2010 Arkansas Archeological Society summer dig

I was going to make some comment about the "dog days of summer" for the picture above, but really we're in the cat days--believe it or not, this picture of Bella was not posed, she was just sitting in this style! We've started off the summer with a spurt of activity (hence the lack of posts over the last three weeks). During the first week of their summer break, both Kenny and Beth had some swim lessons:

Beth is the girl in the blue swimsuit at the top of this ring of beginner swimmers. Kenny only went a couple of days because he went to an archeology camp at Toltec State Park three of those days (more on this later). We also used the hot weather as an excuse to get out to the Saline River and walk along the banks one evening. No, Hope's not crouching to try to avoid the camera--she's trying to spot the chunks of petrified wood we hunt for along this river. Kenny's giving her some of the finer points of wood hunting...

Of course, the big event for us this June was the 2010 Arkansas Archeological Society's summer dig, held this year at Toltec State Park near Little Rock. This is a ceremonial mound center about 1000 years old and has been the site of several other society digs in the past. Below is the set-up for the excavations at Mound D, which had been plowed down by many decades of farming:

Note the large, grass-covered mounds in the background. The larger of the two mounds, Mound A (right behind the sun screens) is over 50 feet tall, and the next tallest mound, Mound B (far right of photo) is over 30 feet tall. I spent almost all of my digging time at a different location, Mound P, which appears to be a small remnant of a mound along the shores of the oxbow lake adjacent to the mounds:

During the first week, I spent most of my time working in the first 2 meter by 2 meter excavation unit (the one closest to the camera). This particular unit had very few artifacts as it turns out, having been heavily modified by historic land uses (probably a road). However, the units on the low mound remnant were very productive, producing many animal bones, potsherds, a few arrow points, and some other cultural goods. Below is a picture of one of these bone/sherd clusters:

Note the small, semi-circular object on the right--this is a broken half of what is probably a spindle weight that was used to spin plant fibers into a coarse thread that was used for cloth. I worked on this site throughout the week, driving 1.5+ hours (one way) each morning and afternoon so I could help out with the kids (mostly Stephen) during the week. Hope is the Director of Religious Education now at our church, and she was doing an evening Vacation Bible School (VBS) that week. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Kenny joined me at Toltec, spending the first couple hours with me at Mound P before heading off to join his archeology day camp until 3 p.m. Then the 1.5+ hour drive back to Monticello, a quick clean up, and Kenny was then off to VBS until 8 p.m. These made for long days for him--since we start digging at 6:30 a.m., we were leaving our house at about 4:45 a.m. each of these mornings to get there on time! He actually handled it pretty well, and had a lot of fun at archeology camp. I took last weekend off from digging (actually going into work on Saturday morning) but we returned as a family to the Little Rock area on Monday for a week's worth of camping at Willow Beach Park, which is run by the US Army Corps of Engineers. This last week, I spent most of my time in a different unit, which had a few more artifacts and some post molds:

Kenny joined me only one time on Tuesday morning. Here he is helping us to screen dirt for artifacts:

We ended up opening a total of six 2 meter by 2 meter excavation units, most of which we dug to at least a half meter deep (about 1.5 feet)--some went over 1 m (3+ feet) deep:

In addition to the artifacts, we found a number of post molds, which are usually dark stains in the soil where the Indians dug a post hole and then inserted a post to support a building. The post is eventually removed, decays away, or burns, leaving a cylindrical hole that is often filled with surface debris and dirt, and is thus often darker than the adjacent undisturbed soil. When we find these features (often by noticing a circular stain in the soil of the floor of the unit we're digging), we usually quit digging them until we get the rest of the unit down to a lower level, and then we careful remove and record the materials in these pedestalled post molds. Note there are several post molds in this picture:

These post molds are important as they can help to provide "floor plans" for structures the Indians built many centuries ago and long since rotted or burned away. They can also help date the site, too, if a good radiocarbon sample remains. Below is a different perspective of Mounds A and B, with Mound A on the left and Mound B on the right--Mound P is in the woods on the left side of Mound B:

Below is a picture of the activities at Mound D, which had the bulk of the Society members:

Even though Mound D had long since been leveled, evidence of it still remained below ground. Below is a picture of the "basket loading" that built these mounds:

Each differently colored patch of soil above represents a single basket's worth of soil dumped on the site, with each basket holding a few dozen pounds of dirt carried by an individual. These mounds were surely monumental efforts!

Not all of our time last week was related to archeology--Hope was scheduled to give a talk on the Monticello Tree Board efforts over the last year at a meeting in Hot Springs, so I took the day off from digging to watch the kids, and Hope did her thing. Even though the day was brutally hot (upper 90s) and we had little shade, we went to a pirate-themed miniature golf course:

In the picture above, Kenny got the stocks for hitting the only hole-in-one that day. Below, our sweaty lil' pirates celebrate a successful round of golf:

After Hope finished in the early afternoon, we went over to a nearby state park, which had a small beach for the kids to swim at:

We also went to a pizza place that evening that had a bunch of different games and activities, including bumper cars, an indoor go-cart track, more miniature golf, and some other games. We were also fortunate in this week of camping to not have any severe weather events. We did have a lot of nice sunsets, including one in which Hope spotted a heron working the shallow water of the lake we were camped along for fish or frogs:

Here's a broader view, showing the pretty sunset colors:

Here were the kids enjoying this scene, with Stephen pointing excitedly to the heron:

Below is a picture of one young digger, a 12-year-old boy named Canaan Gideon, who we've seen frequently at these digs with his grandfather Bob Campbell, an active AAS member from southwestern Arkansas:

While Canaan's choice of snoozing in a wheelbarrow in the hot June sun was not a wise one, his exhaustion was felt by most of us after two weeks of digging in the hot, humid weather. I think a lot was learned from this effort, and I suspect we'll be back to this same park next summer for that dig. Our family also learned how well our air conditioned pop-up camper worked in these brutal temperatures (very well, in fact), and we look forward to doing some camping when we're up north in a few weeks!