Archeology, the 4th of July, and Beth's ear

Well, I survived another week at the Arkansas Archeological Society's summer dig. We were at a location called "Jones Mill" again this year--this is a site near Malvern, Arkansas, dominated by mid-Archaic deposits (perhaps 4-6 thousand years old) produced at a stone tool workshop. In the upper layers of the site, there are more recent features and artifacts dating from a few hundred to 1000 years old or so, then the Archaic workshop, and perhaps even earlier occupations before this.

At this workshop, the prehistoric peoples would take novaculite (a type of silica rich stone) and make tools and other artifacts out of this highly useful rock. The picture below is of my hand holding the broken base of a dart point--this point had almost been completed, but then broke in the last formative stages, and hence was discarded for me to uncover thousands of years later.

The picture below here is a view of a scatter of stone tools, broken points, bifaces, and other artifacts in one of the other trenches at the site I was digging on (I didn't work in this pit). We had dozens of people digging this year, and we found a lot of artifacts. Hopefully, the two years of intensive efforts at this site will shed some light on the cultural practices of the people that lived and worked on this site.
My week at this dig was not all about this excavation. They (that is, the professional archeologists with the Arkansas Archeological Survey) also offer shortcourses on various aspects of archeology designed to take amateurs like myself and train us to be useful volunteers at their sites. This year, I took a course on mapping, which got me using a very precise surveying laser. We went to an actual archeological site, an early 20th Century horse race track just outside of the city limits of Hot Springs, and we used this equipment to survey in the remains of this track. Archeology is not just about the distant past--the Arkansas Archeological Survey records sites that are at least 50 years old...

Anyhow, this old race track site is now occupied by a golf course, and over the years, most of the evidence of the old track has been eliminated. We mapped in some old concrete foundations that remained, and also parts of the old track, which is still visible in places. And, yes, part of one day, we did ride around the course on the golf carts shown in the picture below:

Hope and the kids joined me in Malvern about midway through the week, and spent some time exploring some of the local parks. They went to a state park not too far away a couple of times to use the beaches on the lake featured in this park.

Towards the end of the week, I started feeling a little off, and spent way more time in the bathroom than I planned to...this continued into the weekend when I returned to Monticello. It was bad enough over the weekend that by Sunday evening I was thinking I'd have to visit the doctor. Fortunately, by Monday, most of the condition had cleared up, and I was back to normal by Wednesday. Best I can figure, I picked up a mild case of food poisoning (perhaps that Salmonella that's going around) from one of the restaurants I ate dinner at...

The rest of the week was pretty uneventful. On Friday (the Fourth of July) we stayed at our house and had a few friends come over for supper. It was rainy that evening, so the kids (our kids, and those of our friends) were playing inside. They started wrestling a bit in our living room, and just like that, lil' Beth got thrown down on the edge of the stove we have in our living room. I was in the kitchen cleaning up, but I could tell from her cries she was hurt. I came scrambling in to find she had the edge of her ear split open from the impact of her fall, and it was bleeding. Hope worked to stop the bleeding, then she drove Beth to the emergency room while I watched the boys. A couple hours and six stitches later, Beth returned, somewhat worse for the wear:

You can seen the stitch work in her upper left ear. She'll be alright, and hopefully there will be little in the way of scarring. Hopefully, the kids also learned a lesson about rough horseplay!

Finally, I want to point people's attention to a link (http://www.flickr.com/photos/28202537@N02/) on the sidebar of our blog. This link will take you to Flickr, which provides free online photo storage. We have added dozens of semi-high quality images to this page for people to download if they'd like higher quality pix to print out. Not every picture we put on the blog will be put here (unless requested), and there are likely to be many pictures posted here that you haven't seen yet. So, please, visit this link periodically, and I will try to keep it up to date with fresh pictures. If, for whatever reason, you decide you need an even higher resolution version of any of these pictures, please email me, and I can post even bigger versions.