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| Just starting to remove the sods |
It’s been raining for the last 2 days here in Old
Harbor. Today we did not want to muck up
what we had accomplished at the site I reported on earlier, and so we moved
further out the peninsula to lay out the grid and start on another site we had
to excavate eventually. We had thought
that we would not get to it until next week, but with the rain and mucky
conditions for digging features we decided to go out and bust some sod and
start in on the other site. At least the
shovel work would keep us warm.
And boy did we ever keep warm. We mapped the site and laid out the grid,
removed the sod and shoveled off around 5 cubic meters of dirt – all in one
day. We were exhausted but elated by
days end. But, it must be said, things
did not look good at noon. Under the sod
was thick homogenous layer of weathered volcanic ash, boulders and lots and
lots of cottonwood tree roots - thick ones that we had to use the saw to cut
through and remove. I was beginning to
question if it was even a real archaeological site. Maybe last year when Jill and I ‘found’ the
site we had just been imagining a red ochre floor and charcoal at the bottom of
a deep test pit (the charcoal was radiocarbon dated to over 6000 years
ago)? How do big boulders end up on top
of sterile fill anyhow? (It turns out they probably rolled down from an eroding
outcrop above the site). So we cleaned
out the old test pit and dug into the walls and there, indeed, was the thin
layer of red ochre and flecks of charcoal resting directly on the glacial till. But it looked so ephemeral, and there was so
much dirt to remove. But we persevered –
digging on in the mist and light rain.
Eventually we did get most of the block down to a different
layer of mixed ash that contained chunks of white and gold ash, and I expanded
out the old test pit to see what I could find.
It looks like the mixed ashes might be a thick layer of sods used to
cover the roof of an old structure. And
then just when I started to get to the floor layer I turned up a red ochre
grinder. A stone used to crush and grind
the red ochre that stains the dirt floors of old Alutiiq houses a bright
red. We clearly have a site worth
excavating. Still how did the structure
get buried so deeply in just 6000 years?
Did a drift of ash from a later volcanic eruption cover the site, or
perhaps silt, ash, and rocks slid down over the site from the slope above?
We still have to figure out the construction of the
structure, and even if it is, indeed, really a structure with roof sods (I’ve
been wrong before). But at least we now
know there is a floor of some sort down there – a place where people sat and
ground red ochre. I’m excited to get down
there to figure it all out – to get at the story of what happened at that spot 6000 years ago.
I have also posted a couple of artifact pictures from the
first site we excavated at for the first 2 days. All of the chipped stone from the younger
occupation at that site has been of basalt or agate or imported from the Alaska
Peninsula – clear chalcedony and brightly colored chert (but, it must be said,
we have not found very many). We have
not recovered a single piece of the usually ubiquitous local red chert. We have also found the usual split cobble
tools made from greywacke and the worked slate fragments discarded from the
production of ground stone tools. One of
the artifacts is a tiny chalcedony core that looks like it might have been a
used up microblade core. The other is a
small chipped point made of exotic red chert.
Patrick
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| Getting into the roots |
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| An ochre grinder and on a living surface! |
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| Exotic red chert chipped point from KOD 580 |
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| 5 cubic meters later at the end of the day. .. . |
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| Chalcedony core - used up micro blade core? |
