Albert C. Goodyear speaking at SEAC about theTopper Site
Goodyear discusses the Topper Site at SEAC 2005 One of the most exciting questions in North American archaeology, perhaps the most exciting, is who were the First Americans. The topic is now the focus of a scholarly quest stretching from Pennsylvania to Chile. At the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Columbia, South Carolina, on Friday November 4, 2005, archaeologist Albert C. Goodyear discussed a site - the “Topper Site” in Allendale, South Carolina - that potentially could shed a lot of light on the answer to the question. Goodyear’s team of volunteers has found artifacts at Topper that may date to 20,000 years before present, and possibly far older. Goodyear, director of the Southeastern Paleo American Survey at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, presented the keynote address, entitled “The Topper Site: Implications for Pre-Clovis occupation in the Southeastern United States”. Following is a slightly edited transcript of Goodyear’s talk:
The Topper Site is on a bench by the Savannah River. The site is a chert source that has been of interest to people for the last 13,000 years. When Goodyear decided to start studying Paleo-Indians, he decided to go the quarries where he knew Paleo-Indians had to return. During the Pleistocene (the epoch that lasted from about 1.65 million years B.P. until about 10,000 years ago) the Savannah River would flow through the site and rinse off large boulders that would fall down the hill. Humans quarried the boulders for chert for tools. For the past seven years Goodyear’s team has done two digs at Topper.
Goodyear and his team have been assisted by nationally recognized experts such as Michael R. Waters, the director of the Center For The Study Of The First Americans (http://www.centerfirstamericans.com/) at Texas A&M, and Stephen L. Forman, a geoscientist from the Luminescence Dating Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago who has been doing the Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating for Goodyear’s team at Topper.
The Topper Site has three stratigraphic units: an upper meter, a layer of white sands, and a gray clay terrace. The upper meter has artifacts from virtually every prehistoric cultural period known in South Carolina, including Mississippian arrowpoints, a substantial Archaic occupation and an immense Clovis occupation.
Below that is the layer of white sands, which are Pleistocene alluvium that have slowly washed down the hillside. Because of that, they are very amenable to OSL dating which measures the amount of energy trapped in the crystals of quartz grains. “This has been going on in geology since the ‘80s but it’s finally caught on in archaeology,” Goodyear said. “And where we get corresponding radiocarbon dates with OSL dates the correspondence is remarkably good. So OSL works. It doesn’t work in all sediments. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in Pleistocene sediments. So our OSL dates appear around 14,000 or 15,000 (B.P.).”
“For the last six years we’ve spent a lot of time recovering what we call the standard Topper Pre-Clovis assemblage from the bottom of this white sand unit resting on the (gray clay) terrace. Then two years ago we realized we hadn’t been going deep enough. We began to see artifacts that were embedded in this clay, so we used a backhoe and went on down and that’s where the 50,000-year-old dates came from.
Goodyear said his team doesn’t know exactly how old the Pre-Clovis layer is, but it’s certainly before 15,000-16,000.
How discovery was made
Goodyear described how his team first found the Pre-Clovis level at the Topper Site. They had done two regular digs at the site, and always stopped digging at the bottom of the first layer, about one meter below the surface.
“When the artifacts ran out, I ran out. I didn’t believe in Pre-Clovis. I was adamant about it. If I like something I really like it and I didn’t like Pre-Clovis for all the traditional reasons. So we dug there twice and artifacts ran out. We dug down a little bit more and they stopped, so we quit. We did that two times.”
Goodyear’s team left the Topper Site in 1986 to work on a nearby Paleo-Indian site on the lower terrace. “We were lovin’ that, and we were getting what we wanted, and we were begining to make some breakthroughs.” He was running a program he called the Allendale Paleoindian Expedition, which was sort of a version of the EarthWatch program, that signed up people from all over America who would come and work on the project.
“Instead of giving EarthWatch $4,000 and flying yourself to Ireland, all you have to do is pay $400 and come dig with me and I’ll feed you barbecue for the week. You don’t need a vacinnation, don’t need to know a foreign language and no strange foods.” We’ve been doing this since ’96. I think about 500 people from America have come and done this. And it’s been a fantastic way to pay for a lot of science and do a lot of field work that simply in the normal scheme of things with grants… and the small amount of money for basically pure research in America, this is actually how we made this discovery and kept on the case. So in ’98 I had to go back brokenhearted (“Oh not Topper, the chert quarry! We had a real Paleo site down below.”) We had to do it. We had all these people signed up and I’d been reading – about that time [a report on the Chilean site] Monte Verde was published in American Antiquity. The Clovis establishment in North America had gone down there and said, ‘yeah, it be true.’ ” [For an interesting discussion on Paleoamerican Origins visit the Smithsonian Institution site at http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmnh/origin.htm ]
“In my view, that got me going. I think in some ways that was a real rebuke to the North American scientific community. It’s almost better, frankly, it was found way down in South America. …I saw no reason not to believe Monte Verde, and I think most reasonable people today do believe in it. But I’d just finished reading a monograph by Joe McAvoy on Cactus Hill in Virginia (“Archaeological Investigations of Site 44SX202, Cactus Hill, Sussex County Virginia”, Research Report Series No. 8, Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Historic Resources, Richmond, 1997). I read through the thing and he had dates of 15,000, 16,000 (BP). And he had true bifacial spearpoints. And I’m thinking ‘yeah, this is what’s supposed to happen. By the time I got to Topper a few months later I was at least intellectually kind of primed and ready to go where no man has gone before, certainly I hadn’t, and that was down below where you don’t find artifacts. So the last couple of weeks of the dig I just asked the volunteers, I said ‘because of our hillside situation here, with all these sands oozing off the hillside, you’ve got this chert quarry and there’s a major river that goes into the Atlantic Ocean.” I said “You know, this is a good situation if there really is any Pre-Clovis in the Southeast, if they are on the Savannah River, if they found the chert quarry , and if they actually used it and left anything, (there’s about four ifs there), I said maybe there’s something down here so maybe we ought to try it. And of course everybody wanted to do it because they didn’t have to go to SAA (the Society for American Archaeology) in Chicago the next year to present all this!”
“So we went down and sure enough there was nothing but in about two days we started getting flakes. And then we came down on this pile of rocks. [He shows a close-up picture] And I’m looking at this and I’m trying to be consistent, trying to use my method of excavation and lithic analysis as I would if I were digging an archaic site, not just kick it with a shovel and say, ‘OK, we’ve done enough, bury this, I don’t want to get involved.’ This thing was all on a common surface, it’s a pile of weathered chert (This chert by the way weathers unbelievably), and had some small quartz pebbles all stacked up together. And you might think ‘well the river grabbed all this and put it in a scour hole.’ This is all on a flat service, some of these things are stacked on top of each other and some of the pieces of chert, even though weathered, were split. So I’m thinking ‘I’ve got to be consistent. Let’s draw it, let’s photograph it, let’s call it a feature. Let’s do archaeology. I don’t know what it is. What we’ve got to be is consistent. It turns out that what it is is symptomatic of the normal Pre-Clovis industrial expression here. All this chert is not naturally in place in the old Pleistocene Savannah (River) river bed here. These are very low energy, there not major chute channels in here. These chert pieces are made from cobbles that had to be removed from the hillside, transported down to a flat space and then busted open. And that’s what we have. Virtually all of these have sharp angular faces on them with small flake tools around them. Also this stuff is neither fluvally formed nor fluvally deformed. It doesn’t go along stringers of gravel as though it’s talus wash down the hill, and the slope is rather slight there anyway. Nor is it riding in piles linearly with the next Savannah River stream flow. It looks like exactly what it would look like if you or I sat there and bashed this stuff open, laying in piles on common surfaces, not in holes, fluvial depressions, or anything, and in some cases they’re stacked up on each other. And we have numerous examples of that. And I think probably the reason they are in piles is the way you have to get this stuff open. There’s no hammer stone natural to the deposit here even remotely big enough to break these things open. The chert cobble would win.Your poor little hens egg-sized hammer stone would be gravel. So I think probably these are the residue of people using a block-on-block [method] or kind of a bipolar thing to get them open. And some of them, again, are sort of left in neat piles. Here’s split chert pieces and these large hens egg-sized gravels, pebbles if you will, these are also found up on the brow of the hill in an ancient geological deposit. These large things are not part of the stream flow. And so we call these Pre-Clovis lithic clusters. Now we hired Scott Jones and Steve Watts [of the Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia, North Carolina. (http://www.schielemuseum.org/) to assist with the lithic analysis]. And I’ve been doing lithic technology for years. I worked with Don Crabtree in 1972, which next to working with Dan Morse was probably the two best things that ever happened to me. Don Crabtree was not interested in how to make fluted points or Mayan blades, although he could make them wonderfully. What he wanted to know was how does flint break, what are the principles of flint working that he could apply to any technology in the world. Some of us were fortunate as young people to be able to have that experience and it’s paid off immensely for me.”
“So I look at this [the possible Pre-Clovis artifacts from the Topper Site] and I’m not seeing any big flakes with striking platforms or bulbs. I’m not seeing any big cores with negative bulbs. That’s what you would get when you take a big hammer stone and you whack a piece of chert. You get a big flake with a bulb. These things typically don’t have any. I’m not even seeing a hammer stone around that would remotely be able to break this up. So we told Steve and Scott, ‘we want you to replicate the Topper technology but you can’t use hammer stones.’ Within 15 minutes they figured it out. They put one block on top of the other and smashed them open and generated the flakes and were pretty much able to make the stone tools that we think we’re seeing in the Pre-Clovis. It takes a lot of energy to crack one of these things open. There’s a thick weathering rind that’s almost like a hamburger bun that you have to bust through. So it’s not like you’re hitting obsidian. An enormous amount of energy is involved simply cracking these things open.”
[Goodyear showed a slide of a Pre-Clovis chert core found right on the river terrace.] “These are probably anvil blows where you put one boulder and slam it against the edge of another. You can get off wonderful hand-sized spalls that you can turn into scrapers or choppers without even using a hammer stone. You have a series of force lines all over this material which you do not get with burning or freezing.”
“One of the issues that continues to come up with the critics or skeptics of the Topper Pre –Clovis is ‘how do we know nature didn’t do it?’, the whole geofact thing. The whole geofact thing needs to come under a lot of scrutiny here because with geofacts you need energy and you need some sort of specific agent to detach these things. And in the case of Topper neither the river nor gravity can get you that kind of energy It’s a low energy environment . I’m dubious about many of the geofact explanations because you don’t have the precision and specificity in nature that would give you some of these.”
[Goodyear showed slides of many possible Pre-Clovis artifacts and discussed the technology of how they were made and possibly used. He noted that Pre-Clovis technology at Topper did not use bifaces. It’s not true, he said, that flakes with striking platforms and bulbs are not found at Topper. Hundreds of small flakes the size of U.S. 5 cent, 10 cent and 25 cent coins with striking platforms and bulbs have been found at Topper, he noted, but they were generated by retouching chopper edges and making scrapers. Goodyear discussed some of the qualities of the chert found at Topper, such as the fact that it is chemically unstable and weathers badly. He showed slides of cores and flake tools found at Topper, and again noted that no bifaces are found there.]
“That puts some people off,” he said. Goodyear stated that it is possible to make geological and archaeological errors. It’s also possible to make anthropological errors, too, he said. “I’ve spent a career doing it. That’s where you literally shove what you’ve been taught and what you think about how things ought to be, and you shove that into the past. And what I’ve done for most of my career – and I’m slowly being disciplined away from it – is pushing the Holocene into the Pleistocene. In this case we don’t have bifaces at Topper, we have a core/flake technology. It sure sounds kind of Asian to me. People got along for a long time in Australia without bifaces. So part of this is a re-education of ourselves as scientists, which is what’s supposed to happen.”
Goodyear showed slides of some of the hundreds of flake tools that have been recovered at Topper: Prismatic blades, small microblades, “bend/break tools”. Many times the goal was to make a 90 degree angle. He showed photomicrographs of wear and polish on some of the blades found.
“I don’t think Topper is just a Pleistocene quarry, a bunch of people that got lost that were breaking up some rock. I think they knew where it was and they were after the rock. The assemblage is almost microlithic. And you have to ask yourself, “why are people so invested in microlithic tools?’ You look around the world, whether it’s mesolithic or the stuff on the northwest coast, you have fantastic bone, antler, wood and ivory technologies. So little tiny tools are wonderful, and in fact necessary, to create organic artifacts.”
Goodyear discussed how he took some of the Pre-Clovis artifacts found at Topper to Texas A&M University, where he was able to make color microphotographs of flakes with discrete pressure scars, the kind of thing that happens when someone takes a deer antler tine and carefully make one indenture after another. “You can’t get that in nature,” he said. “You need something with two eyes and five digits to make this happen.”
Showing a microphotograph of one such flake, he said, “These are well-placed, separate, partial Hertzian cone fractures that need an indenter placed right there and probably pressed off.”
“I would submit there’s nothing in nature with the specificity that you get when you have two functional eyes and five digits.”
Goodyear showed microphotographs of microwear on a scraper, a flake tool, a spokeshave with seven or eight individually placed unifacial retouch scars. The spokeshave’s edge had multiple, parallel scratches in two different directions, “exactly what you’d expect to see from tool use. These are striads that are going in myriad directions as though an animal had stepped on it in a sandy environment. I would submit this constitutes stroking in a normal human hand process.”
Goodyear noted that research on the microwear of Pre-Clovis tools from Topper was being done by Robson Bonnichsen “and his magic microscope at Texas A&M.” Bonnichsen, a renowned researcher at the Center for the Study of the First Americans, passed away in December 2004. “We’re now picking back up again. This is some of Rob’s work. I’d like to give him credit for that.”
Goodyear showed a photo of a large “anvil,” a block of chert located on the surface of the Pre-Clovis level with smash marks on it where spalls had been removed. He noted again that the block of chert was in a low-energy, fluvial environment while it requires an extraordinary amount of energy to crack spalls off the block. All around the block of chert on the top of the terrace were tools.
Goodyear noted that Topper researchers will be looking microscopically at pieces of debitage that they don’t think were used as tools to see if the debitage contains natural polishes or striations that are occurring simply because of the matrix they were in. “We want to firm up what we think is culturally-induced wear….You have to cross-check yourself. But these kinds of things [polish, striations], being on the edge, are consistent with what people in the microwear field normally call culturally induced wear.”
Possible hearth found
Charcoal has seldom been found at the Topper Site, but Goodyear showed a photo of a layer of charcoal recovered from the Pre-Clovis layer. The layer had reasonably well defined margins, a reasonably well defined bottom and a relatively flat top, he said. “If I found this in the Archaic level I’d be hopping up and down because I would think I had a hearth. I’m not sure it is a hearth. But what I was excited about was there was obviously charcoal there.” There was also a chert flake. He noted that Australian aborigines used fire to quarry chert, using the heat to crack open boulders when you don’t have large hammer stones. “The burned chert [found at Topper] could easily be part of the quarrying activity.” The flake is awaiting further research.
When the hearth-like charcoal was found, Tom Stafford [a renowned dating expert] was flown in to personally collect it. Goodyear noted that the Topper research team includes “a fantastic geoscience team” which is studying at the hearth-like charcoal. “You won’t do Pre-Clovis in America unless you’ve got a really ace geology team to get the context right,” he said. “There’s all kinds of dating issues, site-formation processes to consider as well as ‘are these things made by nature?’ So we’ve got a fantastic team of geologists working on this.”
Goodyear noted that at the time the hearth-like structure was found, the Allendale Paleoindian Expedition was near the end of its dig. The Allendale dig had been financed by private grants, so a call was put out to volunteers and friends try to raise money to pay for the study the charcoal. Within three weeks $5,000 was raised. “That’s a real testimony to the kind of people that are behind this,” Goodyear said. “We didn’t have to write a grant [proposal] and wait 12 months to see if we got it.”
What the charcoal is remains to be seen. Research has shown that in just two small samples there were six different species of plant material – prune, buckeye, conifer, some kind of hard wood, and fruity plant tissue. “It looks like a hearth but we really can’t say that it is. It could be a depression in the terrace where watershed charcoal was deposited,” Goodyear said. Dates from the charcoal were 50,000-51,000 BP, and because radiocarbon dating doesn’t work that far back the dates are minimal and could be 60,000 or 70,000 BP, he said.
If it is a hearth, more will be there because “people are real messy,” Goodyear said. “If it’s just a couple of bubbas 25,000 years ago cooking fish, and they only cooked one hearth, I guess that will be my luck. But people being people, they’re camping, they’re messy, there will be several burn events and we will probably get them. If we don’t, maybe it’s just where a freshet came through the terrace and gave us some charcoal. But we need to dig some more.”
A broader view
Goodyear finished up his talk by putting Topper into perspective in the broader Southeastern United States. He noted the lower Southeast was never glaciated. “When we speak of the Ice Age it didn’t really mean a whole lot down here. You’re so far from the glacier, which would be up in southern Ohio, that there was no real glacial front.”
Goodyear noted that work by previous research has reconstructed the Ice Age forest and given us a pretty good idea of the paleo-vegetation of this part of the world. “This area, I would submit, if Topper is at all what we think it is, we may have early human/late Pleistocene groups that are occupying the coastal plain in relatively warm conditions and also probably occupying a coast that is now under 400 feet of water. So what we may be seeing at places like Topper – and Barbara Purdy probably found a Pre-Clovis site in the ‘70s and wasn’t believed - we may well have groups that are on the coast –the now-drowned coast – that are following up major river systems into the interior, going out perhaps fishing, chert quarrying, and so forth and coming back out again. It’s easy to say there are sites when they are under 400 feet of water because I can’t go look at it but I think we all probably know by now that even Clovis sites are drowned in the Gulf. At some point we are going to have to find a way to do that.”
Four sites are generally cited as examples of Pre-Clovis, Goodyear said: Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania, Saltville, Virginia; Cactus Hill, Virginia; and the Topper Site, which is the southern-most.
Noting again that bifaces have not been found in 100 square meters excavated in the Pre-Clovis strata at Topper, Goodyear said that Topper “may be a lot older than Cactus Hill or Meadowcroft.”
Goodyear noted that other researchers have noted similarities between Clovis lithic technology and Solutrian lithic technology found in Europe, which Goodyear called “an intriguing idea.”
“One of the implications of Topper is we need to continue to think outside the box. We need to be archaeologists. We need to be looking at technology, things that we feel secure are made by people – striking platforms, bulbs, unifaces – regardless of what kind of settlements they are in. You’ve got to do your science out there. You’ve got to be dead certain you’re really in old dirt before you talk about old sites. And we have done that for the past six years at Topper.That being so, there could be a lower Southeastern coastal plain/circum-Gulf demographic body that’s well before the last Ice Age. That’s what Topper, I think, would imply. It might go back 20-, 30-, 40,000 years and have nothing to do with Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill, nothing to do with the origins of Clovis, nothing to do with Solutrean and so forth. That could all have come in about 16,000 or 17,000 (B.P.). Is all this true? Is all of this done-deal science? Not yet. But there’s enough evidence now from Meadowcroft to Topper that it’s just not good enough anymore to say ‘Well, there was nobody here,’ ‘Why doesn’t it look like Clovis?’, ‘Why don’t we have bifaces?’, ‘Why aren’t there more of them?’ We need to find out all these answers. Because in my opinion there’s enough now that we need to take it seriously and to begin prospecting on landscapes that look dated to 12,000 to 18,000.”
The Ice Age on the Gulf coastal plain didn’t look a whole lot different than it does now, Goodyear said. “Where would you want to be? The same reason people move to Miami, St. Augustine and Hilton Head is the same place they would go probably 20,000 years ago during the worst of it.”
“I think we need to set this [the Gulf coastal plain] apart in terms of paleo environments and paleo temperatures as a potential great place to be with a now-drowned coast, the kind of thing that may have been going on, perhaps with migrations out of Asia, who knows when, with people hanging around the 29-33rd latitude simply because it was a relatively mild place to be even during the worst of it during the last glacial winter.”
Florida was twice as wide during the last Ice Age as it is now, Goodyear said. “How many archaeological sites are out here?” he said, pointing to an illustration of Florida’s sunken west coast line. “There are numerous chert quarries from Tampa all the way up to north Florida that look just like Topper. It’s the same kind of chert and so forth. So I think we need to be prospecting for ancient sites in association with these chert quarries.”
Conclusion
People are fascinated by the radiation of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, by the origins of humans in this hemisphere, Goodyear said. “When you get back that far, you’re really asking yourself who you are.” That, to some extent, is why people are interested in the Topper Site. “When you get that far back, yes it’s science. But you inevitably get into philosophical and religious issues, inevitably, because you’re asking the penultimate question of anthropology, especially paleo-anthropology: What are we as a species? Part of the answer for archaeologists, and the public, of ‘what is man?’ has to do with origins. And if you go back into a very, very dark murky time, where we’re not quite sure what’s a human, ‘when did we become human and when were we not human?’, if you could get that story going in the Western Hemisphere,” now the Western Hemisphere is participating in the whole question of our origin as a species.
Goodyear took several questions from the audience:
Question: Is there any evidence as to whether or not these earliest occupations have been continuously populated since then or was there an early population that then left?
Goodyear: “Good question. …So far, there’s a hiatus between however old this Pre-Clovis is and the first Clovis people that got there. I said from the beginning that whatever this is, it’s Pre-Clovis and it’s non-Clovis…. I think Topper is going to end up being really old.”
“….We’re going to spend a lot of time working in the deep part. The other thing I think we need to do is to continue to prospect in Georgia and Florida around these chert quarries. Topper can’t just be by itself. Scientists don’t like a case of one. That was one of poor Meadowcroft’s problems for years, where is Meadowcroft 2? So we need more.”
Question: “Al, I guess it’s kind of hard to accept the idea that [Homo] Sapiens might have made it into the Southeastern United States before making it into Europe. How do you answer that.”
Goodyear: “You’ve got Homo Sapiens, what, in Asia 40[,000] or 50,000 [B.P.]. You even apparently have Homo Erectus coming in late. So I don’t know, it’s not polite to say in open company, but if these are what we think they are they may not be Homo Sapiens potentially. If you go back 50[,000] or 60,000. The question is: They are artificial. As to who made them, I don’t know. My guess is these things are probably coastal migrants somewhere out of northeast Asia. If I was going to bet, that is what I would bet on….”
“It’s old, we don’t really know how old. But I think for now what I want to do is focus on the artifacts. Worry about what’s happening here. There’s a site in extreme Siberia that’s over 28,000 years old. People said ‘there’s no way anybody could have been here pre-LGM because it was too cold.’ … So people are in very, very high cold Siberia back when nobody said they could be there. So I don’t have a direct answer for you. I just know if you can get Homo Erectus in the Indonesian islands at 18,000 [B.P.] and people in the high arctic at 28[,000 B.P.], I’m just sort of leaving my mind open that somebody could have gotten over here.”
Question: “So you wouldn’t be uncomfortable if someone inquired about the word Mousterian?”
Goodyear: “I’m just trying to leave my mind open. One, are they artifacts and two, how old are they? And continue to firm that up and perhaps find more sites and –terrible pun - let the chips fall where they may.”
Possible Mississippian sweat lodge found
An archetypical structure of the Native American is the sweat lodge. The ethnohistoric literature indicates that sweat lodges were common in North America. They were sometimes permanent structures, but the majority were hastily assembled for a particular occasion and not used daily. They consisted of a light framework of poles over which hides, pieces of bark or mats were thrown to contain water vapor. They were used most often for purification rites by those seeking supernatural power or relief from infirmities.
Yet few sweat lodges are known archaeologically.
However, a possible sweat lodge was excavated in Arkansas in the summer of 2004. Robert H. Lafferty III of Mid-Continental Research Associates ( http://www.mcra.biz ) presented a report on the discovery, which was made near Tyronza, Arkansas, northwest of Memphis, Tennessee, on a job for the
Arkansas Highwayand Transportation Department to mitigate construction and enlargement of Highway 63 at Tyronza, which was a large mound site.
During excavation, several areas of fired clay were found that appeared to be undisturbed. One fired clay concentration was exposed. “About 15 minutes later I looked over the balk and my jaw dropped,” Lafferty reported. In one feature, on the edge of a 3-meter bowl-shaped depression. a co-worker had recovered seven “cones” averaging 16 cm in height, 13-14 centimeters in diameter at the base and tapered toward a rounded point. They weigh an average of 2.5 kilograms. Several cones had not been fired hard and were in poor shape. The cones were found in association with deer antlers, which may have been used to handle the cones when they were hot, Lafferty reported. Analysis showed the cones are composed principally of very fine sand and quartz silt and clay.
One cone had a shell-tempered pottery sherd directly underneath it. Another shell-tempered sherd and flint hoe flake were found close by the cone. Part of a layer of charcoal composed of small carbonized twigs and canes, which in some places had the appearance of a lattice, lay directly on the cones. A carbon date on one twig from the top of a cone dated to AD 1270 to 1400, two sigma calibrated, with intercepts of AD 1300. Another sample from this stratum dated AD 1290 to 1420 with intercepts at 1320, 1350 and 1390.
A mass of oxidized clay daub with cane, sapling and grass impressions lay directly on the carbon layer. One fragment showed impressions of cane and saplings at right angles to each other. “We’re hypothesizing that this was daub used to seal up the structure,” Lafferty reported.
Fourteen small post molds were found on the North, West and East sides of the structure, including several that were angled toward the center of the structure.
“In summary, what we recovered was a three-meter-diameter bowl-shaped depression surrounded by small post molds with a shallow pit in the center of it,” Lafferty said. “The cones were on the floor of the depression, which had the appearance of having been used for a while. There were Mississippian artifacts on the floor that are consistent with the four early 14th century radiocarbon dates. There is a layer of charred small wood and cane suggesting a roof of a lattice and there’s a burned mass of daub on the charred layer near the center of the structure which is capped with sandy clay that partially came from the nearby sand blow. There are several characteristics of this feature complex that are consistent with it being a sweat lodge.”
The cones found are not the first ones to be reported in the archaeological literature, Lafferty said. A.D. Kidder described some from the Pecos Pueblo. Five nearly identical cones were found at a site in southeast Missouri, and a large number of other cones have been found at other sites.
Lafferty said he and his colleagues intend to replicate cones and the hypothesized sweat lodge to see if they work and if the sweat lodge, when burned, will produce similar remains to what was found at the Tyronza site.
Symposium reports on research at the Shiloh Mounds, Tennessee
An entire symposium of 10 papers was presented at SEAC 2005 on recent research on Mound A at Shiloh. Shiloh is famous as the site of an early, major battle of the American Civil War in 1862. But long before that, Shiloh – located on the Tennessee River north of what’s now Corinth, Mississippi - was a major Mississippian center.
One of the site’s mounds, Mound A, was eroding into the Tennessee River. So the National Park Service launched a salvage and stabilization project in 1999 led by David G. Anderson (http://www.cr.nps.gov/seac/shiloh/shiloh-index.htm). The SEAC 2005 symposium reported on this work from 1999 to 2004, with papers on the excavation, paleoecological analysis, remote sensing surveys, lithics, pottery and other findings.
One paper by Paul D. Welch reported on research by himself, James Feathers and James B. Stoltman on prehistoric pottery from Mound A. The research has focused on what pottery from the mound can reveal about the chronology of the mound and the site in general, as well as relations between the mound site and other sites in the region. Researchers had hoped to find pots that would tell them about activities on top of the mound, but no such deposits were found. With few exceptions, the thousands of sherds from the mound are from mound fill. Some of the sherds date very early, which is no surprise because earlier excavations at Shiloh in 1933-34 include items from just about every period from the early Archaic onward, Welch said.
Welch discussed research into the dating of grog-tempered pottery and shell-temepered pottery from the mound. Luminescence dating yielded some surprises, he said, noting that luminescence dating tells us when a particular pot sherd was made. Shell-tempered sherds from deposits near the base of the mound were tested, as were two grog-tempered sherds from near the top of the mound.
Most of the luminescence dates fell within the AD 1000-1250 range. But two grog-tempered sherds yielded significantly earlier dates of AD 589 and AD 700. “Such dates for grog-tempered pottery in this area are really not at all surprising,” Welch said. “One surprise is a shell-tempered sherd with an estimated date of AD 644 +/- 121, which challenges the prevalent belief that in this region shell-tempered pottery shows up only after AD 1000.” So far this is an isolated date, and while it shouldn’t be ignored nor should too much emphasis be put on it, he said.
Welch described the types of pots that the sherds from the mound came from, and their decorations.
Most of the pottery from Shiloh, whatever its tempering, appears to be of local manufacture. However there are a few sherds that may be from the Moundville, Alabama, area. Another sherd may be from an American Bottom Ramey Incised pot or a very good local copy of one. Also found were a handful of complicated stamped sherds that may be from North Georgia/East Tennessee/Western North Carolina region.
“When the Mound A project was being planned, many of the research questions that were specified focused on discovering what people did on top of the mound and what kind of people participated in those activities,” Welch said. “Because nearly all the sherds recovered came from mound fill, material that was originally somewhere else on the site, the pottery tells us nothing about mound-top activities.
However, as a sample of pottery from the Shiloh site as a whole, this material does tell us several things about the community. First, one, the luminescence dates suggest that some potters in this stretch of the Tennessee River valley may have begun using shell tempering in pottery several centuries earlier than we had previously supposed. Second, we know this community residing at Shiloh was making both grog-tempered pottery and shell-tempered pottery before the time the mound was begun. Third, luminescence dates show that some potters were still using grog tempering at least until the 1100s and perhaps as late as the 1300s. It is an open question why potters in this community chose to make pots with grog or with shell. The reasons might have been technological or ideological or perhaps statements about identity, but we’re going to leave that topic for future research. Fourth, some individuals in this community either visited, came from or perhaps had relatives in the American Bottom area, in the North Georgia/East Tennessee/Western North Carolina region and possibly also at Moundville. The American Bottom connection had been known previously, both from the Shiloh pipe made from Missouri flint clay as well as from two sherds of Ramey Incised found during the excavations in the 1930s. But with the possible exception of two copper ear spools, ties to the east were not anticipated in anything previously recovered at Shiloh.”
Welch said, however, no ties can be shown between the people who built the Shiloh mound and people who lived in the area at the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, or the Nashville, Tennessee, basin. “If this apparent absence of connections is not merely the result of poor sherd preservation, it is surprising that we do not see exchanges between these relatively nearby areas given that we do see ties to the much-more-distant Cahokia and possibly Etowah and Moundville polities. It would also be surprising if the people at Shiloh had ties to both Etowah and Moundville, given the evidence that Etowah and Moundville were usually on bad terms with each other.”
A wealth of insight about Poverty Point
Poverty Point is the largest Archaic site in North America. The mysterious, 3,500-year-old site in northern Louisiana is a series of concentric mounds (http://www.lastateparks.com/poverty/pvertypt.htm).
presented an interesting paper at SEAC 2005 on recent research on the site’s Mound A by himself and Anthony Ortmann (Tulane University).
Kidder gave a description of the mound, which consists of a “cone” and “platform,”and provided an overview of previous research on it. Coring conducted in 2001 and 2002 on both cone and platform indicated they were built at different times, with the cone being older than the platform.
Kidder reported on new excavations conducted during the summer of 2005. A unit was hand excavated from the surface to 10.5 meters below the current ground surface. The excavation lasted 28 days. In addition, 72 soil cores were obtained, mostly focused on the platform and around the platform.
“We have cored along the edges of the cone. The cone is so steep and so large that we have not been successful in penetrating to the base,” Kidder said.
Three radiocarbon dates were recovered from the submound midden beneath Mound A. The oldest of these is approximately 2,000 calibrated years B.C., and two dates are essentially duplicates of each other at about 1,350 B.C.
“What we believe, then, is in fact we actually have two distinct archaeological mounds,” Kidder said.
Kidder reported on the submound midden at the base of the Mound A platform. The submound midden is approximately 20-25 centimeters thick on average and is overlain by a single-stage mound construction.
“The curious thing about the submound midden is that it’s full of artifacts, but no artifact is larger than 3 centimeters in maximum dimension,” Kidder said. The artifacts include fine pieces of sandstone or rounded quartz pebbles. There were also fragments of steatite, galena and igneous rock. “Curiously enough for a stone age site where chipped stone is in hyper abundance, there is not one, not any, zero pieces of chipped stone anywhere in the material based on microartifact analysis down to the .5 milimeter range. It’s a very, should we say, peculiar midden to say the least,” Kidder said.
The people who built the mound covered the midden with a layer of pure white silt, and then constructed the mound very rapidly as a single-stage 10 meters high. There is no evidence of weathering on the basket loads of earth used to build the mound.
Kidder discussed the possible meaning of the findings from Mound A both for the Poverty Point site and more broadly for Southeastern archaaeolgy.
“This is not your typical hunter-gatherer site,” Kidder said. “I think that with the work a variety of people on Archaic hunter-gatherer complexity, what we are really doing here is we are going to have to rethink the whole notion of what it is to be a hunter-gatherer, what it is to be a complex hunter-gatherer. And I think the data coming out of the Southeastern United States such as this, and a whole host of other data, are going to let us really seriously recast the notion of what hunter-gatherer complexity is and what hunter-gatherers really are.”
A quick overview of recent Swift Creek research
Another highlight of SEAC 2005 was a symposium organized by Thomas J. Pluckhahn, author of “Kolomoki” (University of Alabama Press, 2003), about the Swift Creek culture. The Swift Creek people occupied Georgia and parts of Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and north Florida from about A.D. 100 to A.D. 750. They were magnificent wood carvers who are known by the elaborate designs they stamped into pottery with carved wooden paddles. (See http://www.sgc.peachnet.edu/Tour/Science/ARCHE/Arche.htm )
Twelve papers were presented spanning the Apalachicola River valley in northwest Florida, Alabama, the Atlantic coast, and the Etowah River valley in northwest Georgia. University of Georgia archaeologist Mark Williams reported on the Swift Creek-type-site near Macon, Ga.
Pluckhahn concluded the symposium with a discussion of his fascinating research into the symmetry of Swift Creek designs, which holds the potential of helping to unlock the designs’ meaning.
Two papers illustrated the tremendous potential for archaeological research to reach out and engage the public in a very meaningful way.
The papers by Dean Wood and Scott J. Keith discussed recent research at the Leake Site, a large and well-known site on the Etowah River near the town of Cartersville in Bartow County in northwest Georgia. The research was done because the Georgia Department of Transportation plans to widen Highway 61/113, a congested two lane road that crosses the site. The site is really six sites. The Swift Creek people lived in three parts of the sites. One of these, the Leake Site proper, contains an early Woodland village and two mounds. (See http://www.southres.com/)
Dean Wood, of Southern Research Historic Preservation Consultants Inc., put the Leake Site into context, discussing the work of earlier researchers and efforts to preserve the site by the city of Cartersville.
Wood’s team began working on the site in November 2004, spending 11 months in the field until late September 2005. Wood presented some preliminary findings. Over 250 square meters of unplowed Swift Creek midden was hand excavated. “The midden ranges in depth from 30 to 50 centimeters in depth in some instances, and is the richest midden I have ever seen in my 33 year career with the exception perhaps of the Etowah Site.”
“Besides excavating the site, the Department of Transportation wanted to get the word out to the local folks in Cartersville, Ga., statewide, and to archaeologists. They asked us to develop a public outreach program that had many pieces to it,” Wood reported.
A big sign was put up alongside the highway, where thousands of people passed each day, telling about what the archaeologists were doing.
“We had interviews from TV stations, and newspapers and magazines,” Wood said. One TV station cut live at 11 pm to an interview conducted by a reporter with lights on-site. “I’ve never seen an archaeological site be featured at 11 o’clock news live at night. There was an excavation unit that had just been flooded that we pumped out. It looked better at night than it did during the day.”
Tours were conducted with lots of school groups, and groups from the Georgia Department of Transportation, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and U.S. Corps of Engineers. “Teaching Trunks” were prepared for the Georgia Department of Education containing activities, puzzles and artifacts, geared for elementary schools and available to teachers all over the state.
A Web page was developed just for this specific archaeological site, www.bartowdig.com. “It’s meant to continually be updated and inform not only the local individuals and local citizens of Bartow County who see us working every day, and can’t come out for a visit, it’s also meant to reach the world, literally.” As data becomes available it will be posted on the site.
Pages on the site tell people what it’s like to work in the field or in the lab.
The Web site is also updated with neat things that were found, including a duck effigy head.
An archaeology day was sponsored in April 2005, including lectures, tours of the site, tables set up with activities for kids such as “Ask an archaeologist”. Visitors were allowed to watch archaeologists excavate, and kids were allowed to screen overburden.
Analysis of the excavation has just begun. 2,600 features were found, many of them post molds. A lot of minerals were found, particularly quartz crystals, which Wood said were probably being found locally and then exported by the Swift Creek people.
Wood noted that the Leake Site is being encroached on by approaching development and while parts are publicly owned, many others are not. “The site is threatened and we’re very concerned about that.” The city of Cartersville is buying as much of it as it can, planning to connect the site to biking and hiking trails that Bartow County has, so that people will be able to visit the site. “We will be preparing interpretation for the site at a later time so not all is lost,” Wood said.
