Troweling Techniques

As an aspiring archaeologist, I feel that it is important to describe the various troweling and shoveling techniques that are needed in the excavation process.  Here is a trowel:

This is one of your most important excavation instruments.  Obviously, you hold it from the wooden handle, but you want to make sure you have a good, firm grip as you are using this devise to chop and scrap and basically wrestle your way through the dirt.  You will be developing impressive hand muscles as a result, and you will get the most annoying blisters when first learning how to trowel.  I place my hand on the edge of the wooden handle as close to, even touching, the beginning of the metal portion of the trowel.  Different ways of placing your hand and fingers allow you to apply a certain amount of pressure depending on the feature and texture of the soil.  For a scrape, you want your hand and the blade to be parallel to the ground and pull the trowel towards you.  Keep a firm grip, or else your trowel will "chatter" and make little lines instead of a smooth groove along the soil, and we archaeologists are all about perfection.  Place more pressure towards the point of the trowel to cover a smaller area and allow for your tool to cut through tougher spots in the sediment.  When the soil is too hard (for us, the dirt was like concrete and almost impossible to excavate through!) there are water sprayers you can use to cover the soil with a thin layer of water.  This does not turn the water into mud but instead spares you at least a year from undergoing early arthritis.  Your trowel will become precious to you over time, so do what you can to prevent it from rusting and make sure you sharpen it to make life easier.

When the trowel isn't going deep enough for us, then we turn to drastic sources.  

A shovel will be your best friend when busting through sod and the plow zone (which is one of the first layers we encounter in excavating - it is the sediment that has been churned from years of human activity and movement of the earth and has a combination of elements out of context from the next level.  Context is important!!).  We do not use a shovel, however, for going through each layer like a trowel, where you have a close-up view of each feature and each story of history told in the soil when on your knees.  Instead, a shovel makes you thankful you do not have to use your tiny trowel to get through the heavy and hard layer of grass and plow zone.  It also lets you make straighter walls for your unit as you cut through the sod and get to the beautiful layer of sediment below.  And when you are frustrated with the dirt, you can always use a trenching shovel to make a combination of a shovel and a trowel!

And, of course, when all else fails and we feel lazy, archaeologists can rely on the beauty of technological advancement to break through the sod more effectively than a shovel and fill up the dirt in our units faster than multiple crews with shovels combined.

God bless technology.  

Background on Fort Ancient

I think it's time I gave a little more information about the Native Americans whose site I've been working on, especially since I keep making references to all these time periods and artifacts found that may not seem to make much sense out of context.  I already gave some information about the Fort Ancient Indians (and yes, that is what all the archaeologists call them, since I suppose they're a little too lazy to say "Native Americans" or prefer to stick to traditional terms), especially time period (1300-1500 CE) and at least one location where they're found, which is located at the park we excavate in.  Fort Ancient Indians thrived more realistically in the Ohio and Kentucky valleys closer to 1000-1650 CE.  Their villages were usually in the circular shape as seen in the site with rectangular houses (which we saw when excavating post holes) and a central plaza for more public and shared activities, indicating a more sedentary lifestyle.  There has been some burial mounds by the Fort Ancient Indians, but that dwindled as time went on and they shifted their burials to a more cemetery setting.  Fun fact: last year, we accidentally uncovered a feature that we thought was a typical trash pit or the like, but discovered that it was actually an area full of burials, which would be a highly political ordeal if we totally uncovered those features due to protective laws over Native American burials.  Through the Cincinnati Museum Center, we tend to leave those alone in order to deal with less paperwork and being greeted with upset natives.  Much of the agriculture was maize-based, which we could see from all of the burnt corn kernels and corn cobs we find in the dirt when excavating.  Fort Ancient Indians were once thought to be a branch of Mississippian cultures, which could be supported with some evidence of Mississippian pottery sherds found in features on occasion, but the overall style of pottery and flint-knapping indicate a more direct connection with Hopewell cultures.  The pottery is recognized as Fort Ancient (especially during the Madisonville period) by being cordmarked along the rim and the neck of each vessel.  Each projectile point has a "Hahn hump" in the middle of the flint that makes it distinctive as a Fort Ancient knapped flint, though the reason for the hump has yet to be explained.  The predominant time period of focus is the Madisonville period, which is the latest time frame which, like the earlier time periods, did not indicate interactions with Europeans, but did point to a high point in culture and activity.  Hopefully with this information you will be able to gain a better feel for the context from which we extract the story of the Fort Ancient Indians out of the ground layer by layer.

Important Archaeological Facts and Terms to Know

In my times in the field, in the lab, and in the classroom, there are specific terms that we as archaeologists use that we INSIST on using.  When we hear any mispronunciations or read any intentional or unintentional spelling or technical errors, we feel the need to twitch and potentially foam at the mouth.  We also have a wave of entitlement wash over us, and we feel the need to correct and belittle you in every possible way.  For example, when you see broken pieces of ceramic, it is called a pottery SHERD, but SHARD.  

Piece of pottery strap handle SHERD

That is one of the most directly important distinctions that must be made, and if you fail to appease us, then you will get attacked without mercy.  Now that that has been settled, let’s move on to other terminology.  The area that we excavate at is called the site (in paleontology, it’s called a locality).  Broken pieces of flint are called flakes or chert, which can cut you really deep when you are working on the screens and are not wearing gloves, so caution!  Flint that has been worked on both sides is called a biface, and not all bifaces are arrowheads; there is a variety of bifaces such as projectile points, spearheads, scrapers, and drills.  

Flint scraper (one of my favorite finds)

We find a lot of bone that gets worked on (which you can tell from cut marks and reshaping and polishing).  Some deer antlers are tapered and pointed to be turned into an awl for both sewing and making holes in leather that has been scraped by a bone beamer (usually a humerus broken in half).  

Bone pin - another favorite find

The units we excavate in are typically 2x2 meters in size, as I said in a previous post, and the most important things to know about units are that you must keep everything level, map the features, and keep your walls straight.  Believe me, it sounds easy, but it is an art everyone has difficulty perfecting. 

As you can see, units can get bumpy from all the bones and features etc.

And last, but not least, we archaeologists get really excited about rocks, because archaeologists are the people that study rocks, right?  Wrong.  That’s geologists.  And when we find a silly or unusually-shaped rocks that individuals think are of some importance, then we call those AFR, or “Another F***ing Rock.”   Hopefully you have been enlightened with this information and I will spare you from the attack of skilled archaeologists looking for fresh meat to torture in the field.

Background on the Hahn Site

I have been working at the Hahn Site for the past 4 summers, with this summer counting as my internship because I have more knowledge and experience in archaeology to contribute more to the site as a whole.  Every day, I wake up at 7:30 and drive half an hour to Newtown, Ohio to Clear Creek Park.  Here, there is this huge field on a raised area of land that serves as a plateau surrounded by a small stream and a large collection of trees.  In this area is the site that we excavate at, which is a prehistoric Fort Ancient village.  We typically open 2 meter by 2 meter units, which usually evolve into long trenches filled with features like earthen ovens, post holes of houses, and even trash and latrine pits.  However, archaeologist enthusiasts like us in the 21st century are not the only individuals who sought more information about this grassy area scattered with Madisonville points.  In 1885, the Peabody Museum at Harvard began mainly surface excavations that did not entirely penetrate the sediment but allowed for preliminary surface collections like flint, bone, and pottery to gain more knowledge about the site.  These surface surveying techniques allowed for the excavators to learn that the village was circular shaped, almost like a horse shoe, with a central plaza. Our excavations starting in 2008 (the year before I started working at the site) brought us to dig into a wall trench and trash pits filled with charcoal and other debris.  We used these findings to date the site to about 1300-1500 CE, and even more specifically to the Fort Ancient Madisonville Phase of 1500-1650.  I find it extremely exciting to work with the head archaeologists at the Cincinnati Museum Center both there and at the lab because, with them, I get to uncover a little bit of knowledge, layer by layer, about local Native American sites I honestly had no clue about prior to my first field school.  I also felt special my first year as a freshman in college working at my first field school and getting filmed for a local television program (I'm the one in the light pink shirt!) http://www.cetconnect.org/video/hahn-site-field-school.  It really is a privilege to work at this site and gain the knowledge and experience I need to become the archaeologist I aspire to be, and the Hahn Site will always be close to my heart.  Stay tuned - I will be updating you more on the adventures we go on out here!

Introductory Post

Hello World!  I have realized that I have not started my blog for my summer internship.  In case you were wondering my whereabouts, I have been on an excavation in Snyder, Texas through the Museum of Texas Tech for six weeks.  This allowed me to go straight into my internship through the Cincinnati Museum Center as an archaeology intern working in Newtown, Ohio on a Fort Ancient Native American site called the Hahn Site Field School.  Since early May, I have been volunteering two days a week (since the archaeology lab is only open Monday and Tuesday) cataloging and cleaning artifacts from previous field seasons in the Geier Center Collections Center for the Museum.  I took a leave for my excavation in Texas, and now I am a field technician student at the Hahn site.  Here, I am learning the various skills involved in excavating, screening, mapping, and other techniques needed in the field.  What I like about this internship is that it directly applies to what I want to study and how I want to apply my skills in the classroom and in this internship to the prospect of finding a job and contributing my knowledge to the world around me.  I can also post neat and interesting pictures on what we find at each site as well!  So stay tuned, world, for I will be keeping you on your toes with updates on what we find, what I learn, and the overall adventures involved in being an archaeology intern!