Photo by George Desort in the New York Times, 17 August 2010.

Moose? What’s this about moose?

Michigan Technological University wildlife ecologists Rolf O. Peterson and John A. Vucetich have co-authored a paper with archaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen and two others about osteoarthritis in moose. Their specimens came from Isle Royale, an island that’s a National Park in western Lake Superior and is closer to Canada than the United States.

The moose most likely to develop arthritis, they conclude, also had evidence of poor nutrition when they were young. Bioarchaeologist Larsen, on the faculty at Ohio State University in Columbus, has long studied human skeletons, and considers the moose data illuminating, and that the same might well be true for humans. Thus, poor nutrition in early life may mean a heightened likelihood of osteoarthritis in later life. Of course, other things can also increase the probability of getting osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is also called degenerative arthritis, and involves the loss of cartiledge in joints, making movement painful.

In an August 16th 2010 New York Times story, Pam Belluck reports that the moose study was begun in 1958 and has been continued by generations of researchers. She writes:

For people, several historical cases may suggest a nutritional link. Bones of 16th-century American Indians in Florida and Georgia showed significant increases in osteoarthritis after Spanish missionaries arrived and tribes adopted farming, increasing their workload but also shifting their diet from fish and wild plants to corn, which “lacks a couple of essential amino acids and is iron deficient,” said Clark Larsen…. Many children and young adults were smaller and died earlier, Dr. Larsen said, and similar patterns occurred when an earlier American Indian population in the Midwest began farming maize.

The Peterson et al. paper is titled “Ecology of Arthritis,” and is published in Ecology Letters (still early view in August 2010). The article is not free, but there’s a link to a copy on the Michigan tech webpage with the press release.

Image from US Navy website here, and credited to R.G. Skerrett, and dated 1902.

It’s been ten years since the submarine H.L. Hunley was lifted from the water just outside of Charleston Harbor.

The submarine disappeared on February 17th, 1864, after setting a charge that sank the USS Housatonic. The sub was crewed by eight men.

Read more about the H.L. Hunley and recent investigations in this article, dated 8 August 2010 and by Brian Hicks, in HeraldOnline.com, the internet version of The Herald of Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The SGA’s website has an article on advances in metal artifact curation methods by H.L. Hunley conservators here.

For more information, visit the Department of the Navy webpage on the submarine here.

The Friends of the Hunley organization has a website with some information, but much of it seems to date to 2002.

Do you want to visit a medieval castle? How about one under construction?

Now you don’t even have to leave this continent to do so!

Make a 12-hour drive (from Atlanta, anyway) to the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas and tour the construction site for the thirteenth-century Ozark Medieval Fortress, plop down $12 per adult and $8 for those ages six to sixteen, and head off through the trees!

This privately owned endeavor focuses on authenticity. The quarrying and the stonework. The woodworking. Even ironwork. All of it is being done using thirteenth-century methods and techniques.

Planners say it’ll take thirty years to finish the castle, so there’s no big hurry to plan your trip!

In summer 2010 archaeologists began the field research for a three-year study of the lands around Stonehenge, on the Salisbury plain west-southwest of London. Almost immediately they made a game-changing find.

Stonehenge has been famous for generations. There are large standing stones, some huge lintel stones, and lots of mystery.

On the Google Maps image above, the right arrow points to Stonehenge, and the left arrow points to the location of the new find, which is visible as a faint circle, due to subsurface remains.

Despite all the work in the immediate vicinity of the stones, there’s never been a systematic survey of the area surrounding the stones. Other notable sites like Woodhenge and the Avebury circle (two miles and twenty miles, respectively from Stonehenge) have been known for years. However, most of the intevening space has never been systematically examined.

The English Heritage, managers of Stonehenge, clearly visible on the satellite photo from Google Maps above, note on their website:

In the landscape immediately around Stonehenge there are visible remains of many different types of monuments, and many more have been detected. Neolithic monuments include long barrows, and the long rectangular earthwork to the north, the Cursus (so called because it was once thought to resemble a chariot racecourse): together with the henge monuments at Woodhenge and Durrington Walls, contemporary with the middle phases at Stonehenge. The most numerous monuments are the remains of many Bronze Age round barrows, which were built after Stonehenge Stone Circle was complete.

But, in 2010, archaeologists began the research that would better set the famous Stonehenge in its archaeo-geographical context. Just two weeks into that research, archaeologists discovered the subsurface remains of a Late Neolithic construction in a plowed field owned by the National Trust.

Click here to go to the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity press release on the find. The page includes a video of Professor Vince Gaffney, project director, discussing the find. The IAA’s press release notes:

The new “henge-like” Late Neolithic monument is believed to be contemporaneous to Stonehenge and appears to be on the same orientation as the World Heritage Site monument. It comprises a segmented ditch with opposed north-east/south-west entrances that are associated with internal pits that are up to one metre in diameter and could have held a free-standing, timber structure.

The arrow points to the feature that researchers have identified as the subterranean remains of another henge. Here’s the IAA artist’s reconstruction, below.

What do you think of the fact that Stonehenge is such an important, long-recognized and long-researched archaeological site, yet, a large, contemporaneous nearby construction like another henge has only just been identified? And that a shadow of that find is visible to anyone with a reasonably speedy internet connection via free, publicly available satellite photographs? Any other observations or comments?

World Trade Center location in Google Earth satellite photograph. Note how far it now is from the Hudson River, on the left edge of the image.

Excavations by construction workers at the World Trade Center location in New York City exposed the timbers of a ship that presumably dates to the 1700s. The long-buried ship came to light on July 13, 2010.

David W. Dunlap’s story in the July 14th New York Times says:

The area under excavation, between Liberty and Cedar Streets, had not been dug out for the original trade center. The vessel, presumably dating from the mid- to late 1700s, was evidently undisturbed more than 200 years.

News of the find spread quickly. Archaeologists and officials hurried to the site, not only because of the magnitude of the discovery but because construction work could not be interrupted and because the timber, no longer safe in its cocoon of ooze, began deteriorating as soon as it was exposed to air.

Dunlap goes on to note:

A 1797 map shows that the excavation site is close to where Lindsey’s Wharf and Lake’s Wharf once projected into the Hudson. So, no matter how many mysteries now surround the vessel, it may turn out that the ghost even has a name.

Check out the story on the NYT website, which includes ten pictures.

Image from the New York Times’ interactive graphic that charts the spreading effects of the oil spill in the Gulf.

Many of us have probably been thinking about impacts of the oil washing ashore on coastal archaeological resources—but what about underwater resources like shipwrecks?

In early July, the Associated Press released an article discussing the impact of the oil from BP’s deepwater well blowout that’s sinking to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico on shipwrecks and archaeological investigations of them.

We are hearing most about the oil that is floating and washing ashore. But a significant portion of the oil is sinking down, and coating the bottom of the Gulf—and any archaeological resources there.

The AP reports:

Within 20 miles of the well, there are several significant shipwrecks—ironically, discovered by oil companies’ underwater robots working the depths—and oil is most likely beginning to cascade on them.

“People think of them as being lost, but with the deepsea diving innovations we have today, these shipwrecks are easily accessible,” said Steven Anthony, president of the Maritime Archaeological and Historical Society.

“If this oil congeals on the bottom, it will be dangerous for scuba divers to go down there and explore,” Anthony said. “The spill will stop investigations; it will put a chill, a halt on (underwater) operations.”

As the AP article makes clear, barrier construction and cleanup efforts also can damage—or destroy—archaeological resources. They also note that BP has hired an archaeological firm, Earth Search, Inc., which is based in New Orleans.

We look forward to reading their reports on findings.

Visit the Michael C. Carlos Museum on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, and contemplate the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, including its temple or ziggurat. So what’s the connection between an art museum in Atlanta and an archaeological site in what is now Iraq?

The satellite image from Google Earth shows the reconstructed ziggurat and some of the surrounding ruins (and a parking lot just east of the rectangular ziggurat). They were less reconstructed nearly a century ago, when “American Scientific Mission” expedition members, including an Atlantan, visited there. Here’s an abbreviated version of the story….

In 1919, Egyptologist James Henry Breasted left New York, leading an archaeological expedition to the Middle East. Breasted had recently been appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago, and his trip was supported by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., whose father had owned Standard Oil and many other lucrative business ventures.

The expedition travelled via ships, which took some time. In addition, from Cairo, they traveled to an oversea route to Bombay before arriving via the Persian Gulf at the mouth of the Euphrates River system. Breasted’s letter dated March 18, 1920 to his family had the dateline “Ur Junction, Babylon, Mesopotamia.” He wrote of the complications of arranging transportation the day before, and of the ruins they explored:

Here I sit in a freight car, where I slept last night on a field bed, and behind me looming high against the setting sun, is the temple tower of Ur of the Chaldees, the traditional home of Abraham. It is something less than four miles away. And when we had arrived yesterday morning it required only a little manipulation of the official wires to produce two Ford vans, and we were presently rolling away across the desert at twenty miles an hour. Behind us was Ur Junction! Ur Junction! What do you think Abraham would say to that! It consists of a group of tents, a mess house, and a row of quarters for the officers of the army in charge, a post office, and three tents in a row serving as a railroad restaurant where we had breakfast immediately on leaving the train. It lies on the main line from Basrah to Baghdad—the main line along which the first train passed not long before our arrival, and which we are the first archaeological expedition to use. There is a little branch line running up to Nasiriyeh and hence the sounding name, Ur Junction.

As we left it we had just before us in the morning sun, the ruins of our first Babylonian city. It consists chiefly of the temple tower of the moon-god of ancient Ur, and the adjoining larger buildings, like the palace of the ruler and the administrative buildings. These form a nucleus at one end, beyond which low mounds mark the houses of the unpretentious town. There is none of the architectural grandeur of the Egyptian buildings with their vast stone superstructures and imposing colonnades. There was little or no stone in ancient Babylonia, and everything had to be built of brick, burned or unburned. Nevertheless, I found it very impressive to be standing in the first ancient Babylonian city I had ever visited, with the bricks of the temple tower lying all about, marked with the name of Nabonidus, the father of Daniel’s Belshazzar, and the older lower course of the tower displaying bricks bearing the titulary of urengur, who lived in the 24th or 25th century B.C., almost 2000 years before Nabonidus. …. The boys, Bull, Edgerton and Shelton, are of the greatest assistance in the practical jobs connected with the living arrangements, and in the making and keeping of records, from which they gain much profit and experience.

The temple tower of Ur that Breasted mentions has been reconstructed to have a height of over 30 meters, although the actual height when the building was occupied is unknown. As Breasted noted, the temple tower was one of many clustered ruins, some of which even then were partly reconstructed. The ziggurat was built about 4000 years ago during the reign of Ur-Nammu.

Satellite image, also from Google Earth, but zoomed out to see more of the surroundings of the ziggurat and its walled precincts. Modern roads and other construction encroach upon the ancient ruins.

At that time, Ur was not as far inland as it is now, as the shoreline of the Persian Gulf has moved southeastward as sediments deposited by the Euphrates/Tigris drainage system have filled in the northern end of the Gulf.

The Mr. Shelton mentioned near the end of the quote above was William Arthur Shelton of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Atlanta cotton merchant John A. Manget financed Shelton’s trip and the artifacts he obtained for the University, which are now in the collections of Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. Shelton’s account of their trip to Ur is similar.

We were at Ur Junction in time for breakfast and found a small city of tents on the desert. We side-tracked our van and made our home in it while we surveyed the mounds in that vicinity.
Four miles out in the desert to the west stands the great buried city of Ur, lying in the midst of the desert sands fifteen miles west of the Euphrates, though that river once washed its walls. … The ancient city is in a state of great ruin; but its temple tower (call now a ziggurat) stands yet some seventy feet high and exhibits splendid walls built of square brick well burned and measuring about fourteen inches in two directions and from one and one-half to two inches thick and laid in bitumen obtained from Hit. This city, which is still doing business in the bitumen trade, is situated about five hundred miles farther up the river. …

Some distance from the temple tower are the palace remains, which have been very well excavated, revealing a high and luxurious state of civilization in that early day. There are many earthenware vessels, broken pottery is abundant, and large seccessive drains are found, while the mound itself is covered with shells and copper or or fragments of copper, together with indications of smelting. The shells are everywhere, and it has not been determined whether they are river bed shells or salt-water shells’ but the desert is strewn thickly with them, and their antiquity is evidenced by the fact that these ancient bricks contain them. There are literally streams of these little shells on the mound…. There was also a large and imposing city wall, with evidences of villages surrounding this great city.

Plate between pages 78 and 79 of Shelton’s book Dust and Ashes of Empires (1922). Breasted is the figure on the left.

Breasted and Shelton traveled together. Breasted’s letter was written to his family when events of this particular day were fresh in his mind—they had happened the day before. Shelton’s account is from a book published in 1922 that he called a “travel-record,” and probably composed the text from notes he made as he traveled.

Are both considered primary source materials by historical researchers? Do you find any discrepancies in their accounts of the ruins of Ur? Do you like one account better than the other?

Text sources

Breasted’s letters have been published by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and are downloadable here. The 2010 volume is titled Letters from James Henry Breasted to His Family, August 1919–July 1920, and has been edited by John A. Larson. It is the first publication in the Oriental Institute’s new Digital Archives series (OIDA 1). The paragraphs quoted here are from page 173.

The paragraphs by William Arthur Shelton are from pages 79-81 of Dust and Ashes of Empires (1922), which is downloadable from Google Books.

Looking for an historical map of North Carolina?

You’re in luck! The Carolina Digital Library and Archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now has debuted North Carolina Maps, an online resource that includes digitized versions of more than 3000 maps dating from the late 1500s through 2000, and detailed maps for each of North Carolina’s counties. The online collection includes Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which, among other things, can be helpful in discovering building locations.

The project notes:

Each map was digitized at a resolution high enough to enable viewers to zoom in close enough to see and read even the smallest details on each image. All of the original scans have been maintained and are available for research, publication, and display.

…and…

An effort has been made to identify and include every available map of North Carolina, or of regions, counties, or towns within the state.

Click here to go to the home page of North Carolina Maps.

Portion of the British Library’s copy of the 1562 map by cartographer Diego Gutiérrez and engraver Hieronymus Cock. Note in the upper left of this screen grab the
word “APALCHEN;” this is a precursor of the word “Appalachia,” still used for this region.

What’s in a map? Have you used overlay capabilities of the free computer program Google Earth? Here we take the section of the 1562 Gutiérrez map that spans the coastline of what is now Georgia and map it to today’s coastline to see what we can learn.

First, the map. This version is from the British Library’s online collection (currently, the map’s link is here). As our own Library of Congress notes,

In 1562 Diego Gutiérrez, a Spanish cartographer…, and Hieronymus Cock, a noted engraver from Antwerp, collaborated in the preparation of a spectacular and ornate map of what was then referred to as the fourth part of the world, America. It was the largest engraved map of America to that time.

Further, the Library of Congress online notes:

Gutiérrez’s magnificent 1562 map of America was not intended to be a scientifically or navigationally exacting document, although it was of large scale and remained the largest map of America for a century. It was, rather, a ceremonial map, a diplomatic map, as identified by the coats of arms proclaiming possession. Through the map, Spain proclaimed to the nations of Western Europe its American territory, clearly outlining its sphere of control, not by degrees, but with the appearance of a very broad line for the Tropic of Cancer clearly drawn on the map.

In our modern world of satellites and lasers, we are accustomed to using maps that more accurately portray the landscape around us—and the ocean floor, the surface of the moon, and more!

Gutiérrez, however, was working with far different data so that his map approximates and estimates what is now Georgia’s coastline. And, since the commission was made more to support territorial claims of the Spanish leadership under King Felipe II (reigned from 1556 until his death at age 71 in 1598) than to provide guidance for mariners, the emphasis was not on the accuracy of Georgia’s coast.

This orientation of the overlay aligns the stretch of the coastline from the notation “Río de Santa Elena” northeastward to the North Carolina’s Outer Banks. This area was chosen because the Florida peninsula is disproportionately wide and the map seems generally less precise along the Florida coastline than along the Carolinas’. In addition, the Georgia bight is more exaggerated than we know it actually was (the coastline bends westward too much).

“Río de S. Elena” as oriented here lines up with the location of the Spanish settlement called Santa Elena, which was on what we now call Parris Island. This archaeological site, which includes a French Fort that predates the Spanish occupation, was declared a National Historic Landmark in January, 2001.

This alignment means that southwest of the “Río de S. Elena” is the notation “R. de tierra llana.” “R.” most likely stands for “Río” or River. “Tierra llana” means flat lands, or plains.

So, which river do you think the cartographer is indicating by “River of the Flat Plains”?

We also have demonstrated this Google Earth overlay operation with an 1864 map of downtown Atlanta. Read about that here.

On Saturday, May 16th, 2010, the Jones Archaeological Museum at the 320-acre Moundville Archaeological Park reopened after a two-year, $5 million renovation. The Moundville site is in Alabama, south of Tuscaloosa.

The Museum originally opened in May 1939, and was built by Civilian Conservation Corps laborers. Notes the Museum website:

Today, the museum combines the latest technology with more than 200 stunning artifacts to describe one of the most significant Native American archaeological sites in the United States. Outside, visitors are greeted by symbols of the Native American culture mounted on enormous wooden heraldic poles. Inside, visitors will find life-size figures displaying the clothing and jewelry of Mississippian cultures, ceremonial feather decorations hand-sewn by Native-American artists, stunning pottery and other artworks placed in display cases that light up when recorded narratives talk about them and three-dimensional, moving depiction of a Native American maker of medicine who appears in a reconstructed earthlodge, taking them on a journey into the afterlife.

Read more about this famous multi-mound site elsewhere on this website in a favorable review of a 116-page volume titled “Moundville” (University of Alabama Press, 2008), by John H. Blitz.

View from walkway exiting visitor center, 2009.

Between the modern cities of Tucson and Phoenix are the famous crumbling prehispanic architecture now central to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. This archaeological zone became the USA’s first archaeological reserve in 1892 by order of President Benjamin Harrison, and was declared a National Monument in 1918 by President Woodrow Wilson.

As visitors wander forth from the park’s air-conditioned museum, their eyes are, not surprisingly, drawn to the towering multi-story ruin beneath the large flat roof that was built to protect it in the early 1930s.

But, this monumental architecture was only a small part of the footprint of this amazing Sonoran desert community.

Irrigated fields and homes were scattered for miles on a tongue of land between the Gila River, to the north, and McClellan Wash to the southwest. The canals drew water from the Gila River, upstream to the east-northeast. The park area is within the McClellan Wash drainage, but the area is fairly flat, a plain with low vegetation that remains after years of ranching.

Cut-away model displayed in visitor center, showing walls and beams in Casa Grande ruin, 2009. Note that the lowest doorways were above the exterior ground surface, necessitating entry via ladders.

The largest ruin, under the roof, is made of local subsoils called caliche, processed into mud, then dried in place on the structure. Builders imported wooden beams from higher, forested elevations at least fifty miles away. The beams support the floors, and allow this building to be built so tall. It also has shaped wood lintels above the doorways. The footprint of the Casa Grande ruin is about 59×42 feet. It is known as a platform mound, because it was built atop an artificial terrace that was up to about 4 feet high.

The interior walls had a smoothed clay surface that was treated like plaster. Probably, the exterior also had a smoothed surface, but none of it survives. The desert peoples who designed and built Casa Grande most likely planned to collect whatever rainfall ran off the building’s flat roofs.

Plan map of Compound A, Plate 6 in Fewke’s 1912 report, showing the exterior wall and interior structures. North is to the right, and the large Casa Grande ruin is the black-walled structure northwest of the middle of the compound. The diagonal line is an old stagecoach road that went between the railroad station at the town of Casa Grande, about twenty miles to the west, and the town of Florence about ten miles to the east. The Southern Pacific Railroad’s line was completed in the winter of 1889–1880.

The Casa Grande building had a wall approximately 420×230 feet surrounding it and several residences. This walled area is called Compound A. Jesse Fewkes, who worked there in the early 1900s, estimated that Compound A’s wall was originally about 7 feet tall. The wall also had a ditch along its exterior.

Construction of Casa Grande, and also the walls and residences of other structures in this community, would have required “mining” caliche from below the surface, crushing it to the proper granularity, and mixing with water to use as a construction material. The main ruin shows horizontal layers that would have been constructed, then left to dry for several days before adding to the wall.

Researchers estimate that the large Casa Grande ruin would have required about 1545 cubic yards of caliche soil. No borrow pits of that size have been found near the ruin, so we assume that multiple deposits of caliche soil were extracted and processed to make the walls. Since wetting the caliche deposits would have made them easier to extract, perhaps some of the caliche came from construction of nearby irrigation canals.

Plate 4 in Fewke’s 1912 report, showing an aerial view of prehispanic architectural remains scattered near the Casa Grande ruin (lower left). Photograph appears to have been enhanced to emphasize structures and compound walls.

Within and outside the compound wall surrounding the Casa Grande ruin were residential compounds, also with surrounding walls. Communities may have clustered residences, with little space among the buildings. Other communities are like this one, with the residences scattered at some distance from each other. Researcher Jesse Fewkes (1912, p. 86) noted:

The limits of this prehistoric settlement are difficult to determine. The whole plain was dotted at intervals with houses similar to those of Casa Grande, from the point where the Gila leaves the mountains to its junction with its largest tributary, the Salt, the valley of which is also marked by the remains of many similar prehistoric buildings. Not all the mounds…, however, contain ruins of great buildings; many walled structures, formerly homes of the inhabitants, have fallen, leaving but slight traces of their existence—no vestiges of walls above the surface of the ground, merely broken metates or fragments of pottery scattered over a limited area.

In historic times, the first stabilization activities at Casa Grande took place in 1891–1892, which significantly slowed deterioration of the big ruin. Ruins of smaller buildings around the monumental architecture have been covered in a more durable material to enhance preservation.

Archaeologists working in southwestern North America can observe people using construction techniques similar to the ones that builders used to make Casa Grande, because some people still know and use them. That’s not true in the Southeast—here in Georgia. Still, are there lessons to be learned from the construction techniques used in building and maintaining the Casa Grande buildings that are informative in considering construction methods for ancient buildings that once stood at Kolomoki, the Leake site, or Etowah, for example?

NOTE: In January 2010, the Society for American Archaeology sent a letter to the Ruins’ superintendent supporting expansion of the park to include more ruins along the Gila River, noting:

Addition of these ruins to the Monument would greatly add to its value as an interpretive center of Hohokam culture, bring more heritage tourism into local communities, and protect these irreplaceable ruins for future generations.

References

Del Bono, Elisa Maria. 1999. Characterization and Analysis of the Caliche Walls of the Great House, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Coolidge, Arizona. Unpublished MS thesis. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania.

Fewkes, J. Walter. 1912. “Casa Grande, Arizona,” in Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution: 1906–1907, pp. 25–179. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Both are available as PDFs from the Internet Archive. The NPS website includes a link to a 1992 history called “Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Arizona: A Centennial History of the First Prehistoric Reserve, 1892–1992, An Administrative History” by A. Berle Clemensen, including a synopsis of Hohokam archaeology and many pictures and drawings.

The Society for American Archaeology, a national organization with over 7000 members, publishes a newsletter, The SAA Archaeological Record, five times each year. The SAA offers that newsletter for free via the Internet. Select the issue you want to read by clicking here.

For issues from 2010 on, when you click on an issue name, its pages appear on a reader, and the issue can also be downloaded as a PDF. For issues prior to 2010, your click will initiate a download.

The March 2010 issue is now available. Maxine E. McBrinn has an interesting article titled “Is She Invisible? Identifying Gender in Foraging Societies” that emphasizes the difficulty of noting “women’s work” in the archaeological record left behind by hunter-gatherers. Based on ethnographic data, archaeologists in particular look to subsistence information and fiber industries as indications of gender-specific activities undertaken by women.

Screenshot from modern Georgia road map found online here.

Roads constitute the largest human-made artifact on earth.

Ted Conover wrote this in his latest book, The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today (2010, Knopf: New York; page 9). On the same page, he also notes:

In fact, almost 1.5 percent of the surface area of the continental United States—an area about the size of Ohio—is now covered with “impermeable surfacing”: roads, parking lots, buildings, and houses.

Modern roads—we know where they are. Go back a century—we know where many of the roads in the continental US were.

Go back six centuries, and it’s trickier—where were the roads? This is something Georgia archaeologists ponder.

Mostly, archaeologists record habitation sites—that is, places where people lived. They may have lived there for quite a while, generations even, at perhaps large villages. Other residential sites may have been been small and used for only a short while, perhaps for a season, or even for a shorter period (often referred to as a “camp”).

But, we know from the artifacts that are found here and there that ancient peoples traveled great distances.

Consider the example of the Leake Site, a civic-ceremonial village settlement in northwest Georgia near Cartersville on the bank of the Etowah River. This unusual village was originally settled about 300 B.C. Over time, the residents constructed large mounds, and dug a ditch around part of the settlement area, meaning some houses were inside the ditch and some were outside. The location of this settlement mean the residents were well positioned to monitor or participate in trade that came from either the Gulf or Atlantic Coast and extended to the lower Ohio River, or vice versa.

We know the residents of the Leake Site participated in such a trading network because of the artifacts that have been found there, on the west bank of the Etowah, and at other archaeological sites that were occupied at the same time.

For example, Leake Site Principal Investigators Scot Keith and Dean Wood examined collections from the Mann Site, a contemporaneous occupation in the southwest corner of Indiana not far from the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. Some of the pottery from this site has produced an abundance of Swift Creek complicated stamped pottery and sand tempered simple stamped wares very similar to Cartersville simple stamped pottery, as reported elsewhere on this website and on the Bartowdig.com website. Other artifacts found in common on other contemporaneous (that is, Middle Woodland) archaeological sites scattered around east-central and southeastern North America include anthropomorphic figurines made from fired clay. They have similar faces and other attributes.

The distinctive decorations of Swift Creek pottery indicate there was communication among these far-flung settlements. We don’t know if people traveled along routes we would recognize as roads, or constructed flattened pathways. We surmise that they would in part have traveled on rivers, like the Etowah itself. But some of their passage must have been overland. Some overland routes were used for generations, into historic times. As Professor Louis DeVorsey has noted in the New Georgia Encyclopedia online:

Before Georgia had roads, it was laced with Indian trails or paths. These trails served the needs of Georgia’s native populations by connecting their villages with one another and allowing them to travel great distances in quest of game, fish, shellfish, and pearls, as well as such mineral resources as salt, flint, pipestone, steatite, hematite, and ochre. Many groups followed an annual economic cycle that saw them undertake seasonal migrations in pursuit of plants and animals needed for their existence.

So, what about roads and archaeology? Conover is right—roads are a huge human impact on our modern landscape. Indeed, the expansion of a state highway is the reason that SGA members Keith and Wood conducted the excavations at the Leake Site, and analyzed the data recovered.

Image from bartowdig.com online here.

Based on their research, they have suggested trading routes that the Leake Site residents and their contemporaries likely followed. That, however, is not the same as documenting those routes.

Some ancient roads are known. They were constructed with care, even with drainage, and distinct margins. They connected important trade centers across sometimes inhospitable landscapes. In general, we define a route as a road if it is an identifable thoroughfare, although it may or may not be constructed; this definition includes footpaths and trails.

Consider the Appian Way, or Via Appia in Latin, which connected Rome to communities to the east and south. Or consider the famous white ways, or sacbes/sacbeob, of the lowland Maya. Some sacbes connected parts of single communities; others ran some distance and connected cities. They are called white ways because they were surfaced in the white limestone ubiquitous in the Maya lowlands. Consider the Camino Real roads the Spanish commissioned to link places in the New World; one of the most famous is El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, or the Royal Road to the Interior, which is part of a network that connected Mexico City with the harbor at Veracrúz and extended north into modern New Mexico. Some stretches of all of these examples can be seen on the free satellite photos projected byGoogle Earth, and some are even modern roads and highways (consider these pictures of New Mexico’s Camino Real).

But, what about travel routes, perhaps used for centuries, that were no more than foot-pounded soil? This, clearly, is a class of ancient archaeological resources that are poorly known, more hypothesized than systematically recorded.

The Appalachian Trail in north Georgia in March 2009.

As Dr. DeVorsey also notes:

Native Americans tended to avoid difficult terrain as they traveled across wide stretches of Georgia’s early landscape, and as a result Indian trails generally followed ridges and drainage divides to minimize stream crossings and swampy bottomlands. Later, engineers used the same criteria when laying out and constructing railways and roads. Bridges were costly to construct and hard to maintain, so the routes pioneered by the Native Americans were often later overlaid by iron rails and graveled roads. When large creeks and rivers couldn’t be avoided, the Indian trails often led to rocky shoals or shallows that could be easily crossed or safely forded. In times of high water travelers sometimes carried collapsible wooden frames and covered them with hides to provide small portable boats for crossing. Dugout canoes were sometimes hidden for use in crossing, or rafts or hickory or elm bark canoes were made on the spot.

The Hightower Trail is a named Indian trail here in Georgia. It may have been used for generations and centuries before it appears in the historic record. The words Hightower and Etowah are corruptions of the same Cherokee term, Ita-Wa, according to a historical marker. Another marker notes that this route was once considered the boundary between the Creek and Cherokee territories; today part of it is the Gwinnett/Dekalb County line. As with other prehistoric trails in Georgia, portions of the Hightower Trail are modern roads, some of them well-traveled routes.

The issue of ancient roads raises many potential topics for discussion, for example, trading networks, stream fords and bridges, road construction techniques…. What are you thinking about? Log in and comment!

If you are interested in Georgia’s Indian trails, you may want to track down a copy of Marion H. Hemperley’s Historic Indian Trails of Georgia (1989, Garden Club of Georgia: Atlanta).

Dr. Jim D’Angelo will give a presentation on examples of Cro-Magnon and later cave art, at the monthly meeting of the Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society, a chapter of the SGA, at its meeting on Thursday April 8, 2010. The meeting starts are about 7 PM with the program beginning at 7:30 PM. GARS meets in the Gwinnett County Administration of Justice Center, 75 Langley Drive, in Lawrenceville.

Jim recently returned from a visit to Spain and was fortunate enough to visit one of the few Paleolithic caves, Cuevo de la Pileto, still open to the public. La Pileto is known for Cro-Magnon and Homo sapiens sapiens (that’s us) cave drawings and markings dating back more 20,000–30,00 years and including the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, as well as the Roman period. The cave, privately owned, is not “developed” and tours, by carbide lantern, are strictly limited.

Wayne Waldrip and Shannon Coffey will also present a review of the joint GAAS/GARS field trip to Standing Peachtree in March, and Shannon and Jim will talk about plans for the Frontier Faire and Archaeology Month in May. Jim will also give an update on exciting developments in the effort to purchase the Fort Daniel tract for development as an historic site and archaeological research park.

GARS and the Fort Daniel Foundation will be working together to combine the 2nd Annual Fort Daniel Frontier Faire with GARS’ Archaeology Month program which will feature public archaeology and a frontier style brick-making demonstration. Cherokee Brick of Macon is helping with the project. Clay mined on the site will be hand molded into bricks and fired in a “Clamp” kiln, and there will also be demonstrations of early blacksmithing and frontier musketry.

For more information visit the GARS website or the Fort Daniel Foundation website.

Osage orange hedgerow and windbreak in a late March snowstorm in Michigan.

The background for this discussion is drawn from Frank F. Schambach’s ground-breaking article in Plains Anthropologist (vol. 45, pages 7–33), “Spiroan Traders, the Sanders Site, and the Plains Interaction Sphere: A Reply to Bruseth, Wilson, and Perttula,” published in 2000. It is available online as a PDF, but is not free.

Across the Southeast, before Europeans arrived, Native Peoples prized the wood of a tree that inhabited only a small portion of the vast interior of the North American continent. The tree is commonly known as the osage orange, and has the scientific name Maclura pomifera. The fruit of this tree looks like a lumpy bright green to yellow-green softball. The limbs and twigs of the tree are thorny. Its range at the time Europeans arrived along the Atlantic Coast was limited to a small area near the junction of the modern states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, in the Red River Valley and along its tributaries. This tree has many other common names, too, including hedge apple, horse apple, and mock orange.

One other name has a big clue as to why this tree is a topic here on the website of the Society for Georgia Archaeology: bow wood, or bois d’arc. The wood is very dense, heavy, close-grained, and resists rot. Historically, an osage-wood bow was equivalent in value to a horse and a blanket. Thus, it was quite valuable.

But, you may be thinking, wood is organic, and doesn’t preserve well archaeologically under normal circumstances. This is true, and indeed prehistoric wood samples are rare, other than charcoal. Still, we have records from early French trappers who traversed the Caddo territory along the Red River in what is now southeastern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas that discuss the bow wood and its value.

Schambach argues that osage orange bows were so highly prized, they were an important commodity. After all, the wood was available from only a small region, since the trees grew in a limited area.

Schambach argues that access to the prized osage orange wood groves, and the wood they yielded, were controlled by the people who lived at the archaeological site we know as Spiro, in far eastern Oklahoma on the south bank of the Arkansas River. This famous site was a large village with civic-ceremonial architecture central to the community. The site had eleven platform (flat-topped) mounds and one burial mound. Unfortunately, the burial mound, known as Craig Mound, was mined by looters in the 1930s, because the grave goods were so abundant and amazing—and valuable.

The question Schambach sought to answer was: how did the peoples of Spiro get all those fancy grave goods, many made of materials that came from far away, including copper and marine shell. They would have had to have something valuable to trade to get those items. So, Schambach hypothesized that the peoples of Spiro controlled trade in osage orange bows and bow wood from the Great Plains, and funneled them via trading networks to the east and south to peoples living farther from the wood source. In return, they obtained the goodies that had been recovered from the Spiro burials.

There is more detail to Schambach’s argument for the osage bow wood trade hypothesis in his article, but the portion presented here is sufficient to introduce the topic of osage orange trees in a short story on this website. Although not everyone agrees with Schambach’s hypothesis about Spiroan trade, the osage-wood bows certainly were expensive and highly prized. And osage orange trees are an odd species and have an interesting story. (Click here to download a 2001 article by Connie Barlow on “anachronistic” North American species, including the osage orange.) Indeed, osage-orange wood is still prized by some archers.

This is the kind of problem archaeologists researching the ancient past often face: how to explain why certain artifact types cluster in certain areas. Perhaps you can think of a different hypothesis for why there were so many fancy grave goods at Spiro. What data would you need to support your hypothesis?

NAGPRA stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. This is a federal law, originally passed in 1990 (with only minor amendments since), which:

Provides for the ownership or control of Native American cultural items (human remains and objects) excavated or discovered on Federal or tribal lands. Vests ownership or control of human remains and associated funerary objects: (1) in the lineal descendants of the Native American; or (2) if the lineal descendants cannot be ascertained, or the funerary objects and so forth are unassociated, in the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization on whose land the remains or objects were located, or which has the closest cultural affiliation with the remains or objects (and makes claim for them), or, if the land was Federal, in the Indian tribe recognized as aborginally occupying the area (unless a different tribe, by preponderance of the evidence, makes a stronger claim). Provides for disposition of unclaimed Native American cultural items according to regulations promulgated by the Secretary of the Interior.

NAGPRA is in the news in March 2010 for three reasons.

First…

First, the National NAGPRA Program launched “the online Culturally Affiliated Native American Inventories Database summarizing data from museums and Federal agencies that have NAGPRA compliance obligations” on March 1st.

Reference databases tend to be quite useful…. Here’s the link to all of the NAGPRA online databases, and here’s one to the new Culturally Affiliated Native American Inventories Database. This database:

is a transmission for public use of data from museums and Federal agencies that have NAGPRA compliance obligations. Many of the Native American human remains described here have been culturally affiliated as a result of consultation with tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. All individuals on this database should be represented in a Notice of Inventory Completion. The tribe or tribes designated as eligible to receive the human remains in each inventory are noted in the remarks section of the record.

Second…

Second, on March 15th:

The National Park Service…announced a final rule has been published in the Federal Register establishing a process for the disposition of Native American human remains that are in museums or on exhibit in the United States and which have not yet been culturally affiliated to a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization. There are currently more than 124,000 Native American human remains listed under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) as unidentifiable, 4,000 individuals have been returned to tribes for re-burial in 82 agreements approved by the Secretary of the Interior.

This takes effect in May 2010. It’s specifically meant to address what institutions must do legally with Native American human remains that are considered unidentifiable as to affilation with modern, living Native American peoples (tribes).

Some clarification on the term “culturally unidentifiable” is included in the law (Federal Register, vol. 75, no. 49, Monday, March 15, 2010, page 12403, and here online). It says:

Culturally unidentifiable refers to human remains and associated funerary objects in museum or Federal agency collections for which no lineal descendant or culturally affiliated Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization has been identified through the inventory process.

The law goes on (same page):

Disposition means the transfer of control over Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony by a museum or Federal agency under this part.

This transfer process is also sometimes referred to as repatriation. Strictly speaking, repatriation refers to the return of someone to their own country.

The law (Federal Register, vol. 75, no. 49, Monday, March 15, 2010, page 12379, and here online) clarifies:

In brief, this rule pertains to those human remains, in collections, determined by museums and Federal agencies to be Native American, but for whom no relationship of shared group identity can be reasonably traced, historically or prehistorically, between a present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group. These individuals are listed on inventories as culturally unidentifiable Native American human remains. The rule requires consultation on the culturally unidentifiable human remains by the museum or Federal agency with Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations whose tribal lands or aboriginal occupancy areas are in the area where the remains were removed. If cultural affiliation still cannot be determined and repatriation achieved, then the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization may request disposition of the remains. The museum or Federal agency would then publish a notice and transfer control to the tribe, without first being required to appear before the Review Committee to seek a recommendation for disposition approval from the Secretary of the Interior. Disposition requests, which do not meet the parameters of the rule, would still require approval from the Secretary, who may request a recommendation from the Review Committee.

In response to this final rule, expect museums and institutions it applies to to once again review their collections.

Third…

Most recently, the professional archaeological community has expressed concern for funding for the NAGPRA Grants Program. This program seeks:

to increase the number of successful repatriations through the support for projects that increase the ability of tribes and museums to facilitate consultation and work together through the NAGPRA process.

Funding for this program, as with all federal programs, has received close scrutiny each year. For Fiscal Year 2011, again as with many programs, there’s a proposed cut in the budget. This is of special concern because grant applications can be expected to increase, especially in response to the final rule for culturally unidentifiable human remains mentioned above.

In response to this situation, on March 19th the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), a national organization with more than 7000 members, provided written testimony to the House Appropriations Committee “in regards to funding for the NAGPRA Grants Program, which is essential to the continued success of repatriation efforts in the United States” for Fiscal Year 2011.

Download a copy of the SAA’s testimony from this webpage.

In the written testimony, the SAA noted:

Of concern today is the issue of funding for the NAGPRA Grants Program in FY2011. The administration’s budget proposal, if enacted, would cut funding for the program by $581,000, instead of providing a much- needed increase to reflect current demand. SAA respectfully requests that Congress reject this proposed cut, and increase funding to a level of $4.2 million, as recommended by the 2008 National NAGPRA Review Committee report, in order to meet demonstrated need.

The SAA testimony documents how demand for NAGPRA funds has been increasing, and can be expected to increase. The SAA, therefore, has joined the National NAGPRA Review Committee in requesting increased funding for the NAGPRA Grant Program for FY2011.

Finally…

Although many high-dollar programs are in the news these days, there are also many very important smaller programs in the news. Some link strongly to our nation’s archaeological heritage, such as these events related to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

You might not agree with the order given, but some of the blogs in this list, “50 Best Blogs for Archaeology Students,” may interest you….

When humans enter an ecosystem, they displace some species and prey upon others. This is true of both plants and animals, including species most of us don’t really notice (for example, nematodes in soil and rotifers in freshwater).

As human populations increase, and peoples intensify occupation of the environment (demographically, populations become denser), demands on environmental resources increase. The impacts of displacement and predation increase. They must; more people mean demands for food, shelter, and other material goods increase.

Photographs in this story are from the IUCN report.

In the Great Plains of North America, bison populations have decreased over the last two centuries—a response to increasing human populations and the consequences of that proliferation.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature is “a democratic membership union with more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations, and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries” (according to the IUCN website). In early March 2010, the IUCN released a report called American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010. The report discusses the current status of the American bison (Bison bison).

The American bison ranged across the Great Plains in large herds, browsing on the vast prairie grasslands. Notes the report, “there is little doubt that prior to Euroamerican settlement, plains bison numbered in the millions, and probably even in the tens of millions” (page 8).

Through the late 1800s, bison herds were hunted commercially, to “open” lands for colonization by peoples from the east. There was also sport hunting. Environmental factors, including introduced bovine diseases, also reduced bison populations. Their numbers became so diminished that in 1905 the American Bison Society was formed and sought to establish bison herds at several federal landholdings (page 9).

Chapter 2 of the report, downloadable from this webpage, discusses bison prehistory and history, including the species’ original range. On page 11, the report notes:

With increased resolution and clarity afforded by ethnohistoric and ethnographic investigations, human-bison interactions among historic native peoples are better described and documented than for the late Pleistocene and Holocene. Bison continued to be the preferred game for many native North American cultures, especially on the Great Plains and Prairies, providing food, clothing, shelter, and tools…. Sustained by bison and plant resources, many native groups likely affected densities of other large herbivore species…. In addition to significant ecological relationships, the bison was a central element in oral tradition, rituals, dances, and ceremonies of native peoples of the Plains…, and it remains symbolically important in the cultural traditions of many native Tribes to this day.

The arrival of Europeans in North America, after 1492, resulted in significant changes in human-bison interactions, and changed the fabric of Native American life forever. Introduced diseases such as smallpox decimated indigenous human populations…, and altered subsistence, settlement, demography, and social organisation for many different groups. Bison hunting by native people was seasonal in nature. Bison were incorporated into a broad spectrum of plant and animal procurement activities…. Bison provided the economic basis for stable, resilient land use regimes and social systems. However, effects of Native American warfare and raiding during the historic period disrupted and destabilised these land use and social systems. The spread of horses into Great Plains aboriginal economies by the 1750s, and increasing commoditisation of bison products caused by the emergence of a European commercial market for wildlife products by the 1820s, contributed to the near extinction of the bison…. Native peoples traded bison hides for Euro-american commodities, with the market in bison robes reaching a peak in the 1840s. Hide hunters began to significantly participate in the market hunting of plains bison in the 1850s, and by the 1890s had decimated the herds. Even bones were cleaned for sale to the eastern fertilizer market, an activity that continued to 1906….

The bison is now extirpated from its original range across North America. Extirpation is a word ecologists use to refer to a species that no longer exists naturally in a particular area. In the case of the American bison, it no longer roams wild across an unlimited range, so it is considered extirpated—although it is not extinct. Extinct, in this context, means individuals of that species no longer exist.

Now, however, modern land use, including roads, communities, fields, and fenced pastures, mean that today’s bison cannot roam and graze as they did prior to this development. As the IUCN report notes:

Bison can best achieve their full potential as an evolving, ecologically interactive species in large populations occupying extensive native landscapes where human influence is minimal and a full suite of natural limiting factors is present. While such conditions remain available in the north of the continent, it is challenging to find extensive landscapes for restoring and sustaining large free-roaming wild bison populations in southern, agriculture-dominated regions. [page 2]

In the final summary, the report concludes:

The next 10-20 years present opportunities for conserving American bison as a wild species and restoring it as an important ecological presence in many North American ecosystems. Taking an ecosystem approach, which puts people and their natural resource use practices at the centre of decision-making, offers a paradigm for balancing the sometimes competing demands of bison conservation, the use of bison and biological diversity by people, and sustaining human communities in areas where there are many resource users combined with important natural values. To achieve ecological restoration at broad scales (large herds roaming across vast landscapes, at numerous locations) will require flexible approaches that can be adapted to a variety of legal and socio-economic conditions. Assembling large landscapes for conservation herds will typically involve several land tenure holders, potentially including public agencies, tribal governments, non-profit private organisations, and for-profit corporations or individual entrepreneurs. Diverse mandates, interests, and incentives will influence how stakeholders choose to manage land and wildlife, including bison. Creative new approaches are needed for forging enduring partnerships among land tenure holders for cooperative undertakings. Strategies may range from top-down government programmes to bottom-up market-based or cultural-based initiatives. Progress towards large-scale restoration will require a much more supportive framework of government policies and significant investment by both public and private sectors. Awareness and substantial public support are necessary at both the local level where restoration occurs, and among national constituencies for whom the bison is an iconic component of North America’s natural and cultural heritage. For ecological restoration of bison to be successful, careful assessment and understanding of biophysical, social, economic, legal, and political conditions are required for planning and implementation. This is particularly true where both community and agency support and involvement are required. This chapter provided guidelines for planning and implementing an ecological restoration project for bison, including feasibility assessment, selection of stock, preparation and release methods, assessing socio-economic and legal requirements, monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. [page 112]

Although viable preservation of the species is the focus of the IUCN report, it also provides a good summary of the past of the American bison in North America, including a review of our understanding of human occupation of the Great Plains. Bison are known archaeologically from the Southeast, and bison trails are commonly believed to have been been incorporated into networks of human foot-trails (which later became the routes of roads and railroads).

Why do you think bison trails would have been used by humans?

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….

The Florida Public Archaeology Network has been established by the Florida legislature to provide, among other things, public outreach. The East Central Region of FPAN has posted online various teacher resources, including PDFs of two books of hands-on archaeology activities that teachers can use. Both are titled Beyond Artifacts….

The link directly to the page where those books can be downloaded is here.

Second call for papers

The Archaeological Society of South Carolina is pleased to Call for Papers for the 36th Annual Conference that will be held on April 9th and 10th 2010. It will be held at USC Columbia in the Business School Auditorium, Room 005. The theme for this year’s conference is Archaeological Sciences. This broad topic was chosen to allow presenters to highlight the diversity of scientific techniques and applications that underlie modern archaeology in their own research and will comprise the first session. A second general session of papers covering archaeological research findings of interest will be presented as well. We encourage and welcome members of the public and professional archaeologists working in the Carolinas or Georgia to submit papers. We recognize that many of the same questions and issues important to South Carolina’s archaeology community cross state borders in our region. 

Deadline and format for submission

We will be accepting submissions for both papers and posters through March 8, 2010. Early submission is encouraged to ensure placement on the schedule. Submissions should include the author(s), title and a brief absract. Please be sure to submit author(s) name(s) as you would like it(them) to appear on the program. The abstract should be no more than 100 words. Please send all submissions to Program Chair Jon Leader by email or call him with questions or comments at 803-576-6560.

Poster awards

Two awards will be given for the first time to the best student poster presentations. The first, $100 in cash and a plaque, will be awarded to the presentation judged “best student poster” by a panel of three judges; the second, a selection of books and a plaque, will be presented to the poster judged “first runner-up” by the panel of judges. The awards will be presented at the Awards Ceremony at the 2010 Annual Meeting.

Keynote speaker

We are very pleased to have Dr. Vincas Steponaitis as our speaker this year. He will be presenting a public lecture on the evening of Friday, April 9th, and a conference paper on the 10th. Dr. Steponaitis is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served as chairman of the board for the Archaeological Conservancy (2003-2007), a national nonprofit organization, and has served as president of the Society for American Archaeology (1997-1999), president of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (1990-1992), editor of the scholarly journal Southeastern Archaeology (1984-1987), and on numerous other professional boards and committees. His archaeological research interests focus on the precolonial Indian cultures of the American South, the development of chiefdoms, and the analysis of ancient ceramics. In addition to numerous articles, his books include Ceramics, Chronology, and Community Patterns: An Archaeological Study at Moundville (Academic Press, 1993), and Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom (co-edited with Vernon J. Knight, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).

Local arrangements are being handled by committee. A catered conference dinner is planned for Saturday evening after the conference ends. The meal will include a vegetarian option. The awards will be made during the meal.

Fees

Conference Registration: $10, Students/Seniors $5
Conference Dinner: $20

Checks should be made payable to the Archaeological Society of South Carolina and reference the ASSC 36th Conference in the memo area. Please send the checks to:

ASSC Annual Conference
ATTN: Helena Ferguson
1321 Pendleton Street
Columbia, SC 29208

The Society for American Archaeology, a national organization with over 7000 members, publishes a newsletter five times each year. The SAA offers that newsletter for free via the Internet. Select the issue you want to read by clicking here.

For issues from 2010 on, when you click on an issue name, its pages appear on a reader, and the issue can also be downloaded as a PDF. For issues prior to 2010, your click will initiate a download.

Perhaps you watched Steve Jobs and other Apple people introduce the iPad on 27 January 2010…. Fans of archaeology might have noted that one of the major demonstrations, of the program Keynote (does a better job of making presentations than the Microsoft program Powerpoint), used the topic “Seven Wonders of the World,” which focused on selected archaeological sites.

Clearly, many people put considerable thought into deciding what to use to demonstrate this new machine.

What does it mean that they chose an archaeological topic to punch their high-profile product introduction?

Here’s the link to watch video-on-demand introducing the iPad….

Picture from Frontispiece of Riparian Lands of the Mississippi River: Past—Present—Prospective, by Frank H. Thompkins (1901, published in New Orleans, available as a free download from Google Books). Picture post-dates de Tocqueville’s trip.

At last, at last, my dear Mama, the signal is given and here we are cruising down the Mississippi, as rapidly as possible under the combined influence of steam and a strong current. We were beginning to despair of ever escaping the wilderness. If you take the trouble to examine your map, you will see that we had reached a pretty pass. In front of us, the Mississippi half frozen and no boats launching; overhead, a Russian sky, pure and frozen. We could have retraced our steps, you say. But that option was fast disappearing. During our sojourn in Memphis, the Tennessee had frozen, and carriages could no longer cross. So there we were, in the middle of a triangle formed by the Mississippi, the Tennessee, and impenetrable backwoods to the south. We might as well have been marooned on a rock in mid-ocean, inhabiting a world made expressly for us, without papers, without news of the rest of mankind, and facing the prospect of a long winter. That is how we spent a week. I must say, however, that except for our anxiety, those days were not disagreeable. We were staying with good people, who did their utmost to ingratiate themselves. Only twenty paces from our house was the edge of the world’s most beautiful forest, a sublime place, picturesque even under snow. We had rifles and plenty of powder and lead. A few miles from the village lived an Indian nation, the Chikasaws; once on their land, we always found a few natives happy to join us in the hunt. Hunting and warring are the sole occupations of the Indian, his pleasures as well. For large game we would have had to go too far afield. Instead, we killed a great many pretty birds of a species unknown in France. We found this highly diverting, though it didn’t do us much credit in the eyes of our allies. I killed red, blue, yellow birds, including parrots with plumage more brilliant than any I had ever seen. That’s how time passed, lightly at any given moment, but with the future weighing upon us.

So wrote the French historian known as Alexis de Tocqueville, in a letter dated 25 December 1831, while he was staying along the Mississippi River waiting for winter to let up so he could continue his trip. He had landed in New York City in May 1831, and had been traveling ever since researching American prisons, along with his supervisor, Gustave de Beaumont. Both worked for as prosecutors for the French government. (This letter has been excerpted in The Hudson Review, volume LXII, no. 3, translated by Frederick Brown, and available here on the web.) De Tocqueville is best known for the two volumes of De la démocratie en Amérique (usually translated as Democracy in America) that were published in 1835 and in 1840.

Toward the end of this excerpt, de Tocqueville describes Native Americans of the Chickasaw tribe (one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, which also included the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole groups; all were officially removed from southeastern North America beginning in 1832, just after de Tocqueville’s visit, but that’s a story for another time/place), and their enjoyment of going hunting. What does he mean? Do all Chickasaws like to hunt? Perhaps de Tocqueville really means that MALE Chickasaws liked to hunt?

There’s another good clue for an archaeologist in this letter that would be difficult to document archaeologically. De Tocqueville writes that large game had been extirpated from around the community where he was trapped by the winter weather. Why was this? Do you think it was due to overhunting? Instead of hunting large game, when he went out nearby, de Tocqueville killed birds. He also describes those birds as very colorful, probably suggesting particular species to any ornithologists knowledgable about this area.

Historical archaeologists have the distinct advantage over their peers who work primarily with prehistoric peoples in that they have historical records that may illuminate the archaeological record. Sometimes, however, the historical archival materials are at odds with archaeological remains.

For example, written records may indicate that a family abstained from alcohol, yet among the foundations of their house, archaeologists may find a trove of bourbon bottles. What is the best way to interpret them? Does their location beneath the house necessarily mean that the family inhabiting the house above consumed their contents? Or, does their location, hidden in the basement, instead suggest secret consumption of alcohol? What additional archaeological data would help refine interpretation of the buried booze bottles?

Quick: what is the only installation built by the United States military during the settling of the interior of the continent to protect Indians from Indians (rather than settlers from Native Americans, or for some other purpose)?

Out in the middle of North America, in what is now the state of Nebraska, near the North Loup River, near the modern community of Elyria, is a Plains infantry outpost called Fort Hartsuff. The outpost was active from 1874–1881. Since some of the major buildings were constructed with concrete-like walls, they have survived to this day. Fort Hartsuff is now a Nebraska State Historical Park.

In short, the Pawnee were an agricultural peoples in the 1850s, growing crops and supplementing their foodstuffs with meat from seasonal bison hunts. Because they were semi-sedentary, they were afflicted more European diseases like cholera and small pox than their nomadic neighbors, the Lakota Sioux. During this period, the Lakota population increased, they gained hunting territory, and harassed the Pawnee.

As Gary Wells notes:

By 1857, the Pawnee were so destitute that they signed the Treaty of Table Creek, giving up rights to all of their land in Nebraska in exchange for a small reservation of thirty miles along the Loup River, fifteen miles wide (present day Nance County), small annual payments and protection from the Lakota, by the U.S. Army.  The U.S. Government did a poor job fulfilling their part of the treaty, as the Civil War diverted money and soldiers away from the west.  Retaliation for the Pawnee against the Lakota finally came in 1864, when the Department of the Platte (district army headquarters) requested Pawnee volunteers to join the Army in their fight against the Sioux and Cheyenne, under the command of Frank North, as the Pawnee Scouts.  Frank had worked at the Pawnee Agency for many years and spoke fluid Pawnee.  He and his brother Luther North led the Pawnee Scouts on numerous engagements, including protecting the workers building the Transcontinental Railroad in Nebraska, and removing the Cheyenne from the Republican Valley in the Campaign of 1869, with General Carr commanding and Buffalo Bill Cody as scout.  During this campaign, Major Frank North was credited with the killing of the Cheyenne Chief Tall Bull, at the Battle of Summit Springs, and honored by the Nebraska Legislature in 1870 for his part in the Campaign.  The Pawnee called him the “Great White Father”.

Few settlers had pushed into the Loup River Valley before 1870, probably due to the proximity of the Pawnee Reservation on the lower Loup.  Even though the Pawnee were relatively harmless, it would have taken real courage for early settlers to travel through their villages, to reach the rich farmland beyond.  That same year, the Paul brothers (J.N. and N.J.) and the North brothers (Frank and Luther) departed from Columbus with a small group of men, and went up the Loup to the forks on a hunting trip.  That trip resulted in dreams of a cattle ranch and the determination to establish a new county called “Howard”.

Once Howard County was formed, it drew new settlers into the Loup Valley, but the Lakota were still using the trail down the Loup River Valleys, to raid the Pawnee on their reservation.  The Norths and the Pauls knew that these new settlers would need to be protected, so a request was sent to General C. C. Auger (Christopher Columbus Auger), commander of the Department of the Platte, in Omaha, to send troops.  The government had been lax on protecting the Pawnee, but with the white settlers in danger, two companies of soldiers were dispatched.

It took a while for Fort Hartsuff to be established. Wells continues:

By early September of 1874, the new permanent fort construction was underway.  It was across the river near the famous trail on present-day Bean Creek.  By December of 1874 some of the new fort’s buildings were complete.  All government supplies, soldiers and tentage had been removed to the new site and Camp Ruggles was soon forgotten to all but a few.

This new permanent fort was not to be made out of wood, but a lime, gravel and cement mixture, resembling today’s concrete.  Rather than transport large amounts of lime from eastern Nebraska, the quartermaster advertised locally for a contractor to supply the lime.  Joseph “Doc” Beebe, a close friend and neighbor of the North family in Columbus, bid and won the contract.  Doc built three lime kilns in the hills east of the North Loup River in northern Howard County (east of present day Cotesfield) and burned chalk-rock, taken form the nearby side-hills, in the kilns, using wood from the surrounding canyons, to produce his quick-lime product. (All three kilns are still visible today.)

On completion of Fort Hartsuff, Doc Beebe started construction of a two-story hotel, using the same construction techniques used at the fort.  The new hotel became known as the “Concrete Hotel” or the “Half-Way House”, as it was on the main supply road, half-way between Fort Hartsuff and the rail line in Grand Island. The eighty-mile trip was too long to travel in one day, so those traveling back and forth would stop at the Half-way House to eat and spend the night.

In mid-December 2009, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the National Park Service is awarding $46.5 million in historic preservation grants to 59 states and U.S. territories.

Let’s face it: $46.5 million is a big pot compared to our household budgets!

Divided among the fifty states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Territories, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, however, that comes out to an average of $788,136 if split evenly among the 59 entities receiving the money.

Georgia’s piece of this historic preservation pie? $902,818. That’s 1.97 percent of the total, and somewhat more than the average award.

Arrow points to Georgia value, when ranked among all states (not all entities receiving funds).

The press release from the Secretary’s office says that the division is “based on a formula that considers the size, population, and number of historic properties of each area.”

According to the press release:

The National Park Service will administer the grants through a fund established under the National Historic Preservation Act. The grants can be used through September of 2011 for historic property inventories, resource protection planning, nominations for the National Register of Historic Places, monitoring Federal historic preservation requirements, technical assistance for those seeking to preserve and protect historic resources, assisting local government preservation programs, and acquisition or development of historic properties.

The press release lists what each state and other entities will receive. The list is titled “Fiscal Year 2010 Historic Preservation Fund Apportionment to States under P.L. 111-88.”

The total received by the states will be $42,826,949, or 92.1 percent of the total. That’s an average of $856,539 for each of the fifty states. Georgia’s portion, $902,818, is slightly above the state average, then. Twenty-one states received more than the average, and none received less than $500,000.

Nine states will receive more than a million dollars; they are California ($1,476,028), New York ($1,344,989), Texas ($1,319,232), Pennsylvania ($1,167,552), Illinois ($1,131,366), Michigan ($1,101,370), Ohio ($1,093,803), Florida ($1,021,027), and Alaska ($1,002,486). Note that all are large in land area (and, except for Alaska, have large populations), and thus may be considered to have more resources than small states. These nine states will receive 22.92 percent of the total grants, and 24.89 percent of the total given to the states. When the grants to these nine states are subtracted from the total, the other fifty entities (that is 41 states and nine non-states) divide $35,842,147, for an average of just under $716,843.

Five states will receive less than $650,000. All are small in land area. They are New Hampshire ($616,382), Rhode Island ($575,378), Hawaii ($571,458), Vermont ($570,562), and Delaware ($525,518).

Generally, the lowest amount went to the nine non-states. They received a total of $3,673,051 and an average of $408,117. Puerto Rico ($640,462) and the District of Columbia ($522,668) were the only non-state entities receiving more than $500,000.

The SGA members know that the Department of the Interior is responsible for many, many historical and archaeological resources. As Secretary Salazar is quoted in the press release:

Preserving and celebrating our nation’s rich history is a vital part of the Department of the Interior’s mission. These grants from the Historic Preservation Fund will assist state, tribal and local governments in telling their stories while providing both cultural and economic benefits to their communities and to the nation as a whole.

Comments? Log in and leave yours….

Detail from map by Jonathan Corum, published in the New York Times here.

The phrase “Old Europe” refers to Neolithic Europe, or the portions of the European continent inhabited by people who made pottery and lived in small villages, ate domesticated and wild plant foods, between about 7000 BC and around 1500 BC (when the Bronze Age began in parts of Europe).

Data on these ancient peoples is sketchy, in part because their populations were relatively low, and in part because this whole region has had many settlements and sometimes intensive land use, which damaged and sometimes obliterated the ancient, Neolithic remains.

The word Neolithic translates as New Stone Age, and was originally used to denote peoples who used ground stone tools instead of only those stone tools made through percussion techniques. In the context of early Europe, Neolithic refers to the first agriculturalists who occupied the area. Many archaeologists believe their ancestors emmigrated into the area from the Near East (aka the Levant), bringing both their knowledge of farming and their Indo-European languages with them.

In a recent article dated 30 November 2009 in the New York Times discussing a recent exhibit at New York University called “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” John Noble Wilford notes:

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

Actually, most archaeologists use the phrase Neolithic Europe, rather than “Old Europe.” The Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) coined the term “Old Europe.” Gimbutas theorized that the people native to Old Europe, the non-agriculturalists, had a goddess-centric belief system and were peaceful peoples. Those arriving from the Levant had a patriarchal and hierarchical society, and, she said, the men were warriors. Her interpretation is based in part on what she saw as the absence of fortified settlements prior to the arrival of the invading groups.

Whatever term you use and whatever interpretation you follow, some artifacts from Neolithic Europe required careful craftsmanship to manufacture. Wilford continues:

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition’s guest curator, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world” and was developing “many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”

Wilford also notes:

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

For more information, here’s a link to the exhibit catalog.

Food for thought

Does the terminology you use, for example Old Europe instead of Neolithic Europe, telegraph certain meanings to your audience? Is this good or bad?

Suggested reading

These are all recent single-author volumes, which tend to be more comprehensive than edited volumes. They tend to have an academic style and vocabulary.

Anthony, David W.
2007 The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Beckwith, Christopher I.
2009 Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Bernstein, William J.
2008 A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York.

Earle, Timothy K.
2002 Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of Political Economies. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado.

Harding, A.F.
2000 European Societies in the Bronze Age. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Kristiansen, Kristian
1998 Europe before History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Maisels, Charles Keith
1999 Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India, and China. Routledge, New York.

The Savannah River Archaeological Research Program is seeking information about prehistoric metavolcanic stone quarries in the Carolina Slate Belt Region in South Carolina. As this map shows, the Carolina Slate Belt Region is prominent in the Carolinas, and extends southward into Georgia.

For more information or to convey information about quarry locations, call Christopher R. Moore at 803.725.5227, or email him by clicking here.

Download an announcement with more information by clicking here.

Illustration by Barry Roal Carlsen, provided by University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Did people kill off Pleistocene megafauna in North America, or were those species done in by climate shifts? Or…?

This question is still not answered unambiguously.

However, research by Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin—Madison shows that neither scenarios is probable based on fossil pollen, charcoal and dung fungus spores that date to just after the ice retreated. Neither the mass extinction model, based on heavy hunting, nor simple climate and thus habitat change matches the data she and colleagues Stephen T. Jackson (University of Wyoming), Katherine B. Lininger (University of Wisconsin—Madison), and Guy S. Robinson (Fordham University) have marshalled.

According to Terry Devitt’s story (19 November 2009) on the University of Wisconsin—Madison website:

The decline of North America’s signature ice age mammals was a gradual process, the Wisconsin researchers explain, taking about 1,000 years. The decline in the huge numbers of ice age animals is preserved in the fossil record when the fungal spores disappear from the record altogether: “About 13.8 thousand years ago, the number of spores drops dramatically. They’re barely in the record anymore,” Gill explains.

Devitt continues:

While both the extinction of North America’s ice age megafauna and the sweeping change to the landscape are well-documented phenomena, there was, until now, no detailed chronology of the events that remade the continent’s biological communities beginning about 14.8 thousand years ago. Establishing that the disappearance of mammoths, giant beavers, ground sloths and other large animals preceded the massive change in plant communities, promises scientists critical new insight into the dynamics of extinction and its pervasive influence on a given landscape.

Archaeologists are often confronted with this situation: how do we get data on human behavior or the human situation, when we don’t have it directly from the archaeological record of human occupations? This research by Gill and her colleagues shows one solution developed to help understand the ecological situation in interior North America early in human occupation of the continent.

Stand by for more data….

View east down Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester Street, from Google Earth, a free downloadable program.

If you want to have coffee in an historic eighteenth century coffeehouse, you can now do so! The drinks that are offered are tea, chocolate, and, of course, coffee!

R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse was dedicated at Colonial Williamsburg on the afternoon of Friday, November 20th, 2009. The present building is rebuilt from the ground up. The original structure is only known from archaeological and archival data. Notes the Colonial Williamsburg website and press release:

Archaeological evidence recovered from the coffeehouse site reflects the importance of fine dining as well as the consumption of tea, coffee and chocolate. Charlton offered an epicurean menu that included fish, shellfish, all kinds of meat and game, even peacock. Besides hot beverages, patrons could choose from a section of wines, beer and spirits. A fragment of a Cherokee pipe suggests the presence of Indians who may have been part of an official delegation. Other finds include a number of wig curlers, indicating Richard Charlton’s connection to the wig-making business, and several bones from an anatomical skeleton that was likely used in scientific presentations.

R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse is built on its original foundations with 18th-century construction techniques and in compliance with modern building codes. The finished reconstruction will appear as close to the original structure as historical, archaeological and architectural evidence permits. It incorporates substantial portions of the building’s original brick foundations. The one-and-a-half-story framed portion of the building—35 feet square—is constructed of hand-sawn timber framing covered with cypress weatherboards and white cedar roof shingles. A central brick chimney allows two of the three first floor rooms to have functional fireplaces, while in the cellar a massive hearth is the central feature of the reconstructed kitchen. Research indicates that at least two of three first floor rooms were used for serving food and beverages which were prepared in the cellar. Other rooms on the first and second floors may have been rented or used for lodging or living quarters.

The general history page of the Colonial Williamsburg website notes:

Williamsburg was the thriving capital of Virginia when the dream of American freedom and independence was taking shape and the colony was a rich and powerful land stretching west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes. For 81 formative years, from 1699 to 1780, Williamsburg was the political, cultural, and educational center of what was then the largest, most populous, and most influential of the American colonies. It was here that the fundamental concepts of our republic—responsible leadership, a sense of public service, self-government, and individual liberty—were nurtured under the leadership of patriots such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Peyton Randolph.

Tickets to Colonial Williamsburg start at $36 for adults, so your visit to R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse will not be inexpensive, but where else can you enjoy am eighteenth-century style coffeehouse!

Maps, a video of the coffeehouse, and an online tour can also be found at the Colonial Williamsburg website.

All photos used in this story are copyright 2009 by Colonial Williamsburg, and were obtained from their website.

Early European settlers were impressed by the productivity and sustainability of Native American agriculture in the Northeast. Today, as farmers begin to come to grips with the consequences of modern, mechanized agriculture, i.e., soil compaction, erosion, the run-off of fertilizers and top soil, and the cost of petro-chemicals to boost production, agronomists and some Native Americans are revisiting the techniques of 300 years ago to test their advantages.

This is how David J. Minderhout and Andrea T. Franz begin their article, “Native American Horticulture in the Northeast,” published in the Spring 2009 General Anthropology Bulletin of the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association, available here (currently free from Wiley InterScience).

They briefly summarize archaeologists’ current understanding of prehistoric agriculture and food preparation in Northeastern North America, with an eye to modern practices and our current food production situation. They note, for example, that, “Research also shows that intercropping, i.e., growing several crops in the same field, produces a diverse plant environment that is more resistant to drought and attacks by pests and plant diseases.”

One message that can be drawn from the information these authors present is that pre-modern innovations, methods, and techniques can provide us with important lessons relevant to the present.

The American Anthropological Association was founded in 1902 and “is the world’s largest organization of individuals interested in anthropology,” according to their website. Membership is approximately 10,000, with annual meetings attended by around 5000 individuals.

Image is a terrain map of Iraq from Google Maps.

Staff Sgt. Luke Koladish, 114th Public Affairs Detachment, writes that Sgt. Ronald Peters, a geospatial analyst whose hometown is Fort Lewis, Washington, with Multi-National Corps – Iraq C-7, has been mapping the archaeological sites of Iraq in his spare time. The article was published online on the Operation Iraqi Freedom’s official website of the Multi-National Force—Iraq on October 27th (2009).

Writes Koladish:

“Back in June, one of the engineers working on future operations wanted to see all the archeological sites in Iraq,” Peters recalled. “Everybody knows this is the cradle of civilization. There’s Babylon, Ur, some pretty famous archeological sites in Iraq.”

As bases were closed and troops withdrew from cities, the existing bases needed to expand, without infringing on historical sites.

Although the country is estimated to have some 12,000 archaeological sites, Peters has mapped only 800.

Closes Koladish:

Peter’s ongoing effort to preserve Iraq’s archeological sites is now part of the U.S. military’s diligence in caring for the ancient sites and history of the Iraqi people as U.S. forces withdraw from the country.

Read Koladish’s full article by clicking here.

Transportation networks, and the potential for social connectivity across landmasses and via waterways and along coastlines is worth pondering as part of reconstructing an understanding of our human past that emphasizes continuity—social, political, technological, etc.—rather than a series of major events. Barry Cunliffe’s Europe between the Oceans: 9000 BC to AD 1000 (Yale University Press, 2008) is not inexpensive—due in part to its wonderful visuals—but it is worth tracking down as an example of this approach. Cunliffe makes the point repeatedly as he traces Europe’s past that this was not a large area, nor was it trackless. He views Europe’s landmass as a peninsula, which could be crossed, despite a few mountainous zones, by following river systems, or by circumnavigating the landmass. Cunliffe writes:

In Europe, distances are not great and knowledge could spread rapidly. The networks of communication pulsated with the flow of information—stories of exotic lands and people, technological know-how, systems of values and beliefs. At the notes where the exchanges took place…, the excitement of the new would have been palpable. Even the most remote communities would not have been totally immune from the flow of information. So it was that the disparate peoples of Europe, from the most innovative to the most conservative, became enmeshed in networks of contact that inexorably drove change. (page 29)

As reviewer Benjamin Schwarz noted in The Atlantic:

Geography forms the essential basis of Cunliffe’s history. The waters encircling Europe, the transpeninsular rivers that penetrated it, and its topography, currents, tides, and seasonal wind patterns all determined millennia-old sailing routes, and thus the goods and beliefs transported along them. From Cunliffe’s perspective, even the Roman Empire was just an interlude, and perhaps its main achievement was to institutionalize through its ports, roads, and market centers Europe-wide networks of exchange that had been operating since the Middle Stone Age.

By stressing historical continuity and adroitly employing a wide-ranging archaeological record to highlight mobility and interconnectedness, Cunliffe draws a startling picture. Europe, he demonstrates, was geographically and culturally merely “the western excrescence of the continent of Asia.” His archaeological and topographic analysis shows how for thousands of years the steppe lands linked central Asia to the Great Hungarian Plain, thus providing “easy access” from China to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a corridor for trade and migration, starting with nomadic groups deep in prehistory and continuing through the preclassical, classical, medieval, and early modern eras with great hordes of Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Moguls, and Tatars. Knowledge of, for example, the chariot seems to have moved from the Russian forest steppe (the earliest known examples date to 2800 B.C.) to the Carpathian basin in Hungary and, by the 16th century B.C., to Mycenaean Greece and Sweden. Sarmatian horsemen, originally from central Asia, served in northern England as mercenaries in the Roman army.

The core of the European peninsula, without northern Scandinavia.

The Caribbean area, including southern North America and Central America.

These two satellite views are screen-grabs from Google Earth (downloadable for free), and are at the same scale; north is “up” on both. Note how the maritime edges of Europe provide a different transportation scenario compared to continental North America. Clearly, the Arctic, the Great Lakes region, and the circum-Caribbean area are the only parts of North America with the topographic potential for similar maritime transportation networks.

Yet, summaries of the prehistory of the Southeast rarely mention much about circum-Caribbean transportation and exchange networks. Is this because data for them are scanty? Is it due to the fractured modern political boundaries of the region? Is it because such exchange networks just didn’t exist? Or…?

Click here to read The Atlantic review by Benjamin Schwarz, published in December 2008.

Click here to read about Sir Barry Cunliffe on Wikipedia.

Oblique view of Moundville facing south, with the Black Warrior River in the foreground, from Google Earth.

John H. Blitz doesn’t mince words. Answering the question who built the mounds at the famous Mississippian settlement next to the Black Warrior River at Moundville, Alabama, Blitz writes: “We don’t know” (page 4).

In a slim volume (116 pages; also called a “pocket guide”) simply titled “Moundville” (University of Alabama Press, 2008), Blitz, an archaeologist on the faculty of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, summarizes “the story of Moundville and the people who once lived there” (page 6). Liberally illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, this book is easy to read yet chock-full of information.

Blitz tells both the story of research at the site and the developing understanding of the Mississippian period, and the role of the Moundville community in the local area, and in the Mississippian Southeast.

Moundville’s first substantial occupation began in approximately AD 1120. Residents “lived in small one-room houses dispersed across the natural terrace above the river” (page 61). Moundville was one of many settlements at this time that were built around civic-ceremonial mounds. At Moundville, people built two non-residential raised areas archaeologists call platforms, because they seem to have been constructed as a special place to erect special buildings.

Around AD 1200 Moundville’s resident population increased dramatically, and people constructed more monumental architecture—a complex with mounds, a large plaza or open area lacking buildings, and an encircling palisade wall, and many new houses. The population change is too much to have been a natural demographic increase; instead, people must have immigrated to the community. Perhaps people were attracted by the prospect of living in a palisaded (essentially fortified) settlement, where residents felt safer. Indeed, Blitz says (page 65) about a thousand people lived within the palisaded area, and Moundville was probably the political and ritual capital of the region.

By shortly after AD 1300, that is, less one hundred years later, or only a few generations, Moundville’s population had decreased and it had become “a sparsely populated ceremonial center” (page 66). People moved out for reasons archaeologists have yet to identify. Perhaps there were shortages in important resources, like firewood and game. Perhaps people felt safer so they moved away from the palisaded area. Perhaps leaders made lower-ranked people leave. “Whatever the case,” Blitz writes on page 68, “Moundville became a place of pilgrimage, ceremonies, and funerals.” Moundville was not a ghost town (page 68); houses in the northern part of the settlement continued to be occupied, and graves with fancy highly crafted burial goods continued to be created.

After AD 1450, Moundville gradually declined in population and funerary activity diminished. Burials from this period lack the fancy grave goods that characterized those of the previous period. Although activities at Moundville declined, other nearby civic-ceremonial settlements also with mounds continued to be occupied and important (page 70). Some parts of southeastern North America suffered extensive drought in the 1400s, which could have affected residents of Moundville and the Moundville region. Further, in 1540, Hernando de Soto and his army passed through small villages in this area, although there’s not evidence they came to Moundville itself. The Spanish brought Old World diseases that devastated Native American populations, and “Moundville was abandoned by 1600, if not before” (page 71).

Researchers continue moderate excavations at Moundville, and also reanalyze collections stored there. Continued research across the Southeast also amplify our understanding of this dramatic settlement, now the 320-acre Moundville Archaeological Park.

The summary in this review just skims the surface of the detailed material Blitz presents. Some readers may find his fictional story about what it might have been like to live at Moundville the most thought-provoking section of this small yet worthwhile publication (pages 85–97).

Read about Moundville in the online Encyclopedia of Alabama here.

On the highest hill in Astoria, Oregon, near the mouth of the Columbia River, stands a 125-foot tall column, patterned after Trajan’s Column in Rome. The exterior of both have a series of carved scenes winding around and up the column. The Astoria Column was built in 1926, and has an interior stairway of over 160 steps, and observation deck near the top.

The Astoria Column has fourteen different scenes carved by Italian immigrant artist Attilo Pusterla. They are in temporal order, and begin at the base of the column and wind upward. However, by the time of the dedication of the monument in July 1926, only a portion of the sgraffito bas-relief carved scenes were complete. The now-complete scenes, if unwound, would extend for over 500 feet.

The carvings quickly began to deteriorate in this location, exposed to storms from the Pacific and the freeze-thaw of winter. It was only in the mid-1990s, with the assistance of conservators from J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, that the column’s art was better stabilized.

Even a cursory examination of cross-cultural data indicates that around the globe, in many societies, peoples with many belief systems have built structures important to them on high places. In addition, the structures are often unusually tall when compared to residential buildings. Indeed, important buildings are often tall, large, or both.

Why do you think this is so?

Website of Friends of the Astoria Column.

Wikipedia entry on Trajan’s Column.

Quick: where in the world is the largest concentration of Bronze Age graves?

Read on….

Bahrain is a large island in a shallow bay on the west side of the Persian Gulf called the Gulf of Bahrain. Bahrain’s modern residents can cross a series of causeways that link the island to Saudia Arabia to the west. Most of the island is relatively low-lying, flat, and arid.

Due to the petroleum industry, the country of Bahrain has had a booming economy over the last generation or so. The country also has a strong banking sector. Accompanying population growth has meant the expansion of suburban neighborhoods westward from the capital of Manama, in the northeast part of Bahrain.

New York Times photograph by Shawn Baldwin, captioned “Hundreds of burial mounds near the village of A’ali in Bahrain. The country has the world’s heaviest concentration of graves dating from the Bronze Age.”

This expansion and development threatens a landscape peppered with Bronze Age burial mounds. In fact, in an article published by the New York Times on September 17, 2009, author Michael Slackman says this is “the heaviest concentration of graves dating from the Bronze Age found anywhere in the world.” At present, some 35 areas are set aside to preserve clusters of mounds. Slackman writes:

Most of the graves contain a death chamber shaped like a boot on its side. The body was placed in the fetal position while personal items, ceramic pots, personal seals and knives were stored in the toe. The value of the graves is not, necessarily, in what they contain but in what they tell about the lives, values and funerary practices of an ancient civilization.

Google Earth screen grab of one of A’ali’s larger mound fields, now split by a divided highway.

The community of A’ali (also spelled Aali and Ali) is currently favored by middle-class families building new homes on the outskirts of suburban Manama. In UNESCO World Heritage materials online:

The Ali mound field is a large mound field of primarily Late Type divided into two parts by a north-south running highway. At the north end of the burial mound field is a group of huge mounds, called “Royal Mounds”, which have during the growth of the village become part of its urban fabric, so that the immediate neighbourhood of these mounds has been utilized for habitation and small industries, e.g. pottery and lime production.

Historically, Bahrain “is believed to have been the capital of Dilmun, which lay along a trade route linking the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia,” Slackman writes. In fact, Dilmun’s capital may have been what is now the modern community of A’ali, southwest of Manama. Certainly, long-distance trading networks developed early and were extensive throughout this region. Archaeological finds from many locations along the Persian Gulf coast indicate the ongoing presence of Bronze Age merchant ships.

Preservationists have been working with UNESCO to make the mound fields a World Heritage Site, so far without success. Online UNESCO materials note:

The Burial Ensembles of Dilmun and Tylos are the expression of funerary practices of these civilizations which flourished in Bahrain from the mid 3rd millennium B.C. till the mid 1st millennium A.D. and which played essential roles in the organization of trade between Mesopotamia, South Arabia and the Indian subcontinent.

Bahrain’s Gulf Daily News published an article dated August 23, 2009, by Mohammed al A’ Ali. He reported on the clash between the forces for development and those pushing for preservation:

Historic burial mounds in a Bahraini village, which the government hoped to have recognised as a World Heritage Site, will be bulldozed to make way for a new road, houses and a public park. Councillors have successfully argued that 62 mounds in Buri, which date back as far as 4,000 years, were standing in the way of development. However, heritage chiefs are insisting on excavating the area, near Hamad Town, before allowing the bulldozers in.

That’s the story from a distant part of the world.

How about your area? What archaeological remains are threatened near your house or neighborhood? What preservation efforts are underway, if any? Comments?

The prehistoric tool called a hand axe is large, and has a sharpened edge all the way around it. The sharpening is on both sides, so it’s a biface. It is found in the Old World and not in the New World.

The Acheulean is a stone tool industry characterized by a particular style of tool-making. Acheulean-style tools are known from across Africa and much of West Asia, and date from approximately 1.65 million years ago to as recent as about 100,000 years ago. The earliest dates for Acheulean tools are from Kenya, in West Africa. The earliest dates for Acheulean artifacts and sites in Europe are much later than the African and Asian dates.

However, Gary R. Scott and Luis Gibert of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California report paleomagnetic dates for two sites with Acheulean artifacts in southeast Spain are much earlier than previously known. A New York Times article by Henry Fountain dated 2 September 2009 reports that these researchers obtained dates of about 760,000 and 900,000 years old for the sites of Solano del Zamborino and Estrecho del Quípar, in Spain. Samples from the layers with the artifacts and those above and below the artifacts indicates that the artifacts date approximately to the time of the last geomagnetic reversal. That reversal has been dated to approximately 780,000 years ago.

Spain is, of course, on the Iberian Peninsula, which today is separated from northern Africa by the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow body of water that is just under nine miles wide.

So, the question becomes: did the makers of Acheulean tools enter the Iberian Peninsula from the south—that is, from Africa directly—or from the east, following the northern Mediterranean coastline? Fountain writes:

“The question is, which route did they follow?” he said. Rather than coming through the Middle East and then westward, Dr. Gibert said he is convinced they came across at Gibraltar. “We think the Gibraltar straits were a permeable barrier,” he said. “It’s a provocative interpretation, but I think there is enough information to support it.”

What do you think?

NOTE: Scott and Gibert published their original report in Nature. The article is not free, but here’s the abstract:

Stone tools are durable reminders of the activities, skills and customs of early humans, and have distinctive morphologies that reflect the development of technological skills during the Pleistocene epoch. In Africa, large cutting tools (hand-axes and bifacial chopping tools) became part of Palaeolithic technology during the Early Pleistocene (1.5 Myr ago). However, in Europe this change had not been documented until the Middle Pleistocene (<0.5 Myr ago). Here we report dates for two western Mediterranean hand-axe sites that are nearly twice the age of the supposed earliest Acheulian in western Europe. Palaeomagnetic analysis of these two sites in southeastern Spain found reverse polarity magnetozones, showing that hand-axes were already in Europe as early as 0.9 Myr ago. This expanded antiquity for European hand-axe culture supports a wide geographic distribution of Palaeolithic bifacial technology outside of Africa during the Early Pleistocene.

Satellite view of the Poverty Point site, from Google Earth. North is to the right in this screen grab.

Poverty Point is a famous prehistoric mound and village site in far northeast Louisiana, along a terrace adjacent to a tributary of the Mississippi River now called Bayou Marçon. The most dramatic earthen structures are a series of broken concentric arcs; however, several more traditionally shaped circular/rectangular mounds predate the arc-shaped earthworks. The arcs “face” east, or toward the rising sun. In the photo above, east is to the bottom of the image.

This summer (2009), the site, a State Park, hosted a research team lead by Diana Greenlee, of the Department of Geosciences at University of Louisiana at Monroe. According to the online news website thenewstar.com of Monroe, Greenlee and ULM students undertook excavations in the central plaza area to enable them to better understand buried circular features. Greenlee says that they can now date each of the four circles they tested. “We were able to establish that the different magnetic characteristics of the circles in the plaza correspond to different kinds of constructions,” she said, according to thenewstar.com article.

The Poverty Point are dated to the Terminal Archaic, approximately 1650–700 BC. Artifacts from the site include stone tools and other objects that came from afar, so the occupants of the site had access to a long-distance trading network, or traveled far themselves to bring these special objects back home.

The Louisiana park website for Poverty Point includes the text of a 1996 (second edition) volume on the site called “Poverty Point: A Terminal Archaic Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley” by Jon L. Gibson. The text has been divided for easier loading and reading:

The Society for American Archaeology continues to monitor legislative actions, especially at the Federal level. In mid-June, the Society submitted a letter to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests regarding S. 409, Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act of 2009, also known as the Apache Leap Conveyance bill.

The letter says that the bill:

would direct the Department of Agriculture to accept certain parcels of non-federal land in five counties in Arizona from Resolution Copper in exchange for federal land in Pinal County, Arizona, including Apache Leap and the Oak Flat Campground area, the latter in which mining activity is prohibited. It is our understanding that under the legislation Resolution Copper could then conduct mineral exploration and “block-cave” extraction activities beneath the surface of the Oak Flat and Apache Leap areas.

These lands include known archaeological sites and resources, as well as places significant to several Native American tribes. Additional, undiscovered sites are also likely to be present.

Block-cave mining is a technique where underground extraction is conducted such that surface materials “fall in” because the materials below them have been removed (essentially creating “sinkholes”). This kind of action would destroy and disturb archaeological remains.

The archaeological resources are now protected by numerous federal statutes, including the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and others. Transferral of the land would remove those protections, and has raised the concern of the SAA.

Thus, SAA recommends increased protections and that tribal stakeholders be allowed to continue traditional acorn gathering unimpeded by mineral extraction and extraction.

S. 409 is sponsored by Senator Jon Kyle of Arizona, and co-sponsored by John McCain, also of Arizona. Both Senators are Republicans.

Download a copy of the SAA’s letter from this webpage. It’s called “SAA Testimony on S. 409, the Apache Leap Conveyance bill,” and is dated June 17, 2009.

The SAA was founded in 1934 and has over 7000 members from all fifty states, and nations around the world.

Information about Subcommittee action on the bill is here. Information on the Senate bill is here. The related House bill is H.R. 2509, with four co-sponsors, all Arizona Representatives. Read about the House bill here.

In the 1820s, a syllabary of the Cherokee language became widely used. It’s inventor had a birth name of George Gist (or Guess), but by this time went by a Cherokee name pronounced something like Sikwayi or Sogwali, although it is commonly spelled Sequoyah.

John Noble Wilford, in the 22 June New York Times, reports that archaeologist Kenneth B. Tankersley, of the University of Cincinnati, has found fifteen identifiable characters from the syllabary carved into the wall of a cave in southeast Kentucky. Apparently, Sequoyah made several visits to the region, and spent time in the caves seeking inspiration.

These may be the earliest known examples of the syllabary, which Sequoyah may still have been developing. This written language is known as a syllabary because the symbols (analogous to the letters we use in English) represent syllables, not individual sounds. Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary has 85 characters.

Read Wilford’s New York Times article “Carvings From Cherokee Script’s Dawn” here.

Read Ted Wadley’s article on Sequoyah in the New Georgia Encyclopedia online here.

Read the Wikipedia entry on the Cherokee syllabary here.

Sequoyah image courtesy WikiMedia Commons, here.

In October 2008 I visited a circular Indian mound on the south bank of the Kanawha River, in South Charleston, West Virginia. The mound is right downtown and is the focus of the central municipal park. It is commonly called the Criel Mound.

According to signs near the mound, the Smithsonian Institution excavated the mound in 1883-84, and found thirteen human skeletons. This site was surrounded by a village on a terrace above the river’s floodplain. Houses were scattered for miles up and down the river. Nearby in the Kanawha Valley were other settlement clusters that also had mounds.

Based on artifacts the Smithsonian excavators found, the bodies in the mound were people dating to the Early Woodland period. Archaeologists call peoples who made and used these artifacts Adena culture. Sites with Adena complex artifacts are found across central and southern Ohio, as well as West Virginia, and east into Pennsylvania and New York, and west into Indiana.

The city is doing a pretty good job of preserving the mound by keeping trees from growing on the slopes or moundtop and keeping it from eroding, although two stairways have been carved into the mound’s flanks and trash cans are kept on top of the mound. However, the prehistoric context of the mound as part of a complex of civic-ceremonial buildings and open (plaza) areas is now mostly destroyed. The mound is encroached upon by a highway along the north side, a car dealership to the west, and the modern city to the south.

Editor’s Note

Back in late March 2009, GAAS and SGA member Dick Brunelle issued a challenge to thesga.org readers. He had read a January Weekly Ponder on a Copeland-Inglis brick found in an Atlanta brick street, and responded by asking who made the brick he had photographed at Hills and Dales, the Callaway family home in LaGrange, which had “LACLEDE KING” stamped on it. As a tease, he noted: The brick is more closely related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition than it is to covered bridges in Georgia. Member Jim D’Angelo was the only one to log in and comment on these brick controversies, among other things noting that he has a biography of John Randolph Copeland (1863-1935), partner in Copeland-Inglis Brick company. Now, Mr. Brunelle reveals the whoe story behind that enigmatic brick….

The answer…

Laclede Fire Brick Company as it appeared in 1854. On the hill behind the plant, can be seen the old Sublette mansion and nearby buildings of the sulphur springs resort. Clay was mined between the plant and the mansion.

The Birthplace of the Laclede King Brick

Bridge builder Horace King practiced his craft up and down the Chattahoochee River before and after his emancipation from slavery. The Townsend Truss structures he specialized in building required solid piers of durable material. Knowing he headed a family enterprise, brick making did not seem beyond possibility for this one time resident of LaGrange, Georgia.

At least, this is what I thought when I spotted the Laclede King brick at the beautiful estate of Hills and Dales in LaGrange. However, a search of Horace King family members did not come up with anyone named Laclede. Casting my net over the Internet, I fished up one Pierre Laclede Liquest.

We find that this enterprising man, a native of France, came to New Orleans in 1755. Soon, he dropped the Pierre from his name and his associates dropped the Liquest. This sort of name dropping was common among the early French in Louisiana. Laclede married an unattached woman in New Orleans, who was also enterprising and had accumulated money trading furs and other goods. She had previously been married to Auguste Rene Chouteau, and her son Auguste was now Laclede’s stepson. To further complicate an already confusing family relationship, stepson Auguste Chouteau had a half brother named Pierre. Some surmise he was a son of Laclede, but he was called Pierre Chouteau.

Laclede supposedly obtained trading rights from the last French governor for all the territory along the Missouri River. He and his stepson Auguste Chouteau established a trading post that Laclede named St Louis in April 1764 in honor of King Louis IX. Between the time he first set foot there, at the end of 1763, and the time of his death in 1788, Laclede had built up his name enough to bequeath it to things both material and political. As we now suspect, this includes bricks.

But, how can the name on our brick be close to Lewis and Clark? This clue was mainly intended to get the ponderer in the correct geographical area. However, both Chouteaus could not get any closer to William Clark than they did in September of 1797. Clark had been across the river trying to gather information to help out his older brother George Rogers Clark, who was in deep doo-doo for spending too much government money embarrassing the British while venturing into their territory.

Feeling the urge to party, William went to St Louis to scope out the town. There, he had a ball (literally) at Pierre Chouteau’s place with “all the fine girls and buckish Gentleman.” Now that they were drinking buddies, Clark would not forget his new friends when he came back across the river years later with Meriwether Lewis. The Spanish governor would not allow the Corps of Discovery to come ashore, but did accept a courtesy visit from Clark, who used the occasion to affirm his friendship in an aside with Auguste Chouteau. Meriwether Lewis used what influence he had to get Pierre Chouteau appointed Agent of Indian Affairs for Upper Louisiana in 1804.

The Chouteau brothers had considerable economic and political clout to go with their immense knowledge of the country and inhabitants of the Missouri and points west. It would take all of this to compete with the companies and political entities trying to control trade with the Indian nations. In turn, the Chouteau brothers made alliances with groups and individuals they deemed most capable to meet the challenges. One of these was William L. Sublette, previously a competitor. He became “their man on the ground” to deal with the most dangerous situations. Bill Sublette used shrewd strategy and good business ability, along with superior frontier skills, to stay alive and come out ahead.

After he gave up mountain man life, it would be Bill who would become owner of the ground that would one day yield the clay for our Laclede brick. Surprisingly, Bill aspired to create his own little utopia close to the city of St Louis, rather than live in Big Sky country. He chose a pleasing valley with a sulphur spring and “a river runs through it.” The “clear crystal stream” was called “River Des Peres”. This piece of property just happened to once belong to the husband of Auguste and Pierre’s sister Victoire Chouteau, Charles Gratiot, who had received it in a Spanish land grant of about 8000 acres.

In 1835, Bill had several log cabins and a large stone manor built on his 779 acre arcadia sanctuary. Sublette immediately put into play a gentleman farmer economy; exploiting natural resources of the property. Along with agricultural, livestock, and lumbering operations, mining of coal and clay was started. As it turned out, the clay was found to be the best in the country for making firebrick.

Gratiot’s son Paul had a fire brick kiln as early as 1837. We do not know, however, if Bill Sublette himself did anything but mine the clay. Soon, Bill’s arcadia had a menagerie of Wild West animals and a sulphur springs health resort for 60 boarders. Sadly, the healing waters did not restore health to Bill during an illness; so, he sought help in the East, but died in a Pittsburg, Pennsylvania hotel during his travels, on July 23, 1845.

William L. Sublette’s earthly remains were brought from Pittsburg and interred on his estate.

Soon, another utopia seeker was on the move in the person of Etienne Cabet. A French experimenter in communal living, he coined the word communisme; which became communism. Called the Icarian Movement, he lead his followers to found a colony in America; first in the Texas Red River Valley, then to the recently vacated haven of Brigham Young in Nauvoo, Illinois. Alas, Arcadia was not found there. The fragmented Icarians that still followed Cabet moved on to St Louis; but Cabet died at the end of 1856.

The remaining Icarians struggled on and in two years bought Sublette’s place, which was then on the block. Ironically, unhealthy conditions at the health resort were one reason that the colony to disbanded. Even more ironic, Bill Sublette’s mortal remains could not stay because of the demand for clay around the cemetery that contained them. Forced out at the point of a shovel, Bill’s remains were moved to Bellefontaine Cemetery in St Louis city in 1868.

Resting on 80 acres of land close by, Laclede Fire Brick Manufacturing Company was inhaling clay from the old Sublette Estate and exhaling an array of brick products. Thus, neither William Sublette nor Etienne Cabet found a final resting place in that place first called Sulphur Springs, then Cheltenham, and finally Dogtown.

However, one brick made from the clay of that place rests in the garden walk of a little arcadia created by the Callaway family in LaGrange, Georgia, where it proclaims to all that take notice: Laclede Brick is King!

Ponder, for a moment, this brick.

When I saw it in the garden walk at Hills and Dales, the Callaway family home that was built on an old plantation property in LaGrange. I guessed it to be made by a family member of a famous craftsman who once lived in LaGrange.

Hint: Expect the unexpected.

Another hint: The brick is more closely related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, than it is to covered bridges in Georgia.

Editor’s note: SGA and GAAS member Dick Brunelle sent this to me after reading about this brick I saw in an Atlanta street. Comments are enabled so you can submit your hypothesis/guess.

Fascade of Callaway family home, Hills and Dales.

Give up? Read the answer here; it’s a fascinating story….

David Macaulay is an author and illustrator who has written many interesting books. One of my favorites is Motel of the Mysteries, published in 1979 by Houghton Mifflin (Boston). The book is now out of print, so I always look for a copy at yard sales and flea markets—and every once in a while I’m lucky enough to find one!

The publisher’s blurb about Motel says:

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson’s incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

Thus, Macaulay imagines being an adventurer in the future, when civilization had been destroyed by being overrun with junk mail—remember, the book was written before there was internet spam! So, in the book, Howard is trying to understand the ruined walls and other architecture he finds. Can you guess what the “porcelain sarcophagus” is?

Howard is an intrepid explorer, and he is certain, based on the architecture and artifacts he finds, that he has found funerary architecture. In his eyes, he is seeing special ceremonial buildings complete with burial goods distributed in separate chambers, similar to the archaeological remains we see today that survive from ancient Egypt.

As you might guess from the title of the book, what Howard had found were the decrepit remains of a modest, twentieth-century, highway-side motel somewhere in this country. His interpretations of the remains are erroneous in extremely funny ways.

This book leads the reader to think about the processes of scientific thinking, and how scientists assemble a wide variety of data to attempt to understand complex systems and situations. Sometimes, theories are developed based on what turn out to be scanty data. Thus, the theories turn out to be wrong, sometimes in humorous ways, when more data are collected.

You may also be interested in other volumes by Macauley, such as Cathedral (1973), Pyramid (1975), Underground (1976), and Castle (1977). All have been reprinted in paperback. Macauley is probably most famous for his award-winning international bestseller The Way Things Work (1988), which he later expanded, updated, and renamed The New Way Things Work (1998).

The Archaeological Society of South Carolina’s annual Fall Field Day will be held on October 25th at Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site in Summerville, South Carolina. Dorchester offers a wonderful setting to discover the past. Its tabby fort ruins and the brick bell tower of St. George’s Anglican Church set a historic atmosphere, and its archaeological record offers a window into village life from 1697 until the American Revolution.

The theme for this year’s event will focus on Historic Indian Trade and Colonial Interactions. Exhibitors are needed to give presentations to the public from 10AM to 4PM. The Society’s goal is to educate the public about the past that can be found beneath their feet by offering presentations and demonstrations that bring life to the archaeological record and show the human side of history. If you are interested in participating, the Society would greatly appreciate your time. While the theme Historic Indian Trade and Colonial Interactions is our focus, presentations and demonstrations do not have to be limited to this subject. Please contact Sean Taylor, ASSC Vice President and S.C. Department of Natural Resources & Heritage Trust Archaeologist (803-734-3753), about participating.

Pictured left to right: Joe Joseph, Rochelle Banks (TRC-Houston), SHA Conference Chair Howard Higgins (TRC-Albuquerque), Mary Beth Reed, Jim D’Angelo, and Barbara Garrow.

The Society for Historical Archaeology and Council on Underwater Archaeology held their annual meetings jointly in Albuquerque, New Mexico this past January, co-sponsored by TRC. Papers examined the interface between archaeology and the public. Among the Georgia folks attending were State Archaeologist David Crass, and, representing their respective firms, Joe Joseph, Mary Beth Reed, and Hugh Matternes (all of New South Associates) and Jim D’Angelo (TRC). TRC and New South each had booths in the main venders room.

In the booth next to TRC was the Mactec booth tended by Pat and Barbara Garrow. As these meetings usually are, it was like old home week with the Godfather presiding: TRC was formerly TRC Garrow and Joe and Mary Beth have worked for Pat in the past. So had top winners of TRC’s business card drawing, Dr. Sheli O. Smith, currently a nautical archaeologist with PAST Foundation, and Mary Beth! No, the drawing was not fixed.

Initial view of dugout canoe in 1970.

In late December 1970, I assisted the Broward County Archaeological Society in the location, recovery, and restoration of an abandoned, twelve and a half foot long, cypress dugout canoe. It became the primary display in the small museum the group maintained for public education.

My friend Keith Hunt asked the Sunday school class he was teaching where they would like to go for a field trip. Several parks and historic locations were suggested. One boy named John raised his hand and said, “I know where there is a lost dugout canoe in the woods.”

At the end of class Keith asked John more about it. John said a few times in the past he tried shortcuts through the woods to get to school, but it had been over two years since he last went that way. Keith asked John if he could find it again, and if he would. He said he enjoyed exploring the swampy forest and agreed. Keith called me about one o’clock and we met John and his mother about three o’clock. By four we were at the canoe. It was about three hundred yards east of Andrews Avenue and about a hundred yards south of the canal that separates Pompano Beach from Fort Lauderdale, west of Dixie Highway and the railroad, and north of Cypress Road. The canal was a drainage canal for flood control from the Everglades. It was a river modified into a canal in the early 1900s. A wall of dredged sand fill on the south bank helped isolate access to the area. The ground varied from mushy, to water-filled areas, with very little dry ground in the area. The trees and ground vegetation were thick and difficult to walk through. Visibility was up to about fifty feet, maybe.

The canoe was covered with several inches of light green, thick, wet moss on some top surfaces. On one side there was a delicate fern about eight inches tall growing out of the wood. The canoe shape had a specific bow wedge at one end and a blunt, lower, stern at the other end. The bow had a vertical front edge to cut the water and kept a rounded deck shape at the top. The sides were slightly lower and about two to three inches thick. The walls became thicker closer to the bottom. The stern was not finished on the outside. It also had decay holes in the direction of the trees’ core at the stern. The canoe measured twelve feet six inches long and was pointed northnortheast toward the canal. About ten or more feet to the southwest was an obvious section of the same tree. It was about six feet long. From the far end of that segment it was only about ten feet west to the tree trunk. The trunk was about two feet high.

The condition of the ground at the canoe was interesting. There was an almost circular depression about ten feet across directly under the entire canoe. We did not think this was formed naturally as there was solid dirt under the other segment of the tree. We speculated how the canoe was to get to the river a hundred yards away. One line of thought was if a ditch were dug from the canoe to the river, it could be floated out. After tearing down the final wall at the river, water would flow to the canoe in the depression. It can then be floated out, by possibly only one person. It was not known to us how high the water in the river could be during different seasons, and how deep a ditch might need to be dug for the idea to work.

View of the canoe before recovery.

The canoe looked to be shaped by blade because there were sharp angles not likely formed by burning. I insisted we do not touch even the plants on it until photos were taken or an archaeologist gives an OK. We counted our paces out in the most direct path we could manage so we could find it again.

The next day was Monday. I worked less than a mile from the site. During my lunch break I brought my Polaroid camera and took several photos of the canoe. After work I had classes at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. I took my photos and started looking for someone in archaeology or anthropology. All the offices were closed at night. None of my classes of my major were in Anthropology so I had never spoken to, or knew any archaeologist. I noted Dr. William Sears was the Director. Tuesday morning I again had classes and I made a point of getting to Dr. Sears.

I showed him the pictures and asked, “Is there was some way it could be recovered before a bulldozer ran it over, or the land was developed?” He gave me the address of Mrs. Wilma B. Williams, in Hollywood, Florida, who was the director of the Broward County Archaeological Society, a chapter of the Florida Anthropological Society.

Next I wrote a short letter about the find and Dr. Sears’ referral, and mailed it to her. On Thursday afternoon the phone rang and I answered it. It was Wilma and her first words were, “When can we meet?” We set up Saturday. On Saturday about 9:30, my dad and I, Keith, John, Wilma, and Burt Mowers all met to look at the canoe. Wilma and Burt agreed it could be safely removed, and they would get it tomorrow.

On Sunday a group of almost thirty of us started the recovery. We picked the most direct route from the road to the canoe. With machetes in hand, the two lines spaced themselves with blades tip to tip apart and cut their way forward through everything. Replacements took over for the tired. The result was a direct path. It looked like a ten foot wide hole had been drilled through the woods and brush.

Four two-by-fours were tied across the canoe with two inch diameter rope. One youth had the job of passing the rope under the canoe in the water of the depression. This is how we found how long and deep the depression was under the water. Eight strong men then lifted the waterlogged canoe, but we could not hold it long enough to inch forward. Another board and two men were added. We could now lift and walk in six inch steps. We could move about twenty feet before everyone became exhausted. Many replacements were used by the time we got it to the truck for removal. The flatbed truck had a bed that tilted to make loading possible. Next, they hauled the canoe back to their workshop at Flamingo Groves, one of the orange groves west of Fort Lauderdale in Davie, Florida.

In the workshop they put down a thick plastic sheet. The canoe was placed on the sheet. A strong box was built around the canoe using the plastic as a liner to prevent leaking. The canoe was then covered in a solution of white Elmer’s Glue and water.

The ratio was 2 parts water to one part glue. A circulating pump was positioned to keep it all flowing and cover the exposed surfaces. This was done for fourteen months. The capillary action of the glue rising through the wood fibers displaced all the water. At that time, the tank was drained and the glue allowed to dry. When the glue was dry the entire canoe was very hard and ready for display. The glue did not change the color or appearance of the wood. The wood was so weak before preservation that you could crumble soft wood fibers away from the top of the sides by just rubbing it with your finger tips. After preservation it was so solid it rang like a wood bell when tapped.

View of the canoe after conservation.

The chapter had a small frame house that was their museum, generously rented to the group for one dollar a year. Admission fees were half a dollar, voluntary, and helped the chapter run the museum. They now had a major attraction and the donations increased as the number of visitors increased. The dugout canoe had its’ first museum home. This donation resulted in an offer to me to join the Broward County Archaeological Society, which I eagerly accepted. I worked as a volunteer with the group on most Sundays doing field work until we moved to Georgia over three years later.

Soon Wilma Williams was followed by a new member, Gypsy Graves, as director. She moved the museum contents from Flamingo Groves to downtown Fort Lauderdale, the second museum location. The new location was next to the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society. I visited it again and took pictures of the preserved canoe in this location. For a short time they moved to an empty store nearby. Then they moved to a large building in Dania Beach on highway U.S. 1. There was a name change with this fourth location.

From newspaper clippings sent to me by a friend, it appears there was a lot of leadership controversy about Graves. She and her daughter could not account for $100,000. The museum was in debt for $885,788. Their web page shows they are defunct, and the Bankruptcy Court had taken control of the museum. The Fort Lauderdale newspaper stated on February 17, 2003 that items worth $450,000 were sold for a very small amount to pay debt. There was no other information about what was sold, or what happened to the remainder. At that time, I didn’t know the status or location of the canoe, and I assumed it was lost. My depressing thoughts were it may have been discarded, sold privately, made into a decoration at a restaurant, or left outside somewhere to rot. This is what I had hoped would never happen.

Revisit and update: Canoe déjà vu?

On Wednesday, March 29, 2006 I went to Dania, Florida to where The South Florida Museum of Archaeology and Natural History had been located. A company called “E-tour and Travel” occupied a small office on one side of the otherwise empty January of 2005 all the contents of the museum were removed by a man named Frank. The remainder of the building is completely empty. A woman named Kirsty was the caretaker and had a key to show this location to possible renters. Her home was next to the museum and I might find her there. Nobody was home then, so I left my phone and email address at her front door. My note explained who I was, and why I was interested in the status of the canoe.

On Friday, March 31, 2006 I received an email from Ms. Kirsty Forgie. She is with the Broward Community College as the Museum Collection Coordinator, and the Coordinator of the World Cultures Collections, both associated with the B.C.C. Library Department.

She stated that nothing had been sold or auctioned. Everyone who brought papers to prove ownership of items loaned to the museum had their items returned to them. The bankruptcy court awarded the remainder of the collection to the Broward Community College on March 28, 2005. This included the dugout canoe.

On April 14, 2006 I found and scanned several black and white photos I took in 1970 and sent them to her. With them was included an early draft of this information. She responded with thanks for my interest, and for sending the background information. No one of the Broward County Archaeological Society, or the earlier museum staff, preserved any information about the background of the dugout. The notes I provided on my visit to the Historical Society did not survive. In the ten years of working in the museum she said she had not known any of this information or what conservation methods were used to preserve it. She said recently the B.C.C. executive board had approved the loan of the dugout canoe to be displayed at the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale. It is a first class facility located near the Fine Art Museum and even includes an IMAX theater. The museum was founded thirty years ago and now serves about 400,000 visitors a year. Many of them are children on their school field trips.

In my view, this museum is an ideal location to loan the dugout canoe. Here it can reach and stimulate the maximum number of students and other viewers. The dugout canoe was found in Fort Lauderdale and ideally belongs in the Fort Lauderdale area. Now it will be available to the public again. I am very satisfied with this outcome. The loan to the Discovery Center has now ended. Ms. Forgie notified me on February 4, 2008 that it is currently on display at the college. They now have another canoe from South America, and the two form a new display together. Soon I will return to the Fort Lauderdale area to see it one more time. However, with déjà vu, this too, may not be the end!

In September 2006, Leake Site Principal Investigators Scot Keith and Dean Wood took a trip to Indiana in order to conduct research into the Mann site, a Middle Woodland Hopewell site located in southwestern Indiana. This site is notable due to the presence (and abundance) of Swift Creek complicated stamped pottery, as well as sand tempered simple stamped wares very similar to Cartersville simple stamped pottery. The site has long been known to contain Swift Creek type pottery, recognized by such archaeologists as James Kellar and Bret Ruby. As the Swift Creek complicated stamped pottery tradition is not endemic to that region, its presence indicates a connection between Swift Creek and the Midwestern Hopewellian peoples. Our research was designed to investigate this connection.

We examined the Mann site collections held at the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology at Indiana University in Bloomington and the private collection owned by Charles Lacer in Evansville. We took with us photographs of numerous selected Swift Creek sherds from Leake in order to search for potential design matches with the examples from Mann. While no exact design matches were found, we did come away with several interesting observations. Many of the complicated stamped design elements are shared between the sites, yet one design common at Leake—the barred oval—is rare at Mann. Furthermore, we noted numerous examples of the zigzagged Crooked River design at Mann, which is common in the Gulf Coastal and southwestern Georgia region, and conversely absent at Leake. An early Swift Creek pottery rim trait—deep and closely spaced rounded notches (often referred to as notched or scalloped)—is very common for the complicated stamped rim sherds from Mann, and this rim form is common at Leake as well.

As documented by Ruby, the Swift Creek complicated stamped wares from Mann are produced using a grog/clay tempered paste, while the simple stamped wares are sand tempered. Petrographic analysis conducted on the Mann site sherds indicates that the complicated stamped wares are produced locally, while the simple stamped wares are non-local—the materials suggesting a Southeastern origin. While assembling Leake sherds for a petrographic study shortly after returning from this research trip, Mr. Keith noted a complicated stamped notched rim sherd which was extremely similar to the Mann site examples, particularly in terms of paste temper and texture. This sherd was submitted to Dr. James Stoltman for petrographic analysis in order to see if there may be a direct connection between these two significant sites. The results from the petrographic analysis indicate that this sherd probably did derive from the Mann site, as may a small rocker stamped rim sherd we recovered!

Another ceramic variety recovered from the Mann site consisted of diamond shaped checks, each with a raised square or circle within. Examples of this type are also known from Hopewell sites in Ohio (such as Seip, Rockhold, Harness, and Turner), as well as from contemporaneous Southeastern sites having Hopewellian assemblages. Such sherds have been found at the Miner’s Creek site and 9Hy98 near Atlanta, Mandeville in southwest Georgia, and the Yearwood site in southern Tennessee. We feel that this variety may be related to the unidentified decorated type at Leake.

Our road trip demonstrated some very significant long distance connections (450 straight line miles) between the Swift Creek heartland in the central Georgia and southern Indiana as well as connections between the Leake and Mann sites specifically. More details and some illustrations of the connections can be found by clicking here.