Little orange flags stretch across the ground, marking points on a large grid in front of Mound A. Two-person teams converge at each flag. They bring buckets, trowels, shovels, screens, and perhaps most importantly, paperwork. While the sun is still low in the sky, and while the gnats and mosquitos are still relatively dormant, shovel testing begins.
For most of the James Madison students of the Points of Contact Field School, archaeological field work is usually the province of textbooks and teacher demonstrations. Despite the historical reasons for our excavation, there is a sense among the students of simply digging into something new: new experiences, new techniques, and new information about the events of our site.
With that, the crunch of shovels fills the morning air. Moments later our teams break past topsoil, and already artifacts appear in the screens. What seems to be a potsherd is pressed to a tongue – if it is ceramic, it is more likely to stick; if it is a rock, it will tend to roll off. Potsherd after potsherd is promptly placed in the artifact bag. Notes are made on paperwork: “potsherd and lithic (the fragment of a stone tool) found 10-20cm below the surface.” On the final transect on our grid this day, one team unearths a sizeable chunk of daub, the hard-fired clay which would have formed the plaster-like walls of Indian dwellings. This soil is generous with its artifacts, and happy exclamations quickly follow the sound of shovels.
Beyond the soil, the people of Georgia are generous too. They warmly welcome us, graciously cook the team barbecue, and even provide a water tank for a later screening process. This is only the beginning of the list, however. Many local volunteers assist with the work of archaeology itself.
The figures of one of the teams are seen hunched over an open shovel test. They are foregrounded against a swamp densely forested with cypress. The rest of the field school watches as the team members bolt upright and wave their arms. They’ve uncovered a kind of stone tool called Pickwick, or, what would probably have been a knife for someone roughly three to five thousand years ago. Its edges show clear signs of being reworked. Even though this doesn’t tell us anything immediately about Capachequi or Hernando de Soto, it nonetheless tells us that people have used this site for a very long time, and that resources in the area are frequently recycled. A local volunteer smiles from ear to ear at the find and speaks knowledgably about it to the students.
-Allen Luethke and Kelly Teboe
The figures of one of the teams are seen hunched over an open shovel test. They are foregrounded against a swamp densely forested with cypress. The rest of the field school watches as the team members bolt upright and wave their arms. They’ve uncovered a kind of stone tool called Pickwick, or, what would probably have been a knife for someone roughly three to five thousand years ago. Its edges show clear signs of being reworked. Even though this doesn’t tell us anything immediately about Capachequi or Hernando de Soto, it nonetheless tells us that people have used this site for a very long time, and that resources in the area are frequently recycled. A local volunteer smiles from ear to ear at the find and speaks knowledgably about it to the students.
-Allen Luethke and Kelly Teboe