at? Since I’m a bioarchaeologist and I prefer things that were once alive to the general detritus of human society, we’re gonna start with the bone.  Specifically, we’re gonna start with how I know those two pits from yesterday’s post are one pit.  This is how: 

This is a deer bone.  Don’t ask me which one bc I’m really not good at ID’ing species and animal anatomy, but it’s a leg bone of some kind.  See how it’s broken? One piece was found in one hole and the other piece was in the other.  Clearly it’s the same animal, ergo the pits are related to each other.  The vast majority of what came out of that particular feature was bone, with the rest being charcoal and the occasional pot sherd.  This means it was probably used for cooking and not as a garbage pit. Also there was food in it, if you recall the cooking accident from yesterday.  but sometimes y’know, stuff falls into the fire pit or it’s put in there as a way of disposing of it.  

But wait, I have more cool animal bones!! 

Ok, so there’s this one: 

This bone has a special place in my heart. IDK what species it is (I *think* it’s a fragment of deer long bone.), but that’s not why it’s cool.  This single bone is strong evidence for the presence of dogs.  =D See that circular mark on the right? That is the impression of a canine tooth from a carnivore.  Human teeth can’t make those marks in bones - our teeth aren’t strong enough to do significant damage to bone, and anyway we tend to crack bones open with rocks (a form of damage called percussion marks.) and not with our teeth.  Those other longer scratch marks are also likely from chewing, not butchery, because they’re in the right places and they’re the right shape.  Now we know this was a settlement, and this bone was found smack in the middle surrounded by human detritus and not on the fringes or outskirts.  There were no domesticated felines in the Americas at the time BC this is from the lower pre-contact level, so what’s really the only carnivore that would be wandering around a human settlement? Dogs.  I love this kinda stuff because it’s so easy see them chilling around the fire pit, talking and eating, teasing whomever it was that spilled dinner, and then tossing the bones to their dogs to gnaw on after dinner.  It’s just such a people kind of thing, you know? All from one small, circular mark.  I actually found more on later bones that came out of other places, so it’s pretty safe to say there were dogs living here with their people even though we have found neither people nor dogs.  

So here’s another cool bone: 

Again, no idea what species it is bc I’m not a zooarch (yes, there are archaeologists that specialize in animals and wooooo boy can they tell you a LOT about migration and eating habits of people.). It’s about the size of half my thumb, IE, not large.  This one is cool, and it’s the only one I have like this, because of that notch you can see vertically in the image on the right hand side.  I don’t know what it was for, but I DO know that it was an intentionally made modification to the bone.  Those striations aren’t natural - natural bone is smooth or has a very specific texture and this isn’t that.  It’s probably not damage done to the bone after it was deposited in the archaeological record.  It has the same patina as the majority of the rest of the bone, which you can compare to the lighter area there on the right hand end of the bone.  That lighter area does not have the patina of age that the rest of the bone does, and is the result of damage in a much more recent time - probably as we were taking it out of the ground.  Small bones are fragile.  So someone gouged this channel intentionally in this bone, either because they were going to use it as decoration or it served some purpose as a tool.  I’m not really sure what though.  Hell, they could have just been bored and fidgeting after eating.  Either way, it’s a human modification to this bone that has nothing to do with cooking or consumption (damage from human consumption is cracks and breaks, not scrapes.).  It could also be a butchery mark, although it’s a bit deep for that.  Butchery marks are there from separation of meat from bone - they’re usually just shallow scrapes.  

Ok, last cool bone I’m gonna show you.  Well, bones, plural.  

Ok so this is part of the same assemblage as the ones above, and if I remember correctly these were the ones that came out of that pit.  You can see the same bone with the canine tooth mark there in the center.  There’s also some interesting things like some pottery on the left and a couple teeth off to the right (one is a deer and I *think* that curved on is a squirrel.), but the really interesting thing is the series of 3 shiny bones that are in the center.  There’s a lot of ways to cook meat, and they all do different things to bones.  You will often find the dry, brown looking ones like you can see here in the non-shiny bones. That’s like...your basic “this bone had meat on it when it was cooked”. Then you’ll see ones that are black, and that’s “this bone probably didn’t have meat when it was cooked, or someone tossed it back in the fire when they were done”. Lastly, you’ll see white bone, and that’s a bone that has been burned at a high temperature for a long time.  Usually it’s done on purpose (you can use burned, powdered bone to make stuff.).  

But the shiny ones were in a soup.  And the reason I know that is *because* they’re shiny.  Bones, especially old ones, aren’t shiny.  I mean...you can see that.  You have to do stuff to ‘em.  And bones are porous, but those weren’t.  They felt like hard plastic. And they get that way by being boiled.  The shiny patina is what we call pot polish - they were stirred in the soup while it was cooking and rubbed against the side of the pot and each other, and it gives them a smoother texture.  

All of these collections of bones tell us what and how they ate things.  I know from what I can ID here (which isn’t everything, trust me.) that they ate a lot of deer and wild turkey (we have an entire almost completely intact turkey long bone.). There is also, I believe, squirrel (I found a portion of a skull and jaw that I’m pretty sure belong to a squirrel), and an assortment of other small rodents and birds.  Lots of birds.  Bird bone is really distinctive, it’s light and the spongy bone has a distinct texture.  A zooarchaeologist can look at bones like this and ID species and age, and from there tell you what time year something was probably killed.  Societies that hunted a lot tended to do it seasonally so that they wouldn’t damage the populations.  Plus especially with fish and stuff they have very specific growing cycles and short lifespans, so they can also tell you a lot about where the people were hunting and when.  Like certain fish will only spawn in certain places, so it’s really informative.  Zooarchs are so important and there just aren’t enough of them.  

Anyway, there are other cool things in the bones but I’m trying to strike a balance here between too much and not enough and I really love bone so I’m going to stop here for today.  Tomorrow is going to be other artefacts (yeah, sadly, even lithics, lol), and what they tell us about the site and the people who lived there.   As an aside: if anyone has any like just general “how do they know this?” sort of questions about history and archaeology those would be fun to answer.  I love to tell people how we do things but I don’t just wanna infodump.  I DO want to explain procedure in what I hope is a readable way because I think understanding how we make the sausage will help people have more trust in science.  So if you have any questions, please, send asks.  If I don’t know the answer I’ll research it or pass it on to someone who does.  

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 3

(As before, parts 1 & 2 can be found via the KyidylCL tag.)

THE PITS

So, we’ve got the info about the site and we’ve got the prep work done, so what next? Digging! But archaeologists don’t just randomly dig, we dig in very precise ways. There’s, generally speaking, two ways to make a hole for an archaeologist (and this *doesn’t* apply to burials.  Burials are done differently.): a pit and a trench.  A pit is usually a specific size and meant to uncover a small area.  A trench is a long area that takes a cross section of a specific area and is meant for exposing lots of area.  When you’re doing a whole settlement often a trench is used because of the volume.  We’re doing a mixture, and we started with two 5ftx5ft pits (~1.5 meters for the non-americans in the crowd.  Good rule of thumb for ft --> meters is that 3ft = 1 yard = 1 meter, approximately.  It’s not exact but if you’re trying to imagine how big something is, it’s a good way of thinking about it.).  

Pit one only had 1 interesting thing and I don’t have any pictures of it really so I’m just gonna tell you about it real quick.  In pit 1 we found a feature, which is a spot where the dirt is a different color in an unnatural shape because humans did something.  This particular feature was a post hole from a palisade wall.  That’s interesting for two reasons: 1, the natives didn’t build palisades until they came into conflict with the colonizers. It isn’t that they didn’t need defenses previous to that, it’s that the people they were defending against didn’t have horses or guns.  Once the colonizers arrived, they started copying their method of defense.  2, palisade walls are made of large trees.  To cut them down they were first burned in the place where the cut was made to make cutting them easier.  And this means CHARCOAL.  

Archaeologists love charcoal.  We can date that shit really easily.  And this particular charcoal was sent out for dating.  Came back as 1700s, which makes sense for this area.  It took the colonizers a bit longer to push up into the mountains, so the dates for contact and treaties and that kind of thing are later than official first contact in the 1400s.  So that’s the latest date we have for the site.  

Now, pit 2.  Pit 2 was, and still is, the most interesting pit on the site so far (we’ve opened a number of others, but it’s...lots of plow scars and jumbled artefacts.).  Archaeologists, as I’ve mentioned, dig this kind of stuff in layers.  So for our site (and I know a few of you following me are also archs, so I need you to know this was the site director’s choice not mine. >.<), we have a sod layer, layer 2 - the plow layer, and layer 3 the layer below the plow layer.  General rule of thumb, at least the way I was taught is that you do it in increments or when the dirt changes color, whichever comes first.  So layer 2 for us is pretty thick.  Here’s what the pit looked like at the end of day 1 after we’d gotten the sod off and started bringing it down evenly: 

The bucket is covering the test pit that’s at the center of it.  The string is the boundaries of the pit, but also we attach what’s called a datum to it.  A datum is a known spot above sea level that you use to make measurements as to how deep something is.  It’s basically a string with a line level and you stretch it out until the line level reads, well, level...and then you use a ruler from there down to whatever depth you’re measuring.  So when we find like...arrowheads and points and stuff (and this pit had several) we record where they were by saying “_____ inches BD”, or “below datum”.  

Anyway, you can see already where there are some rocks and differences in color of the dirt.  It’s honestly not all that interesting but I figured you guys might like to see the progression.  This is that same pit about 2-3 working days later, and this is where it started to get interesting: 

Some of the difference in color there is because some soil is freshly exposed and some isn’t.  The pit in the middle is the remains of the test pit.  The lighter dirt at the bottom is sub-soil for this area, so it’s where the plow zone ends.  The rocks may or may not have been added by people, so we record them just in case.  How you deal with rocks depends entirely on where you are digging.  In Florida, where I went to school, rocks are important because 99% of what they’ve got there is sand and shell.  So if you find rocks they were probably put there by people.  Here? Sometimes it’s just part of the ground and sometimes it’s people.  It really depends on how far down you find them.  This is about midway through the pit so it could go either way.  So we do what’s called “pedestaling” where we dig around them and let them sit on a pedestal of dirt.  You’ll see that in a lot of pics going forward.  The reason that we’ve dug those upper corners differently is because we were starting to see soil color changes and we were investigating them separately.  Good thing too, because they both turned out to be part of a large fire pit feature.  Next slide! 

So here you can see that the dirt in those two areas that we’ve dug is a distinctly different color - it’s reddish.  Reddish dirt is a sign that the dirt has been heated, so we’re following the red dirt here.  The digging changes from going in layers to following these features.  And we’re really methodical about it so that we don’t remove too much or too little and lose the line of the feature.  Here we were lucky, all the dirt inside those features was full of tiny specs of charcoal.  And, in the upper left up there - which was my feature to dig - there were huge chunks of charcoal.  Also a really nice piece of pottery.  Well, I mean, comparatively.  It’s still just a large sherd that I accidentally snapped in two while removing but like it counts.  The square in the lower leftish is ust from like the foam I’d been sitting on.  Getting into a pit - rather than digging it from the sides - is something you do NOT do without permission and a lot of care.  Here, the ground is really solid so I wasn’t going to ruin anything by getting in there and the pit was getting too deep to effectively dig from the side, so I spent a lot of time in weird positions on the flat parts of this pit.  So, anyway, here’s a close up of the feature so you can see what I mean about the charcoal: 

Charcoal is very, very black so when you’re digging it stands out bc nothing else is that dark or that bright.  Everything else is covered in dirt. But you can see it there in the top half - it’s those dark flecks and blobs.  There was a ton of it, and when I say a ton, I mean we got I think almost 300g just that DAY.  And y’all know how light charcoal is.  This was the stuff we sent in for c14 testing along with the palisade charcoal and it came back, if I’m remembering right, mid-1300s.  That’s a period called the late woodland. It matches up with the pottery and points we were finding, but I’ll get to that when I start in on the finds.  

Now, I thought you might need some help with this next image so I brought it into procreate and drew on it.  I know it looks like it came before the previous stage, but it didn’t.  What happened is that we brought the whole pit down deeper to expose the edge of the large features.  We also found a post hole in the process! 

So I’ve marked the layers of dirt in the side wall for you so you can see what I mean when I’m talking about them.  I’ve also marked out the bottom of the pit bc this angle made it a little hard to see.  In the upper right you can clearly see the darker dirt of the post hole.  A post hole is exactly what the name implies - someone dug a hole, stuck a post in it, and later the post was removed and filled with moar different dirt and now it’s a different color but in a distinctly unnatural shape.  You can also see that we’ve long ago dug deeper than the test pit.  The area I’ve marked “bridge” is an area of soil that didn’t have charcoal in it between the two pits that did.  There was charcoal throughout that area - hence the blue boundary - but for the features themselves we were following the red dirt.  And if that feature on the right looks deep to you it’s because it *is*.  I dug it out and followed the charcoal and it went *under* the bridge.  

Now you guys probably don’t realize this, but this is like...stupid deep to be finding this kind of stuff.  We’re like 3ft below the surface here and still going down deeper.  Around here the rate of topsoil accumulation is like...an inch every 600 years or so.  The charcoal coming out of this pit is only 700 years old and it’s 3ft below the surface.  So we’re likely looking at a hole that was dug by the natives for their own use.  The thing that was confusing us was that we didn’t see the feature even start until we were almost at the bottom of the test pit so like...8 inches or so down.  (about 16cm.  1inch is approx 2cm.) But then I was looking through some of my earlier images of the pit and I noticed this: 

(north is the same direction in both pics)

The rocks, the ones that could be either nature or people, approximately outlined the areas we’d found the fire pits.  This is why you document shit.  Even though this is still pretty deep to be finding this kind of thing, it at least makes more sense in the context of very disturbed site.  So there might have been more evidence higher up, but it’s in the plow layer so we’ll never know.  So what was the feature? Well, the two features were actually one feature (and you’ll have to wait till tomorrow’s post to find out how I know that.), and I think that might have been one of these: 

(image credit)

Or something similar anyway, but I have to do more research about native cooking methods in this area of the country.  But it would fit with the two holes and a bridge of dirt with no charcoal that we saw while digging.  

Anyway I know this post is super long but I swear we’re almost done.  When we finally finished digging the damned thing it looked like this: 

(here I’m standing on the north side of the pit, so the top is the bottom in the other pics.) 

We think that this might actually be part of another feature so it’s a little...ah...yeah it’s just weird.  Those rocks were definitely from people, so maybe they were lining the bottom of the pit or something.  If I could draw your attention to the black crud in the wall to the right of the pedestaled rocks, I’m gonna tell you one last story about this pit.  That is a burned like...conglomerate of crud.  It isn’t charcoal (charcoal is fuel for the fire, not what they were using the fire to make).  Here’s what it looked like close up: 

(aw yis macro lense)

See those circles? Those are *seeds*.  I sent it to a former prof of mine who is an ethnobotanist for ID and she says she thinks it’s chenopodium AKA goosefoot, which was a staple food for the natives for a long time.  One variety still is: quinoa.  So basically, what we think we’re looking at is a 700 year old cooking accident.  Or, as my professor put it: 

So forgive the length, and I hope you all enjoyed this installment.  =D 

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 1

About me, and about the site.

I’m gonna have to do this in parts because I tend to be, uh...wordy.  Actually...ok, so I believe very strongly that knowledge does no one any good behind a paywall, but I also have a hard time parsing it down for social media because, well, people are complex but also ADHD.  So if you guys have any feedback for me that’d be awesome.  I’ll probably do these as a series so they don’t get overwhelming to read.  Tag for ‘em will be kyidylCL

A caveat to all of these posts: archaeologists walk a fine line between “I’d love to tell you about this and here look at this cool thing” and “I don’t want to share a colleague’s forthcoming paper on social media before they publish it and also fuck looters”. We classify anyone who *isn’t* an archaeologist as a looter.  Because even when you find artefacts just lying around, as soon as you pick them up they’re removed from context and become near-useless for scientific research and data.  When we remove them we capture all that information via a prescribed methodology.  When other people remove them they tend not to.  And you can tell how legit someone is by how much they care about the context.  Context is key, that’s why we’re so meticulous.  Anyway so I can’t tell you where the site is specifically because I’m not allowed.  I also, though, have been heavily involved in this project so I’m mostly going to be telling you about my own research so it’s ok to publish it on social media.  Anyway, that’s why if you show an archaeologist something you just like found they’ll be like “gee...thanks...well...I don’t want to squelch your curiosity, buuuuuut...” 

A little bit of background on my involvement with this site: I’m a newly minted archaeologist.  I’ve had my MS a little over a year, and I’ve been doing things in that time to keep up my skills and get the field hours I need to be a registered state archaeologist (it’s basically just like a professional license for archs.) bc I didn’t get enough in school and my dissertation is on genetics and cannibalism (and if you want to know about *that* I’ll tell you, but in another post.), so yeah.  Anyway.  I’ve been volunteering with the local archaeology society, and they’re great.  They found this site because two of the members grew up in the area and just knew of its existence.  So I volunteer with them and am one of like 3 people they know who have a degree so I get to be really involved - probably more than I would be otherwise just cause people with my credentials are in short supply for them.  I’m basically the only member with a degree, and the rest are consultants they bring in for stuff like this (including the RSA who works the site - the site director.).  

Before a site can be dug there’s a lot of prep work involved.  It varies based on what kind of money you’ve got and access.  We have lots of access - it’s on private land owned by someone who is childhood friends with a member of the arch society - but almost zero money.  Before I showed up, in summer 2018, they did a series of what are called shovel tests.  Basically there’s a grid laid over the site and where the grid lines intersect they dug a round pit down to what archaeologists call “the sterile layer”, IE, where there’s no evidence of human activity.  Basically, you dig small holes to see if it’s worth digging big holes and in this case it was worth it.  

When I started working with them, I took all of the material from the test pits and sorted and catalogued it.  We’ll come back to this in the next post, so remember this.  Pause.  

I forgot to tell you where the site was.  Like not specifically, I can’t do that, but I CAN tell you that it’s in the Shenandoah valley.  Wanna see pics? Yeah, you wanna see pics (I took all of the images I’m gonna be posting so I give myself permission to post them. :P): 

The site is too big to get in one pic, but this is the far end looking towards the mountain.  The field continues off to the left of the shot.  

Here’s a nicer pic of the mountain: 

And another one cause it’s super pretty: 

And here’s my view when we’re eating lunch:

And here’s an artsy shot of the cows I pass on my way in, because who doesn’t love cows? ;) 

The site has been occupied for a long time (how long? Well, that’ll happen in the pottery post soooorry. ;), and I think you guys can see why.  It’s also on a slight ridge overlooking a river so it’s near fresh water, easily defensible, and is fertile.  Speaking of which... 

It’s also what archaeologists call “highly disturbed”. See, after the colonizers drove the natives out of the Blue Ridge mountains, they started farming the fertile land in the valley.  This site was farmed for several decades, and not only that but during the civil war they dug a big ‘ole defensive trench through the middle of it.  So whilst farming disturbs the finds, it tends to a, only be a max of 15 inches deep and b, keep the finds in the same relative area they’re pulled out of.  And we can tell where that layer ends (I’ll show you that in the post about our pits bc I don’t think Tumblr will let me add more pics.), so even though it destroys features and damages things it’s a lot less destructive than, say....building a giant war trench and shooting at each other.  

The site is an entire settlement.  It’s...several acres in size.  There are burial cairns in the woods around it, and some rumors that human remains have been found there in the past - although we have not, as of yet, found any (much to my personal dismay because, well...bioarchaeologist.). 

So who lived here? Well, when the colonizers drove out the natives they didn’t exactly keep good records about who lived where, but generally speaking the site is on both Massawomeck and Manahoac land. We don’t know which group lived there, and there were other groups coming and going in the general area so it could have also been Piscataway or Potomac or even one of the later nations that formed the Iroquois.  Based on the age though I think the best candidates are the Massawomeck or Manahoac.  

Next up, the prep work I did for the site and dig! 

(aaaahhhhhh hopefully I didn’t forget anything. x.x)

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 2

Ok, part 1 can be found in my KyidylCL tag.  

Prep Work!

Digging up something as large as an entire settlement involves a lot of prep work.  You can’t just like....start digging.  Archaeologists view prep work the same way that doctors view tests - do as many as you think are necessary and gather as much data as you can *before* you make the first cut so that you inflict as little harm and destruction as possible.  Archs only have one shot at getting it right because after we dig it’s destroyed.  That’s it, it’ll never be in the ground the same way ever again.  Archaeology is also time intensive, painstaking work so you want to get the most you can out of your digging.  There are tons of ways to do prep work for a site - test pits, ground penetrating radar, resistivity tests (run a current through the ground and if it hits something different than dirt it tells you that.), metal detectors, drone mapping, satellite images, historical research, etc.  You have to determine where to dig and what method you’ll use, because the size of things you’ll dig up ranges from easily visible artefacts to near microscopic seeds and - in the case of biological remains - sometimes actual microscopic and chemical analysis of the soil itself.  

Further, if you’re the first people to formally dig a site you are going to need to establish the stratigraphy.  This is the order of layers, how old they are, and what’s in them.  That way it can serve as a guide to anyone who comes and digs the site after you.  This is the biggest reason why we record things like a Munsell (soil color.).  This is why we argue over the color of dirt because if the color of the dirt changes then you’re either in a feature (YAY!!) aka something a human did, or you’re in a new layer and that means a new time period.  This is how we keep track of where stuff is located and how old it is.  IE, finding plastic like 2ft down (~.75m for my non-American followers.) is a *problem*.  This is also why a lot of archs have some side knowledge and training in geology and soil deposition.  It’s really important for determining the order of events.  

Back to my site specifically.  We don’t have any money so all the fancy ground penetrating stuff was out, and we went with shovel tests.  So step 1 was making a grid, and we do this with GPS coords.  Basically you start somewhere you know the coords for and then you draw lines every however many yards.  In our case it’s 50 feet on the X-axis and 25 ft on the Y axis.  Where these lines meet, we dig small holes.  This happened at this site in June 2018, while I was still in the UK and not there to help with it (TBH, lucky me.  Digging test pits in June isn’t exactly my idea of fun.).  When I got back to the states I joined up with them and one of the first things I did was sort, catalogue, and record all of the finds.  The arch society has basically zero digitization so I started doing that with these test pit finds.  

Normally, the numbers of artefacts isn’t *as* important because it doesn’t include features, or tell you what kinds of artefacts, or any of that.  But in this case it actually was important because the site is so disturbed.  We’re not going to find as many features (like post holes, fire pits, etc.  I’ll explain those more when I do the post about the pits.), so we won’t be able to tell the layout of the settlement as well.  But because farming doesn’t move the artefacts far away from where they were buried - it just uncovers them and brings them to the surface - if we superimpose the artefacts onto a map we can visualize where things might have been.  Basically, farming moves things out of place in *time* but not in *space*.  

So I set about doing this.  I basically just inserted myself into this planning process and took it over.  I *was* going to use GPS, but I didn’t have enough coords nor did I know at the time how far apart the grid lines were.  Instead, I superimposed the grid over a newer sattelite image of the site from google.  Then I imported it into Procreate and I started adding colors.  Each artefact type is a different color, and so I wrote the number of each artefact in its color.  And that looks like this: 

Which for me was still difficult to visualize, so I used the same colors but removed the grid and used darker dots depending on how many of each thing we found.  That was a lot more digestible and looks like this: 

NOW you can see where things are.  I made some recommendations for pit locations based on this work and the site director used that, in combination with the recommendations of the people who’d dug the test pits, to decide where to dig.  This is a map of my informal guesses for how the settlement might have been laid out: 

Fun fact, and I didn’t know this at the time I made the maps, but you see where I’ve written “main thoroughfare?” there on the right? Yeah, that’s almost exactly where the civil war era trench was based on my later research.  So while here I’ve kind of marked the intense bit off to the left of that as the main occupation, it’s likely that the civil war trench cut right through the main occupation and ruined the archaeology there.  Weirdly, honestly, because D900 is right in the middle of that and it’s been our most interesting pit so far.  

But you’ll have to wait for the next post to find out about that. 

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 5

(as per usual, all these posts are collected under the KyidylCL tag)

Pottery and shErds

So, what are we talking about today? Well, I think the next thing is gonna be pottery.  This is where we’re gonna talk about time, space, and dating a site.  Because most people think that the only way to date an archaeological site is via C14.  That’s not true, and actually we don’t always do it.  C14 dating can have some problems, including that the wood used in the fire is likely older than the time in which it was cut down and burned.  It also only goes back 50,000 years, so anything older than that won’t have any carbon isotopes (it’ll have all decayed), and we have to use other things that are more expensive.  And c14 testing itself is expensive - we sent in 2 samples and it was around $500/sample so we spent about $1000 on testing.  Instead, there are other ways to date a site and one of the most accurate is pottery.  

See, like all other kinds of material culture (AKA, stuff people leave behind.  Non-material culture is like...song and story and stuff like that.), pottery follows stylistic trends and trends in how it was made.  And it does this both regionally and chronologically.  Which is great, because if we find bits of one type of pottery we know is made in one place in a settlement in another place, then we know the two people traded with each other.  But I have to explain something else so that determining a date from pottery makes sense.  

Every area of the country has what’s called a “type site” for a given period of time.  In undergrad I was lucky enough to actually get to work on the type site for the Safety Harbour period, which is Weedon Island....ironically enough there’s a Weedon Island period and Weedon Island isn’t the type site for that period so uuuhhh...yeah it’s weird lol.  Anyway, a type site is a site that is considered stereotypical for a given time and place in history.  Usually they’re large and well-preserved, and they’re often the first sites found in that time period/area (but not always, which is how the above weirdness happened.). And so what happens is we dig ‘em and analyze the finds and do testing on those finds.  So now we know “hey, this kind of pottery comes from here and it is X years old”. Now you know when you find it in other places where and when it comes from.  This is all a very generalized explanation, but I think any more is like extraneous detail you don’t need.  Just know that things like type sites help us determine where and when stuff like pottery was made.  Lots of literature usually exists for type sites, but I actually can’t remember the type site for this area for this time period.  

We also use a term called “diagnostic”, which is used much as it is in medicine.  If we find a certain thing that was only made during a specific time period or in a certain place, then it’s diagnostic.  IE, a certain kind of pottery is diagnostic of the late, middle, or early Woodland.  The pottery we have at our site is diagnostic of the late Woodland.  Some of the lithics we thought might be a bit earlier, but honestly I think that was just misidentification by the site director bc we were in the field at the time.  Lastly, identifying pottery has a few components.  Color and decoration I think are easy to understand (they didn’t have glazes, but you can make different colored pottery by varying the composition of the clay and the temperature at which it is fired.). Paste and temper are the other two.  IDK how modern pottery is made, but old ass pottery is made with paste - the main body of the clay, the matrix that contains the temper - and temper. Temper is stuff they’d crush up and mix in to help it not break during firing and heating during normal use.  So we combine these factors to ID the pottery and thus the age of the site and trading habits of the people in question.  One last thing you need to understand about pottery - ancient people used pottery the way that we use disposable things.  They didn’t think it was like an important thing that had to keep safe.  They’d use it until it broke and then toss it in the garbage pit and make a new one.  So it’s really common and we find it all over the place, but TBH in the future pottery *won’t* be diagnostic anymore because our ceramics come in such a wide variety that we couldn’t possibly hope to narrow down time or place.  

Alright, so who wants pictures? You, of course.  Who *doesn’t* want pictures? Here’s some of the pottery we found: 

This is the larger shard that I found in the features I’ve talked about in previous installments.  You can see where I accidentally broke it. >.> Anyway it’s kind of unique bc of the light color outside and the black inside.  It’s like...idk, 4 or so inches long.  

This is a rim piece that I happened to find two matching sherds of.  I always check the rim pieces because the patterns on them usually make them easier to fit together.  Honestly I’ve got hundreds of pot sherds from this site and I don’t have the sanity to try and make pots from them.  

This is the outside and inside respectively of the largest piece we have.  TBH taking this thing out of its box and handling it makes me nervous because of how large it is - about the size of my hand, but I did include my earbuds for scale.  The black is charring from both firing and subsequent use, and it came out of the pit feature I’ve been talking about.  And do you wanna know the cool thing about the inner surface of pottery? Because they didn’t use glazes, the surface was porous and retains the unique chemical traces of what was made in them.  However, the vast majority of the time those kinds of tests aren’t done because archaeology as a whole is extremely underfunded and trace chemical analysis of pot residue is an expensive test requiring expensive equipment and expensive scientists.  Funnily enough I probably could do some of this testing bc I used to be premed and so I’ve taken a lot of chemistry and know how to read a mass spec thing, but I don’t have access to the chemicals or tools to do these kinds of tests.  Plus, they’re often destructive...which....I mean...there’s so much pottery that it doesn’t really matter if one piece gets destroyed but like you do still have to be careful *which* piece you destroy.  

Anyway, you also can see the striations on the outside piece, and that’s decoration on the pot.  It probably also helped with gripping it.  This is a piece of Shepardware, which is diagnostic of the late Woodland period in the Shenandoah valley. Here’s some more cool pottery: 

This is a random assortment of the kind of stuff we regularly pull out of the ground when it comes to pottery.  The most common kind we have is the orange on one side black on the other (3 upper rt pieces), whiteish (upper left 2), orange on both sides (lower left 3) and totally black (lower right 3).  All of ‘em are some variety of shepard or pageware.  You can see the texture on a lot of them, too.  We have a good mix of textured and untextured, and that’s why the composition of the pottery is more diagnostic than the decoration.  Frankly, people can and will put whatever design they think looks cool.  But they made that particular design by wrapping twine around the end of a flat stick and pressing it into the surface of the wet clay.  I also chose those two upper right pieces because they have really visible temper.  Here’s a side shot of one of them: 

You can see how big the bits are compared to my fingers (yeah, there’s dirt under my nails....I haven’t taken some tweezers to them yet after working on the car.). And...wait, I WAS going to try to describe this to you but then I was like “no, they deserve better” and I broke out my DSLR and my macro lens and took some pics.  Here are some macros of the temper: 

The white balance is a little off on the top one...the bottom one is more true to color (they aren’t the same piece of pottery, but they are a similar color).  So you can see that it’s crushed up limestone.  Pardon the depth of field on those...I had to open the aperture pretty wide to get one that wasn’t blurry bc I don’t exactly have bright lights in my room.  

Anyway....so that’s the pottery we’ve gotten at the site and what we can learn from it.  It’s going to take some time before we can start determining patterns and whatnot in regards to style, but we do have some evidence of trading here because some of the pottery we have is from the piedmont culture....

...wait, let me explain what that means.  When archaeologists need to describe a group of people who existed in a given place in a given time based on similarities in material culture regardless of ethnic and social grouping we call it a culture.  This is different than the standard meaning of the world culture, or even the way a cultural anthropologist would use the word.  So when I say the piedmont culture, I mean people that lived in the general area of the Piedmont plateau during the late woodland.  They were of varying tribes, languages, etc.  And we do this to describe the extant boundaries of cultural influence of particular trends in physical objects and not the social groupings of the humans in question.  So, for example, lots of people are familiar with the Clovis culture.  When archaeologists use this term we mean “these are the boundaries of the places we are finding physical objects in the group we’ve named Clovis” not “everyone in this area was a Clovis person”. Like no, obviously, they weren’t.  There were tons of social groups, tribes, etc. that were all distinct and different.  It’s a way of mapping cultural influence via physical objects to see how far they spread and who was using them.  

So, we have some piedmont stuff despite not being in the piedmont area, so we know that they were trading with those natives.  If you’re interested in more detail here, this is the VDHR resource I use for IDing pottery.  It looks like it came to visit you from the late 1990s, but the info is good and it’s easy to use. 

Anyway, that’s it for tonight.  Tomorrow is gonna be rocks and weird stuff, depending on how much I end up saying about rocks.  Probably not much bc we know how I feel about rocks.   ;) 

[kyidyl]

Heads up, I'm gonna be reposting the kyidyl explains bones and other science things to my science side blog @science-of-anthropology by queueing them up at a rate of 1/day. Then once the reposting is done I'm gonna start writing them there first and reblogging them here. I'd really love to grow that following and do more with the part of me that enjoys doing educational stuff, so thats the reason for the change. I'm not looking to make it like a patreon thing or money bc a, I don't think I'll get to the point where people give me money to tell them science things and b, I just genuinely enjoy it and I'm looking to increase *interaction*, not necessarily build a career out of science education on the internet. If you're following me for those posts, I won't be sad if you unfollow here and follow over there. :) If you like all my content, you won't miss anything by not following my side blog, so don't feel obligated.

As always, feel free to interact with either blog via all available tumblr methods. Hell now that you can see tags on desktop I even interact with those. I do my best to reply to everything but sometimes I dont have the spoons or if forget. That last one happens a lot because ADHD so please know that if I missed something you wanted a reply to it is almost 100% that I forgot and didn't see it so you are absolutely allowed to contact me via a more direct way or ask me about it. I dont have a busy askbox but I wouldn't be sad if I did. I believe very strongly that knowledge doesn't do anyone any good locked away, and I paid a lot and worked hard for my education so I'm happy to share it with you.

I love my field and I love talking about it so please, I'm begging you, don't be shy. Even questions you'd consider silly. Anon is on and always has been and probably always will be since I tend to enjoy ripping trolls a new asshole. :) if you want a private response, just be sure to let me know or use the messenger. Help me spread the knowledge and tailor my content to what you guys actually want to read about! :)

For example, I'm tentatively thinking about my next series being a kind of intersection of evolution and fantasy creatures. I've wanted to do it for awhile but never quite figured it out. What do you guys think?

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 6

(yep, the rest of the parts of this are all under the KyidylCL tag, in case you happen across just this one.)

Rocks and...other stuff

Ok so here we are...we’ve arrived at my least favorite thing.  Lithics.  I’ll be honest with you guys, my disinterest in lithics means that I don’t have a lot to add here.  But...I’ll do what I can.  

So, first off, we’ve found *thousands* of lithics on this site.  It is by far the most common thing we have.  We’ve found broken tools, used up tools, intact points, fire cracked rock, like...the whole nine.  One of the things you can learn from lithics is how far people were going to get their rock.  For example, we have a lot of jasper in our lithics, so we know they were going up onto the nearby mountain because that’s where the nearest jasper deposits are.  I *absolutely* am not the right person to go into a detailed account here, but I do know that they were going pretty far away to get their supplies - even over to the other side of the mountains.  Or at least they were trading with people in closer proximity to those places.  

I think what’s amazing to me is the degree to which they work quartz and quartzite.  Here’s one of the points we found: 

I’m pretty sure, if I’m remembering the things the Rock Guy told me correctly, that point is made of quartzite.  Quartz and quartzite are very hard (7/7.5 on the Mohs scale aka the rock hardness scale.), so working them is difficult.  I don’t know how to do it, but I know it must have taken either an impressive amount of brute force or an impressive amount of energy.  Either way, it’s neat.  Hell I found a piece of quartz the last time I was in the field (which I don’t have, or I’d show you.) that literally looked like it was cut like a gemstone.  It’s more likely it came out of a geode but still, they did cool shit with quartz.  Some of what we’ve found has been almost as clear as glass.  

I’m aware that the style a point is made in (and everything that is, well, pointy...is a point.  It includes spear tips, arrow heads, etc.) is indicative of the age of a site, but I don’t know enough here to go into it and we’ve already covered age in the pottery and digging post (it’s late woodland - early contact, c. 1300s - 1700s), so I’m just gonna show you some cool pictures.  

First point that we found...

Same hole, another point.  Probably both are arrowheads given the size.  The one I’m holding up in the picture up there was probably a spear, not an arrowhead.  Arrowheads are actually really small.  

Here’s another weird rock: 

It’s weird because that one in the upper right has that groove in it and is kinda squished.  to me it looks like a tile, which would be really anachronistic to this particular site, and our Rock Guy assures me this is a natural thing, but these rocks have something on them I’ve been finding on a lot of the lithics: a red residue.  You can see it pretty clearly on the top surface on the center rock, but it’s in the grooves on the right one too.  These rocks didn’t come out of the pit with the red dirt, so it’s not like...red dirt from burning.  To me it looks like ocre, but this is one of those areas where my knowledge base just comes up short and I need to wait for someone who knows more to look at them.  But lets just say that I have this experience often where I’ll say something like “this looks like ocre” and people will be like “nooo, that doesn’t make sense” and then they’ll spend some time with the artefact and be like “hey look at this it looks like ocre” and I’m over here like....yes....I know....I told you that weeks ago...perhaps if I’d found a way to say it in a male voice we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  x.x Aaaaannnnnyway.  

Another kind of rock we have are fire-cracked rocks.  Back in the day they used to heat rocks in the fire and then put them in pots to boil the water.  They often reuse them, and after a few uses the constant “hot rock plunged into cold water” thing causes them to crack.  It’s *extremely* common to find this all over the world.  I saw it at the site I worked in England, too, when we were digging the Roman stuff.  And it’s always kind of confused me because even though water boils basically instantly when you add the very hot rock, it would likely take longer for the rock to heat up than it would to just, y’know, boil the water, so why use the rocks? Then it occurred to me: because the rocks were just casually tossed into fires that weren’t being used for cooking.  So you toss a few into the fire you’re using for warmth or for smoking or whatever in the morning and by the time dinner rolls around you just grab some rocks that’ve been in the fire all day and you toss them into a pot of water.  Multitasking ftw! I would find some pics for you but I’m NGL guys, they just look like stones that’ve been cracked in half.  People weren’t all that picky about the type or anything like that.  

So yeah, that’s rocks, now who wants to see some weird shit? You, obviously, YOU want to see some weird shit.  

Weird Shit

First up, because I STILL haven’t figured out why this is like this, we have this bone: 

Ok honestly I’m only like 93% sure it’s a small piece of bone, but like...it’s definitely natural.  It’s been burned for awhile but the weird part here is that IT’S GREEN. Now that’s not in and of itself weird - this is what happens to bone when there’s some metal nearby.  It often leaves behind green staining on bones.  But there was no metal in the ground here, and this thing was pretty deep.  Below the civil war trench stuff.  So I have no idea why it’s green like this.  

This...thing.  No idea what it is.  Roughly a quarter inch long, metallic...looks like slag but, again, came out of a hole that was really too deep for us to be finding iron in (in this case, iron is a modern contaminant or something you’d only find in the top - IE, later - layers.). Meteorite, maybe? We’ve found some other weird stuff like this too but it was from much higher layers.  

The back and front of a piece of bone that is too small for me to make a determination as to whether or not it’s human without like...a microscope.  I don’t have one.  I mean it probably *isn’t* human, but the color is right, soooo...IDK I just thought it was weird.  

This is another small, weird, brown thing.  BUT! it’s a different kind of small, weird brown thing than the other one.  The other one passes the magnet test and fails to leave a streak when wet.  This one fails the magnet test but left a brown streak on my skin when wet (no...I didn’t lick this one).  So I’m pretty sure it’s a coprolite, but I’ve never handled them before so I’m not entirely certain.  It looks like one to me, though (coprolite is very old poop.  Poop is important bc it informs on diet and stuff.  There have been literal fights and thefts in the archaeological community over coprolites.). This came out of one of the test pits and we haven’t dug over there yet so IDK.  

This next bit is less weird and more cool.  

This is a very small, very burned piece of bone but it’s cool for two reasons.  One, see that long light-color diagonal mark in the lower right area of the top surface? That’s either a butchery mark or more tooth marks.  I learn towards butchery becaaaaause....see how flat this is? That only happens when it’s been cut by people.  Bones don’t break clean and flat like that, the crack or they splinter.  When they crack they do it vertically because that is with the grain of the bone.  This is horizontal, or across the grain.  They have to be cut to look so flat.  Here’s another example from the test pits: 

See? Perfectly flat across the grain.  This one has also been cut and burned.  The white color of the two bones means they’ve been burned for a long time at a high temperature.  All of the collagen - the soft stuff - gets burned off when you do it for long enough and at a high enough temperature and the minerals are left behind.  Both of these images are macro images on bones that are smaller than an inch.  

Ok, one more weird thing: 

This is actually the back and front of a rock.  It’s flat on both sides like pottery, but it tasted like a rock and it has no temper so...rock.  But in that top image it has some kind of dark residue on it that almost looks like rust or paint, and the opposite side has small marks that look like cut marks or tool marks.  I’m not sure what kind of rock it was, but it also had a dry, sandy texture to it.  IDK it was just weird.  The marks could just be damage over time to the rock (what we call taphonomic damage.), but the residue is pretty strange.  

Anyway, that about wraps it up.  I think that what I’m gonna do is start going through the uncleaned material I have downstairs (I got sidetracked by covid and the holidays. :P) and start posting what I found or anything out of the ordinary, if you guys want anyway.  Thanks for sticking around through this long series of posts about the site I work at, and I hope you enjoyed it.  As always, if you have any questions my askbox is open.  :) 

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - An Addendum

So I realized last night that I’ve made a bunch of these posts now and somehow managed to skip one of the most important parts of archaeology, especially in the field.  I think it was one of those like...it’s so obvious to me and I’m so used to it that I took it for granted moments.  Anyway, it’s these bad boys: 

(Image Credit)

No, no...not the dude, the screen he’s using.  That’s how we get stuff out of the dirt, we screen the dirt and the screened dirt is called the spoil heap or spoil pile (and Murphy’s law: archaeology edition dictates that you will ALWAYS end up accidentally putting your spoil heap in a place you need to dig later but didn’t know you needed to dig.). We keep the dirt bc a, we always miss stuff so sometimes we screen it twice, especially if we get our hands on a screen with smaller holes and b, to back fill the holes we dig when we’re done with them.  

So yeah anyway if you were wondering how it was that we ended up with stuff from the dirt, that’s how.  It’s on one leg like that with the handles bc it makes it easier to sift if we can shake it, but TBH at my dig we just stick it on a couple of saw horses and do it that way.  

Because these screens can’t catch really small stuff, we often just take soil samples so we can run it through a series of progressively finer mesh and then do flotation on it (use water to separate seeds and whatnot from dirt and bone.).