Archaeologists frequently make the point that artifacts can convey certain kinds of important information, but artifacts found in context can convey so much more information.

What does this distinction mean and why is it important?

What, after all, is context?

In the glossary on this website, context is defined as:

the location or placement of an artifact, feature, or site, including its relationship to other artifacts, features, and the surrounding environment. Context includes the soil around archaeological materials. Sometimes, the context of artifacts is more informative than the artifacts!

Consider a particular kind of stone tool, which we can date to say about 4000 BC based on the material it’s made from and the shape and style of its form. Say we find it with some pottery and other artifacts that we can date to much later, say about AD 500. And that layer is undisturbed, perhaps a midden layer that formed from trash disposed around houses in a village, with no other materials that are so old as the hypothetical stone tool in that midden.

Now, if archaeologists just have the stone tool, perhaps collected from the surface of a plowed field, they think: there’s a 6000-year-old occupation in this spot. (Occupation here refers to a period of use of a particular place on the landscape.)

If however, archaeologists find the stone tool when carefully excavating the midden, recording how undisturbed that layer is, what do they think?

The Shroud of Turin, from the official website.

Artifacts are often taken out of context. Consider the objects in an art museum, say in Atlanta, like a pottery vase from ancient Egypt or a sculpture from a Medieval French church. They are both artifacts and art objects. And they are objects no longer in context, since they’re displayed in a building far from where they were found (or abandoned).

Consider the Shroud of Turin, which is scheduled to be on display in Turin in spring 2010. Writes Victor L. Simpson of the Associated Press, and published in the Washington Post:

At least 1 million reservations from around the world have already poured in to secure three to five minutes to admire the cloth that has fascinated pilgrims and scientists alike, organizers of the April 10-May 23 showing told a news conference in Rome on Wednesday.

The Shroud is an artifact, art object, and “revered by many Christians as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth but described by some as a medieval forgery,” as Simpson notes. He says the earliest secure record of the shroud date to 1354.

The Shroud is being displayed in Turin (Torino). Is it in context? Login and discuss….

Archaeologist Jerald Ledbetter records stratigraphic information to provide context for the looted artifacts and bone.

Burke County State Court Judge Jerry Daniel in January 2010 handed down heavy fines on four east Georgia men who pled guilty to multiple counts related to looting a Late Archaic, Stallings culture shell midden site on the Ogeechee River in southern Burke County, Georgia. The four men were apprehended on private land by Georgia Department of Natural Resources Ranger First Class Jeff Billips and Ranger First Class Grant Matherly in late September of 2009. Two were found on the site with digging tools and fled when approached by the rangers. They were caught and charged with criminal trespass and interfering with the duties of an officer. They initially pled not guilty.

The other two men were arrested the next day when they were observed in the act of digging on the site. They had a number of artifacts in their possession, including a bone tool, several spear points and a shell gorget. One of the latter two men was digging through a human burial when caught. They were charged with criminal trespass, digging on an archeological site without permission and littering, and pled guilty to all counts.

In statements made during the sentencing, Judge Daniel said he knew that important archeological sites in Burke County were being badly harmed by site looters and that he wanted to put a stop to this long-standing activity. He also emphasized that the looters were trespassing on private property, and stealing private property, since archaeological sites (with the exception of burials and associated artifacts) under law belong to the landowner. In an attempt to put an end to destructive site looting the judge levied heavy fines and penalties, which included a $1000 fine for each count, a minimum $7384.00 fine to repair the archeological and physical damage to the site, 12 weekends in jail, community service, three years of probation (which requires a surcharge payment of $52/month) and a ban on attending any type of artifact show. After hearing about this heavy sentence, the first two men then pled guilty to avoid potential harsher sentencing in a trial. The three men who live outside of Burke County (one is from Swainsboro and two are from Metter) were banned from Burke County for three years.

All four men have been digging on sites for many years and one acknowledged that he has dug on many sites on the Ogeechee River acknowledged selling artifacts.

Testifying at the sentencing were State Archaeologist Dr. David Crass and Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns (GCAIC) archaeologist Tom Gresham. Crass requested GCAIC involvement in the case, and Gresham was called to the site in early October to document the site and the extent of the looting. He saw numerous piles of Stallings/Thoms Creek pottery, animal bone and chert artifacts left by the looters, as well as spoil piles containing abundant fresh water shell. After the DNR officers gathered the evidence they needed, Gresham and three colleagues mapped the extent of the looting, calculating that about 290 square meters had been disturbed. They also gathered about 47 pounds of bone, 56 pounds of stone artifacts and 82 pounds of pottery. This material is now being analyzed by Jerald Ledbetter and Lisa O’Steen so that some scientific value can be salvaged from the site. The site dates to the Stallings and Thoms Creek cultures of the Late Archaic period, which spans a critical time in Georgia prehistory, from about 3500 to 4000 years ago. This was a time when Indians in the Southeast were becoming more sedentary and began heavily exploiting freshwater shell fish.

Dr. Crass told Judge Daniel that Burke County contains some of the most important Archaic Period sites in Georgia, and that DNR believes an educated and caring private landowner is often the best protection for such sites. He also pointed out that there is an important distinction to be made between wholesale digging and casual surface collecting, and that DNR (and Georgia code) recognizes this distinction.

The Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns actively supported the efforts of DNR’s Law Enforcement Division to prosecute the case and rectify the damage to the site and to the human burials. Although the Council was disappointed that felony charges of burial disturbance were not brought, it was explained that misdemeanor convictions and appropriate penalties in State Court were a better bet than the uncertain outcome of a felony charge in Superior Court.

Tom Gresham notes that these sentences were largely a result of several actions taken by the archeological community in the past two decades. The principal charge was excavating on a site without written permission of the landowner and without notifying DNR. This law was proposed by archeologists in 1993 to allow prosecution without requiring the landowner to press charges. Additionally, the DNR rangers had been trained and sensitized to the problem of site looting and were very effective in gathering evidence and presenting a strong case. Dr. Crass lauded the two rangers and their colleagues, Sergeant Max Boswell and Captain Thomas Barnard, saying that they handled the case with high professionalism.

Third, it is likely that a long running campaign by archaeologists to inform the public about the harm that site looting does to all Georgians created the atmosphere for harsher sentencing.

Society for Georgia Archaeology President Dennis Blanton observes that

the outcome of this case sends all of the right signals: Georgia’s irreplaceable archaeological sites are under siege and require vigilant protection, there is a broad spectrum of our citizens out there that cares deeply about them, and such sites have a critical story to tell about our human forbears. We can only hope that looters will take note and that others will be alert to illegal digging elsewhere in the state.

Tom Gresham remarked that he had never seen such a wide array of punctated and stab-and-drag motifs on the pottery. One sherd alone has five types of punctation. As noted a decade ago by Ken Sassaman, Stallings-like pottery on the Ogeechee River is mostly sand tempered, with very little fiber. Thus, it is more accurately typed as Thoms Creek pottery. Of the approximately 700 sherds collected from the spoil piles, every one is Thoms Creek/Stallings pottery. The animal bone contains a great deal of deer and turtle bone, and only small amounts of bird and other mammal bone. No fish bone has yet been identified. As mentioned, human bone, probably from two individuals, has also been identified.

Illegal digging on shell middens along the Ogeechee River is a long-standing problem, presumably fed by the antiquities market that highly values bone pins often found in shell middens. Ken Sassaman, Kristin Wilson and Frankie Snow wrote an article in the Spring 1995 issue of Early Georgia citing this problem and documenting two looted sites on the Ogeechee River not far from the recently looted site. It is anticipated that the analysis of the pottery, stone and bone from the present site will be described in an article in Early Georgia.

 

Photo by Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press.

Writes John Tierney in the 16 November 2009 New York Times:

Scientists and curators have generally supported the laws passed in recent decades giving countries ownership of ancient “cultural property” discovered within their borders. But these laws rest on a couple of highly debatable assumptions: that artifacts should remain in whatever country they were found, and that the best way to protect archaeological sites is to restrict the international trade in antiquities.

Tierney’s article is titled “A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’,” and discusses the ownership of artifacts traded on the international art market. Some of these items are very well known, for example, the bust of Nefertiti from what is now Egypt, presently kept in a Berlin Museum.

Obviously each nation involved may have laws that conflict, making the ownership of antiquities a complicated matter, with no obvious, undeniable solutions.

If you own a piece of land in the United States of America, do you own the antiquities on that land? Is the same true if that land is in England?

One thing we have to consider when reconstructing ruins of any sort, including historic and ancient buildings, is the period or date to make the reconstruction match.

For example, we know that the main house at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, was modified and rebuilt over more than forty years. In addition, after Jefferson’s death, there were other modifications and restorations.

Any restorer has to make choices. In the case of Monticello, do you restore the building to the way it was on the day that Jefferson died—to the extent you can determine it? Or do you pick another date? Which, and why?

The same is true for archaeological ruins, for which we have far less information than we do for Monticello’s architecture and renovations.

Consider the example of the largest temple-pyramid at Chichen Itzá, a Classic-period lowland Maya civic-ceremonial and residential settlement on the northern Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico. This structure has long been referred to as El Castillo.

Here’s an historic photo of El Castillo (rather poorly scanned), published in T.A. Willard’s The City of the Sacred Well (Century, 1926). Willard doesn’t date this photo, but it was probably taken sometime in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Compare it to this photo from 2003, taken early in the morning when the ground fog made the pyramid more mysterious. The photographs are probably of different sides of this relatively symmetrical pyramid.

Both have the same number of levels, when you examine the profile of the edges and corners of the sides. The staircase is on a separate plane “above” the levels. However, the reconstruction staircase has borders running from the top to the bottom that are not clearly present.

Why? Is it because the photos show different faces of the pyramid? Is it because the historic photograph is of a relatively poor quality and we cannot discern the exact form of the staircase? Is it because restorationists opted to add this detail to make climbing the pyramid safer for tourists? Or…?

Click here to go to Monticello’s website.

Click here to go to the Chichen Itzá entry in the Wikipedia.

Click here to go to the El Castillo entry in the Wikipedia.

To compare the archaeology of Indiana Jones and of “real” archaeologists, the National Science Foundation presents a web experience called “Archaeology from Reel to Real: A Special Report.” For the activities of “real” archaeologists, the presentation draws on the research projects the NSF has funded.

In the Introduction, the NSF website accurately notes:

Unlike Indiana Jones, there is nary a fedora to be found in their field kits and their grants certainly don’t cover the costs of Webley revolvers or bullwhips, but it could be convincingly argued that in some respects NSF-funded archaeologists are “shadowy reflections” of their big-screen counterpart.

And yet, they go on, there are parallels between what Jones does on-screen, and what professional archaeologists do in real life. They teach, they study vanished civilizations, and they also “seek rare and precious artifacts that tell important stories about the past.” And:

Rather than relic hunters and adventurers, they are scientists, whose work is aimed at answering key questions about the past, answers that may even inform policy about contemporary problems such as how societies adapt to climate change, ecological shifts, political upheaval or mass migrations.

Most of the pages you can click through detail how archaeologists do research, including field methods, and what kind of data they recover.

The final page is a list of useful on-line resources, although the “Special Report” does not seem to have been updated since spring 2008.

Click here to visit the NSF web experience about “real” archaeology.

Scientists studying ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland conclude that the Earth’s climate changed rapidly about 14,700 years ago. They studied the oxygen isotopes in air bubbles trapped in the ice. About 14,700 years ago, they found changes in the air that came from increases in vegetation levels. These increases happened over about 200 years, which is quite rapidly.

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

The press release notes:

The ratio of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O found in an ice core has shown the history of abrupt climate change on Earth. For example, dry spells around 14,700 years ago resulted in the planet being quite arid north of the equator. Monsoons that followed, caused the proliferation of vegetation north of the equator 14,500 years ago.

Combine this with information from the National Science Foundation’s 2009 report “Solving the Puzzle: Researching the Impacts of Climate Change Around the World.” On page 62, the report says:

Earth’s landmasses support critical ecosystems, host Earth’s freshwater environments, and sustain almost all human agricultural activities. Land separates freshwater from the sea, stores nutrients essential for terrestrial and aquatic life, and holds a fossil record of Earth’s climatic past. As the planet warms, the conditions favorable to many plant and animal species are expected to shift toward the poles. Individual species will differ in their ability to make the same shifts. The resulting altered species distributions will likely cause significant disruptions to established ecosystems, as habitats adjust to new species populations.
Land use is inextricably linked to the carbon cycle. Changing land-use patterns, such as clearing forest to create agricultural plots, change the dynamics of the carbon cycle. Livestock such as cattle contribute a net surplus of carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Past climate change patterns are not predictors of the rate of change we may be experiencing today.

Undisturbed archaeological remains buried in the soil contain all sorts of chemical clues invisible to the human eye. The oxygen isotopes in the air bubbles in the ice are a similar invisible clue. Visible archaeological remains can also reveal clues as to the climate in the past. What invisible chemical information about the climate of the past do you think may be contained in archaeological sediments, artifacts, and features?

Read the full press release on the Science article by clicking here.

Click here to go to the National Science Foundation’s website, where you can download their 2009 report “Solving the Puzzle: Researching the Impacts of Climate Change Around the World.”

The recent amendment to one of Georgia’s archaeology laws might affect you, whether you are an avocational or professional archaeologist.

Code Section 12-3-621 has always required a person who is going to dig on an archaeological site to first notify the Office of the State Archaeologist. This recent amendment has made that notification a lot easier. You can send an email from HPD’s website, at www.gashpo.org—see Archaeological Services, and under that click on “Notify State Archaeologist before you dig.” The text of the law is there as well. The other way is by calling the archaeology notification hotline phone number toll-free, at (866) 755-0014. Leave a voicemail message at that number anytime, giving your contact information and the location of your intended excavations.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the State Archaeologist, Dr. David Crass, david.crass@dnr.state.ga.us, (404) 656-9344, or HPD’s Archaeology Program Coordinator, Christine Neal, christine.neal@dnr.state.ga.us, (404) 657-1367.

Resources at Risk: Defending Georgia’s Hidden Heritage is a special issue of Early Georgia, published in May 2001. The goals of this issue were 1) to expand public perception of what archaeology is and what archaeologists do; 2) to call attention to the urgent need for the preservation and stewardship of archaeological resources, or at least the recovery of basic information before it is destroyed; and, 3) to spur discussion of new ways that Georgians can accumulate more archaeological knowledge and save more resources, and disseminate this new information to the public.

In short, this issue is a primer of Georgia archaeology, with these articles:

• Georgia’s Hidden Heritage at Risk: An Introduction
• What is Archaeology? How Exploring the Past Enriches the Present
• Why is Archaelogy Important? Global Perspectives, Local Concerns
• An Introduction to the Prehistory of the Southeast, or, ‚“They were Shootin’em as Fast as They Could Make ’em” and Other Popular Misconceptions about the Prehistoric Southeast
• Archaeological Resource Protection in Georgia: Federal, State, and Local Legislation and Programs
• This Is Not Your Mother’s SGA
• Sprawl and the Destruction of Georgia’s Archaeological Resources: Transforming Citizens into Defenders
• Jargon Commonly Used by Archaeologists: Glossary of Terms

The articles work in concert as an overview of the besieged state of archaeological preservation in Georgia. Although this publication dates to 2001, its fundamental message about the desperate need for preservation and stewardship of archaeological resources has only become more acute with continued sprawl and land-use changes and forests and fields become become buildings and roads. As Charlotte A. Smith, author of the introductory article, notes:

All around Georgia, archaeological sites are being destroyed or are under threat of destruction. While it can be argued that ‚“development” is the natural progress of things, obliterating the past before it’s been recorded and understood is not ‚“natural,” nor does it have to be an inevitable by-product of progress.

In Georgia we lack sufficient infrastructure to implement a large-scale systematic project to record archaeological resources before they disappear forever. That infrastructure cannot be constructed without public support, and that support will not emerge without public understanding. And public understanding, in turn, stems from outreach by professionals and those committed to archaeological preservation.

Click here to download the entire issue in PDF format (2 MB).