Week 4 (May 31st- June 6th) - Brought to you this week by Arron Wiliamson and Lela Grant.

Sorry for the lag in posts this week bloggers!  Field school internet is sometimes hard to come by.  However, in addition to our weekly update we have a special extra post this week from Joeseph Renow.  Joeseph is a Ph. D candidate at Loyola University who is writing his dissertation on how research is conducted at the Angel site.  You will find this in the next post.  I hope you enjoy the different perspective!

Now for ou weekly update.

            The Blog week started with forecasts of scattered thunderstorms. Thursday afternoon severe storms rolled in during the afternoon, but we didn’t let that stop us. After covering the trench to protect our work from the rain, we broke into two groups. One group moved to the garage to repair (once again!) our broken water screens, while the other group moved the museum building to organize the bagged artifacts that had accumulated over the course of field school. Friday the rain was gone, but cold air remained. The group headed to the trench in hoodies and long pants, and water screeners wore rain ponchos to keep dry and warm. 

            After our days of rain and cold, we were reminded of the important role weather and climate play in the formation of an archaeological site. This fact is most obviously seen in our eastern most units. These units (9-12) sit mostly outside the palisade and on an eastward slope. As we excavated, we noticed layers of clay which were originally thought to have been packed down by cultural activity, but underneath the clay we found a feature full of artifacts including a large number of deer bone, pottery sherds, fish bones and scales, lithics, and bone needles. The considerable amounts of large faunal remains and charcoal are indicative of a period of rapid filling. This shows that the material did not have enough time to be washed or fall down the slope. 

The layers of clay over the feature suggest that it’s a result of washing from either rain or the nearby Ohio River. Another interpretation, provided by Dr. Bill Monaghan, is that these layers, with so little cultural debris, are due to attempts to repair or support the palisade wall with this type of soil followed by periods of trash deposits.  The area immediately outside palisade also has a large amount of charcoal and burnt daub, which suggests the palisade, may have been burned at some point.

            In other areas of the site, Dr. Bill Monaghan, one of our directors, taught students how to take core samples. They started with Mound F, the second largest at the site with a long and interesting history. It was added to twice prehistorically, and the first “mound” was capped with sand.  Historically, Glenn A. Black and his WPA workers excavated the outer most mound in the 1930’s and 40’s. After his excavations, the mound was rebuilt using backfill dirt. Dr. Monaghan and our students wanted to take core samples to see if there was evidence of all of the aforementioned layers and the possibility that some of the original mound remained for future research.

Using a tractor, they drove 4 foot long clear tubes into the mound; these tubes essentially created an observable cross-section of the mound layers. Working from ground level down, the top most section of the core sample included grass and the backfill Glenn A. Black used to rebuild the mound after excavation. There was then a transitional period between the WPA excavation and the prehistoric outer mound seen within the cores. It appears that Black did not completely excavate the outer mound. Beneath the outer mound layer, there is a very thin line of sand in the core sample, which reflects the sand cap of the inner mound, prior to the construction of the outer mound. The sand layer is followed by an area of charcoal, which suggests a period of heavy prehistoric cultural activity. After the charcoal layer, we saw the inner mound material. Beneath the inner mound material, there is another layer of charcoal, which again suggests cultural activity, though this time it is associated with the original ground surface, prior to any mound construction. The final layer visible in the core sample is the “B-horizon” which is the name given to the sterile soil that underlies all cultural activity.

 How our artifacts are processed!

Step 1: Pour the buckets of soil coming from excavation onto water screens and carefully wash the dirt away with a hose.  Below you see students Gary Macadaeg, Lela Grant, Marsha Ratliff, and supervisor Jasmine McClure.  Our tough students continued even in 50 degree weather!

 

Step 3: Spread out the washed
artifacts in drying racks to be dried by the sun

Step 2: Find really neat artifacts
such as this bird beak!

  

Step 4: Bag the dried artifacts with their
respective field specimen cards into
labeled bags

 

Step 5: Organize artifacts in the museum and
place them back into buckets for transport back to the Glenn A. Black Lab at IU

After excavating the back dirt, Dr. Bill Monaghan and Dr. Jeremy Wilson
looking at the profile from excavations which took place in 2007

Hannah Bose cleans the walls of 12-E-11

Left: Mama Bear (Autumn Williamson) fills out FS (field specimen) cards which are placed in each bucket of soil for water screening
Above: Honey Badger (Blake Davenport) excavates a complex series of zones in 12-E-2.

In this photo you can see a series of three wall trenches,
likely representing three rebuilding episodes of the structure's walls.
Blake Davenport is seen here.

After the current level is complete, Jason Hines takes elevations in each of the four corners in
12-E-10 using the datum line, a line level, and tape measurer.  The single datum allows for the precise measurement of elevations across the entire unit of 12-E.

Having withstood a very cold day in the field, the students and myself take time for some fun pictures to keep moral high.  This is the Angel version of Grant Wood's "American Gothic."  Perhaps we should call it "Angelian Gothic!"