6 posts tagged “archaeology”

My friend Luke, the amazing flintknapper, made a projectile point for me from a piece of chalcedony that I found on survey.  I'll let the photos show the amazing transformation.

Luke's point raw

Luke's point closeup 2

Luke's point closeup

How cool is that?  I had no idea it was going to be translucent when I picked up the tablet of chalcedony.  I can't thank Luke enough for making me something this amazing!

As I was looking for a way to put a subtitle on my blog title, I noticed a little ad at the bottom of my blog page:

Now, I know that plenty of websites have advertising banners and whatnot that they use to make money and keep the site going.  Fine.  Those ads may be targeted to a specific audience that is presumably accessing that website.  Fine.  But I find this ad somewhat offensive, since the market in arrowheads and other collectibles supports pothunting, which is in some cases illegal and in other cases merely robs us of the ability to learn about our past, both prehistoric and historic.  It reminds me of when I was a teenager and a devotee of Sassy magazine.  There was a several-page article about self-esteem and healthy body images, and near the end of the article there was a full-page ad for some teen-directed weight-loss gimmick.  They got lots of mail from their readers, and the editor's response was that she did not have control over who advertised in the magazine.  That's how I feel right now too.

Here is the scoop on buying arrowheads online: if there is an archaeological or historical site on private property, then the property owner can do whatever they want with the artifacts they find there.  However, as soon as you remove artifacts from a site, we lose some information about it, unless you keep track of exactly where each and every artifact came from.  There are thousands of sites on public land that are protected by the various agencies that manage those lands, but pothunters will raid known sites, dig into mounds for artifacts, and then sell them, because people who, I would assume don't know better for the most part, think they're cool. 

When archaeologists dig, they dig as little of a site as possible and they keep detailed records of everything they find.  We tend to dig 1x1 meter squares, and we dig in 10 cm levels so that we have a 3D record of artifact locations.  If we find something like a pot or a hearth, we map in exactly where in that square meter it was found.  Any artifacts we collect go into museums and storage facilities in the hopes that someone will be able to use them for scientific or public educational purposes.  If we find human remains, we treat them with dignity and respect, and follow federal guidelines that involve contacting the tribe that is designated as the Most Likely Descendent so that they can help guide us in appropriate treatment of their ancestor's remains.  Pothunters will dig through burials and desecrate the remains they find, because all they care about is the money they can make from the offerings that were carefully buried with someone's mother or grandfather or child hundreds or thousands of years ago.

I know, some people don't care about prehistoric Indian villages when they need a house or a freeway or money to feed their kids today.  Some people don't see the value in preserving the past, or in knowing where people gathered acorns or hunted deer throusands of years ago, or where Chinese immigrants were mining in the 1880s, or where sheepherders camped in the 1940s.  But a lot of us do, so much so that preserving archaeological and historical sites is written into federal law hand-in-hand with preserving our environment.  And, to me, helping Native American tribes preserve their past and the dignity of their ancestors is a major motivation for doing what I do.  So, please, don't go buy arrowheads on EBay.  If you can find modern ones that are being made today by flintknappers, buy one of them.  They are equally amazing, perhaps more so in this day and age, even if they aren't old.  And you are helping to preserve a technology and a tradition that ties us to our distant past, instead of robbing someone else of their history. 

Ruby pano 2

We had a good day today.  We covered part of the line that we weren't able to access before, which was a good hard hike, but then we did a bunch of road scouting and we got up to this ridgetop, where we could look down on everything.

But I thought I'd show you some of the artifacts we've collected recently too.  I know that people like projectile points the best, so here are some of the points we have found recently:

Elko base frag

NSN frag

Most of the points we find are broken, and for a good reason.  Much of the time, when we find a lithic scatter (chipped stone lying around) we will find broken points nearby.  That's because someone took the broken point out of its hafting and re-used the arrow or spear shaft for a new point.  What we are seeing is the broken, old point and the flakes left behind from someone making a new point.  I think it's pretty cool.

You'll notice that both of these points are made from something other than obsidian -- we are in an area that's  between obsidian sources, but there are good chert sources nearby, so the majority of the tools are made from chert.  It comes in an amazing variety of colors and patterns:

DSCN0485

I found all of these colors within a 10 meter area on one site!  It's actually one of the most fascinating parts of this project -- seeing how the vegetation, the topography, and the toolstone changes as we move across the state.  Knowing where the obsidian and chert comes form can tell us about how people moved around, or who they traded with, since an obsidian projectile point that is found a long way from its source must have gotten there somehow.  We are also seeing a lot of what we simply call bifaces -- basically, they are roughly-shaped pieces of stone, projectile point "blanks" that were traded from place to place.  Someone would shape the chert into a large, thick oval and then trade it that way, so that the person who got the stone could make their favorite type of point from it later.  A lot of the time, these blanks break as they are being made into a point, so we tend to find broken bits of them in with the lithic scatters.  It's another clue to what people were doing at the places we now call sites.

Ruby pano 1

Rabbitbrush and sage

The weather is starting to become unstable, so we are beginning to feel that the end may be near.  We will still be out recording until there is too much snow for us to see what is on the ground, but that it starting to feel sooner rather than later.  November is probably the latest we can reasonably expect.  Even in the photo above, you can see the cumulus cloud starting to gather, preparing to toss a fine drizzle at us on our way home.

The picture above was from the end of the day today -- we had a several-mile stretch that was inaccessible by road, so we walked the line again, going from site to site and recording collections of 3-10 flakes.  The other team dropped us off in the morning, and we followed drainages and antelope trails down to the road when we were done.  The picture was taken while lying at the side of the road in a rare patch of (dry) grass, waiting for the other team to finish their work and come pick us up.

One site we recorded today was small, but it had beautiful chert for the flakes:

Flake closeup

 I pretty much love anything that's banded, striped, mottled, or multicolored.  My favorite roses are the two-toned ones, with a different color on the petal's edge, and I don't even really care what the color combination is.  So these striped and veined chert flakes just struck me as so much prettier than any single-color flake, I had to take a picture, even if they were pink.  Not to mention, I am always amazed at how plastic rock turns out to be, and any evidence of geological forces melting, bending, or re-shaping rock always gets me excited, as evidenced by a whole blog on a single flake of obsidian.  *laugh*

I did get an interesting shot of our former campsite while we were out working today:

Willow Creek Reservoir

That strip of blue surrounded by hills in the background is the reservoir, whose edge we camped on 2 months back.  I am still kicking myself for not bringing my camera that rotation, because despite all the hardships we experienced while there (no fresh, potable water, port-a-potties, no shade, no shrubs, tiny stickers carpeting the ground, dust everywhere) it was a gorgeous location.  The sun setting over the hills took my breath away every night, and stars blanketed the sky.  The orange flag in the center of the shot is one of our survey stakes, which marks where the proposed centerline is, or at least was at one point, since in some areas it has been rerouted.  We tend to get one at the crest of each ridge, if we're lucky, and we have followed them across the landscape for months now.  They are like old friends now, so I had to be sure I got it in the frame.  *smile*

I'll let the photos say it all:

Recording 004

Recording 005

Recording 006

Flat tire

(Actually, this was the other team's flat tire.  I was not driving that vehicle and we had nothing to do with it, except we helped a little and mostly waited while they changed it.  But they did such a good job on it, I felt it needed to be included.  *smile*)

Making the datum tall enough to see

So, we are virtually done with our survey, but now we need to do the second half of the work: recording sites.  So far, we have been following the proposed pipeline, walking along looking at the ground.  When we saw something, be it an old can or an arrowhead, we stopped just long enough to decide whether it was a single, isolated object or if there was more around.  If we could tell it was a site, we pretty much just took a point on the GPS so we could find it again and kept walking.  Now, we need to go back to each one of those points and collect all the data we can on the sites that are there.

Recording is, in some ways, more tedious than survey, but in other ways it is a lot more fun.  You get to mill around for a long time, looking really closely and seeing what you can find, stabbing pin flags into the ground wherever there is an atrifact.  Today we recorded two sites.  The first one had been described as a scatter of about 20 flakes of white chert.  We spent about an hour pin-flagging the first site, and when it was done it looked like this:

Recording 001

Each pink or green flag (if you can make them out!) is an artifact -- usually a single flake of stone chipped away while someone was making a projectile point or some other tool.  It is literally impossible to find every single flake, but based on the number that we were able to flag, we estimated there were up to 300 flakes on the site -- and the survey crew only saw 20 of them!  To me, that's the fun part.

The not-so-fun part is filling out all the paperwork once you think you've found most of what is on the site.  There are forms that you have to fill out, which as you things like where exactly you are on a map, directions to get there, where the nearest water is, what plants are on the site and around it, how big the site is, etc.  Then you have to be very specific about what you have found -- we literally count, measure, and describe every flake that we flag, which in this case was about 200 total.  You have separate sections to describe any projectile points that would help us figure out how old the site is, other tools or pieces of stone that have been shaped but not finished, pieces of groundstone, and sections to describe things like housepits or hearths, or what kinds of prehistoric pottery we might be finding.  Unfortunately, all we have found so far are flakes, tools, and groundstone.  If you are at a historic site, there is another form where you describe bottles, cans, ceramics, buildings, fences, and anything else that you are pretty sure is over 50 years old.  We found a total of five old cans on this site, and measured and described each one.

Then there is even more paperwork!  We need a hand-drawn map of the site, with a line drawn around the artifacts that determines the boundary, a dot to show where each tool or historic artifact is, and landmarks, like roads, power lines, trees, etc.  We also take photographs of the artifacts and shots looking across the site, plus some artifacts have to be drawn by hand, too.  Even the smallest site will take at least an hour to record.

Why bother to get all this information?  Well, for a couple of reasons.  First, because we want to know what was there before it was destroyed.  Some less-important sites that do not have any buried artifacts can be ignored once we have recorded them, because, according to federal and state laws, the only thing that is valuable about them is the information held within them.  Once we have found, drawn, plotted, photographed, and described as much as we can, that data has been extracted and, in the eyes of the law, it is no longer valuable.  In cases like this, we only have one shot at getting as much information as we can before the site completely ceases to exist.

Second, all these different pieces of information that we are gathering can help us figure out what people were doing in this area in the first place.  Archaeologists have to guess where and how people lived in the distant past, and they do this by looking at the stuff they've left behind.  A small scatter of flakes on a hillside next to a pass may mean that someone sat there, finishing or sharpening a projectile point, while they waited for game animals to pass by.  A large site with a lot of dense circles of flakes next to chert outcrops probably means that people were collecting the chert as a toolstone, and they were testing the quality of the material and roughly shaping it to make it easier to carry with them.  A large site close to a stream with lots of flakes, tools, and groundstone most likely means that larger, family groups were camping there for longer periods, using the area as a base for hunting but also bringing back plant materials that needed to be ground up or crushed to be eaten.

Finally, and especially in the case of sites that are on BLM land, the BLM and other government agencies have a responsibility to manage and take care of archaeological sites that are on their lands.  That means they need to know exactly where these sites are, and what is there.  Over time, a site may be revisited several times by archaeologists, as an area is used to meet different needs.  Each time, archaeologists go through this recording process, updating the site record to say that the groundstone is still there, but the projectile points are now gone, or a stream channel has moved and has now washed part of the site away.  Just as often, over time archaeologists find more and more at a given location, as the discipline gets better and better at identifying things that can tell us about a site.  Back in the early days, flakes would have been thrown out, but now we can tell if they are the result of testing materials, or beginning to rough out a point, or the fine work that makes the edges of these tools sharp.

Have you all been taking notes?  Good, there's a pop quiz on Friday.  *grin*