Summer Dig 2022

Most of this post will be on archeology, but that wasn't the only thing that has gone on during the last couple of months...Not by a long shot!  For example, Stephen was able to compete in an invitational Quiz Bowl tournament for students that had done exceptionally well over the past school year.  He really enjoyed his time in this competition, and we suspect he'll be involved more in the near future!

There was also a lot of time invested in taking care of our outdoor cat, Pusseidon, who has been having some health issues since before the holidays.  This condition, which is either seizures or mini-strokes (or both), has sapped him of a lot of his previous energy and personality.  Now he spends a lot of time tottering around--we're starting to call him "Wobbles"--and his vision also seems to have been affected.  However, as you can see in the picture below, he still loves attention:

So our archeology time has been split between some local projects and the "Summer Dig"...  The local project of greatest interest was an excavation at an early 20th Century sharecropper homesite, with Kenny spending most of the time there (at least in terms of the contributions from Bragg Family South).  Kenny had been planning to spend some weeks abroad in a educational trip with his university, but that fell through earlier this spring.  So, when his classes ended at Michigan Tech in late April, he returned to Monticello and soon found himself spending a considerable amount of time in the field with the UAM Station Archeologist Matthew Rooney:

Kenny got a lot of good practical excavation experience in his hours worked...In addition, this relatively small excavation yielded some useful information on this site, and will likely help us focus on other excavation efforts in that general area.  The picture below is of the main point of interest for the two-week archeological training program that Kenny and I just got back from:

Holman Springs is on private land in southwestern Arkansas not too far from the small city of De Queen, and was the site of salt making work for at least several hundred years...dating back to the Caddo Indians and used by early American settlers up to the Civil War (if not even later).  Our first week of digging was characterized by some nice days and some not-so-nice days, largely due to several rounds of rain that past through.  Day 1 was glorious, however:

My first unit--shown closest to the camera--was placed in an area that was thought to have been previously unexcavated.  

The wooden boards along the edges of these 2 meter by 2 meter (roughly 6.5 ft by 6.5 ft) are called "balk boards" and are designed to protect the edges of our excavation units (known as "balks") from inadvertent damage by us while excavating.

The Holman Springs site was dug by professional archeologists first in the mid-1980s, and two previous summer digs were held here, yield huge (quite literally, truckloads!) amounts of pottery sherds and other artifacts.  But several issues meant that the records for this site were incomplete, so we were flying kind of blindly.  My unit quickly starting showing some curious materials, evidenced by the large lighter colored object in the picture below:

That is a good-sized chunk of highway asphalt!  Turns out that my unit had not just one but parts of two units excavated back in the 1980s--they had used road-related fill materials to help refill the excavations they did!  My first unit was not entirely without its prehistory--pictured below is a side view of a likely post hole, probably dug by the Caddo hundreds of years ago to support a large wooden post:

While it takes some experience to spot these features, this post hole can be seen as a dark brown, artifact-rich (the horizontal thing in the middle of this feature is a large potsherd) column of soil extending into the lighter, more yellowish-colored subsoil that lacks artifacts.  

Below is a picture of the excavation site prior to our starting work on one of the pretty mornings we had during this first week:

You can see all the sunshades we use to limit how much direct solar radiation we experience...and the big piles of soil--"backdirt"--is from where we push the soil through 1/4" wire screens to separate the larger artifacts from soil and very small artifacts (which we usually don't collect).

By the middle of the first week I (and others) had re-excavated the part of the first 1980s unit in my first unit of this dig (note the progress of the other test units beyond mine):

My next goal was to excavate the feature on the one wall of the 1980s unit and then excavate the darker brown soil from the other half...however, that effort was complicated by circumstances!  The post hole was pretty easy to excavate, and happened without incident; the rain that followed that night was the first challenge:

We had to spend some minutes bailing out this and other units; thank goodness we always lay black plastic over them when we are done for the day!  Not only does this keep units from getting too wet from rains, it also helps limit how quickly the soil dries out (which can also be a problem).  The biggest complication may be difficult to see in the picture below:

If you look closely, starting at and just to the right of the North arrow on the unit floor, and somewhat lighter colored brownish area with abundant sherds is bordered on the right by a darker brown area clearly delineated by a straight line and far fewer artifacts.  This would prove to be a second 1980s excavation unit (clarified when we found the black plastic they laid on the bottom of that unit nearly 40 years ago)!  So, I didn't really get to do much in terms of actual excavation in my first unit of this dig, but finding these two old units (plus a third one in the next area I was assigned) helped the dig director locate where the old excavation units were and therefore put that old work into modern-day context.

The biggest surprise in our two-week dig did not happen where I was working, but rather close by...and Kenny got to help!  The first week of the dig, Kenny took a class in prehistoric ceramics from one of the Arkansas Archeological Survey's Station Archeologists (which is a good thing for a young man looking to become an archeologist!).  By the end of that first week, and low brick wall appeared on the edge of one unit in a place completely unexpected.  Further excavations near that wall started revealing an old brick floor likely built  between 1830 and the Civil War:

Since Kenny is interested in specializing in industrial archeology, we got him shifted over to this location after his class wrapped up, and he started working with fellow archeology enthusiast Paul Knapp in a unit laid out to see if the brick kept going:

After a few hours of digging, it became pretty apparent--more was to be found related to these bricks!:

As Kenny and Paul dug further down, they founds more bricks, which became a challenge to work through the artifact screens:

Soon, it became apparent that collecting the brick artifacts would be an exercise in frustration, so their strategy shifted to putting them in a bucket separate from the other artifacts and just weighing them and dumping the bucket.  Handling so many bricks took a lot of time, so to take advantage of the opportunity, a smaller sub-unit (1 meter by 1 meter) was dug into this brick feature:

(You can see all the brick fragments in this subunit).  The dig director wanted to see what was below all of this crushed, crumbled brick.  (This brick was fired on site from clay dug locally, so it was not as strong or durable as the brick made in kilns at higher temperatures).  After several more inches of brick rubble, they came down on a very dark, very wet zone of slimy soil material:

This is probably mostly burned plant material (e.g., wood), but what exactly this feature represents is still a mystery--even Kenny couldn't puzzle it out:

That mystery will be passed on until a later date, as we had largely run out of time at the dig.  On the last day as we were shutting things down, Kenny did get to pull out several large pieces of rusty metal that had a yet-to-be-determined purpose:

While Kenny was playing with his bricks, I opened another unit on the edge of the site to see if the brickwork extended that far over...  It didn't, but my unit was chock-full of artifacts, mostly prehistoric ceramics and a fair amount of animal bone (at least for this site):

Most of this site had very little rock (compared to what we're used to seeing elsewhere), but this unit had both large-ish chunks of angular sandstone and a few chipped stone tools, like this small arrow point in my hand:

Although small, it was well crafted...and one of only a handful of projectile points we found all dig (I had found another small point a few minutes before this one).  Sometimes these scarce artifacts are more useful than the more abundant ones...And we had artifacts in abundance on this site!:

There are probably thousands of pounds of artifacts in these bags (again, mostly potsherds)!  Will take a while to clean, label, identify, and curate all of these materials!

The last partial day on the site is typically reserved for "back-filling" the units--basically, putting the dirt back into the holes!  As you can see, we punched quite a few holes in the ground:

With all of the other excavation materials removed, it was an ideal time to fly a drone over the site to see it from a bigger view:

Fortunately for us on what may well have been the hottest, most humid day of the dig, we had access to a small tractor with a bucket and box scraper...but first, we lined them with black plastic, in case future archeologists every wanted to find them:

Kenny and I got back to Monticello yesterday afternoon, and have been slowly getting ourselves unpacked and ready for our next adventures.  Summer dig 2022 was a huge success, and we're already looking forward to next year's work!