Early morning once again – the JMU field school arrives on site, attempting to outrun the day’s heat. String is looped around nails in the ground and pulled taut. It appears to hover above the soft gray humus, marking 1x1m units. Before the first shovel can bite into soil, tools must be sharpened and paperwork completed. Opening elevations are gathered at one unit, while the sound of file against trowel carries from the next. Finally, when the first gnats are swatted away, digging begins.
As the students work through topsoil, one thing comes to the front of their minds: they are working off natural strata rather than operating within an arbitrary matrix. The first strata of these units are generally distinguished by the appearance of plow scars in the floor, the remnants of plantation work from a century prior. Each team of excavators keeps an eye trained on the ground, watching for changes in soil color, though namely for plow scars. Since this soil has been churned repeatedly, the students also find a smattering of artifacts from across time.
Unit 8 uncovers a whelk shell with clearly visible incisions. Such a piece would have been part of a larger cup, used as a symbol of high status within Capachequi. It would have originated near the Gulf Coast, perhaps traveling through Apalachee territory before reaching Capachequi. While “warfare among Lamar chiefdoms was a fact of life,” especially at the time of de Soto’s expedition, these chiefdoms nonetheless participated in “low level trade in exotic substances” (Hudson 155).[1] Such a shell, discovered within the haphazard plow zone of Unit 8, could be indicative of such trade.
We must be careful not to speculate too freely, however. One whelk shell is far from enough evidence for grand statements about trade in the region. Unit 6, for instance, extracts a three sided, flaked stone knife which clearly dates thousands of years before the Lamar period (C.E. 1350-1600). Elsewhere, students discover plain potsherds and often unidentifiable lithic flakes. Again, this smattering of artifacts complicates any effort to precisely tell time.
The day comes to a close. The field school leaves with artifacts rustling in brown paper bags and paperwork in hand. These notes are only the beginning of a story, however. Plow zone is far from the clearest of archaeological contexts, and any argument about the site and its artifacts will always be dependent on context. Still, the excitement of the students digging their first units encourages the imagination. Standing on the top of Mound A, it is impossible not to see the spectral outlines of pit houses, smoke wafting here and there from the center of thatched dome roofs; impossible not to feel the bodies moving between, perhaps gossiping about the appearance of traders with ornately carved whelk shell. It will only be in breaking past Strata I that such imaginary scenes will be truly put to the test.
-Allen Luethke and Kelly Teboe
We must be careful not to speculate too freely, however. One whelk shell is far from enough evidence for grand statements about trade in the region. Unit 6, for instance, extracts a three sided, flaked stone knife which clearly dates thousands of years before the Lamar period (C.E. 1350-1600). Elsewhere, students discover plain potsherds and often unidentifiable lithic flakes. Again, this smattering of artifacts complicates any effort to precisely tell time.
The day comes to a close. The field school leaves with artifacts rustling in brown paper bags and paperwork in hand. These notes are only the beginning of a story, however. Plow zone is far from the clearest of archaeological contexts, and any argument about the site and its artifacts will always be dependent on context. Still, the excitement of the students digging their first units encourages the imagination. Standing on the top of Mound A, it is impossible not to see the spectral outlines of pit houses, smoke wafting here and there from the center of thatched dome roofs; impossible not to feel the bodies moving between, perhaps gossiping about the appearance of traders with ornately carved whelk shell. It will only be in breaking past Strata I that such imaginary scenes will be truly put to the test.
-Allen Luethke and Kelly Teboe
[1] Hudson, Charles. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Print.