The Dating Game

As the last post discussed, getting new dates is always exciting. Well, we just got seven more and they are interesting and raise more questions about the site. First, we have a date from the lowest level of the site that now pushes back the earliest occupation of the site to perhaps as early as 5600 years ago. We have another result that corresponds roughly to the other early date we got from the site, suggesting that some of the earliest occupants of the island lived at Stock Cove.

Some of the other new dates suggest a possible occupation hiatus, when the site was abandoned for over 1,000 years, and maybe as much as 2,000, although we need to run some more tests to confirm this. The next oldest date is from the early Groswater Paleoeskimo occupation of the site around 2700 years ago, which corresponds to some of the Groswater artifacts we found from that excavation level. The stratigraphy (levels) of the site suggest they occupied the site off an on for a few centuries and there does not seem to be a clear distinction between their use of the site and the later Dorset Paleoeskimo occupation, which raises some intriguing questions about the transitional period that we need to examine more closely. We have a few dates from when that transition is thought to have taken place around 2200-2000 years ago.

So, we have much to think about as we work out the details of the different peoples who lived at Stock Cove. I've attached a graph of the dates from last summer's field work.

Radiocarbon Dating the Site

Getting radiocarbon dates back from the lab is like Christmas to archaeologists. You get an email from the lab and hope that you have an accurate date and that it is interesting in some way. You usually want it to meet your expectations or exceed them. Well, we just got back dates from charcoal samples from one of the layers of our excavations from last summer (2016), and they do both.

The samples we sent off were collected from Level E in the excavation area, which contained significant amounts of Maritime Archaic stone tools and debitage (the debris left behind when people make stone tools). So, we knew that the level was at least over 3,000 years old, but we were not sure exactly how old it might be. Some of the artifacts suggested that it may have been early in the Archaic sequence, and we know Archaic people probably first occupied northwestern parts of the island of Newfoundland sometime between 5,000-6,000 years ago. We now know that they made it all the way down into southeastern Newfoundland by at least 4,900 years ago, and probably sooner.

The date for our sample came back as 4470 +-30 BP (Before Present). But because the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has changed through time, this date needs to be calibrated to give us an accurate calendar date. Fortunately, scientists have figured out how to do just that. The calibrated dates with 95% certainty is between 3390 BC - 3080 BC, or between 3070 BC - 3025 BC. There are two different range possibilities because the calibration curve is intercepted in several places. This places the date between 4975 and 5290 years ago! The highest probability is somewhere between 5100-5200 years ago!! These are some of the earliest dates on the island, but we should realize this is only one date and needs to be confirmed with more samples, which we are about to send off to the lab.

One of the interesting things about these dates are that they date Level E and there is a deeper stratum, Level F, underlying it. If you remember the last post about the Law of Superposition you will know that this means that Level F must be even older than that! We will be trying to select samples from Level F to send to the lab this week.

Layers of understanding

It is a well known aspect of archaeology that most of the research takes place in the lab, well removed from the field study site. This is one of the reasons it is so important to document everything in as high resolution as possible, so that back in the lab you aren't wondering what the hell you did. One of the most important things to document at a site is the stratigraphic profile of the excavation area. This is just a fancy way to say the natural and cultural layers of the site. This information can tell us a great deal about how cultures and environments changed through time. This is due to the Law of Superposition, an idea thought to have first been written about in 1699 by Nicolaus Steno, a Danish-born naturalist. In a nutshell, the principle of superposition is that things closer to the surface tend to be younger than things more deeply buried.

Think about it in terms of your laundry basket. The clothes at the bottom have been in there longer than those at the top (and are probably smellier). If we dug through your laundry basket we could tell roughly how your clothing choices changed through time, from when you last emptied it to the time of the examination. Archaeological sites can be examined in the same way. As we dig deeper, we are exposing older and older things that may belong to an earlier culture or may simply be telling us a story about how a culture changed at that location. These layers also contain information about the environment in which those people lived. So, by recording the changes in the layers, including artifacts as well as what is contained in the soil itself, we can begin to understand how cultures and environments changed through time, and how they may have affected each other.

That is why we draw "profiles" of the walls of our excavations to record those changes in order to help us interpret what we found in the various cultural and natural layers we dug through. Here is an example from our 2016 excavation at Stock Cove. Level A is a natural layer, Level B contained Dorset Paleoeskimo artifacts, Level C contained early Paleoeskimo materials, and Levels D-F appear to represent changes in the Maritime Archaic occupation of the site. We hope these layers are going to tell us a great deal how the occupation of the site and its environment changed over the last 5,000 years.

Stock Cove Field Season (Part 1)

We just got back from 11 days of excavation at Stock Cove. We arrived back in St. John's covered in dirt (and a bit fragrant), but with a very interesting group of finds. We are now getting multiple showers and trying to feel a bit more civilized before heading back out to the site for another 11 days on Monday.

We dug deeper than we had planned, despite relatively rainy and cold weather for the first half of our stay at the site, because much of the top soil in the location of our excavation units was removed by previous excavations. Within a week or so we began finding evidence of the Maritime Archaic people who first inhabited the island. Above those deposits were thin layers of Dorset and Groswater Paleoeskimo artifacts and other evidence of their occupations. We will share photos and stories in the coming weeks.

This year we are going to have a bit bigger crew than usual, but still relatively small compared to some archaeological excavations. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, the site itself, while one of the richest sites on the island, is contained in a relatively small area and having a bigger crew would create difficulties, particularly since there are few places to camp at the site. Also, because the site produces so many artifacts, relatively small, controlled excavations provides substantial collections that need to be analyzed and catalogued, which takes more even more time than digging them out of the ground. We also want to minimize destruction of the site, and potential erosion. It is part of our professional ethics in archaeology to only disturb those parts of the site that will contribute to answering the questions we are pursuing. In that way, we preserve as much of the site as we can for future questions to be asked.

The field crew this year will include: the co-Principal Investigators, Dr. Don Holly and Dr. Chris Wolff; two graduate students from the University at Albany, Jessica Watson and Jessica Vavrasek; an undergraduate student from Eastern Illinois University, Brian Sparr, and other part-time visitors and assistants.

While in the field, we are largely unconnected to the internet, so updates will be sporadic throughout the summer, but we will try to keep everyone up to date about what we are finding out.

Prep Work

One of the most challenging parts of working in the subarctic is dealing with logistics. While many places in Newfoundland are easily accessible, Stock Cove can only be reached by boat. We usually leave from the town of Sunnyside because it has the nearest dock, and the people of Sunnyside are amazing and supportive of our project. We couldn't do it without them. Our boat captain, Warrick Seaward, is a local fisherman and is very involved in the community. He is our life support while we are out camping at Stock Cove. It takes us about 30 minutes in his boat to get to the site from Sunnyside.

Currently, we are compiling all of our equipment to camp there for about a month. This means tents, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, as well as all of the things that go along with that. We have to haul in all our food and water, and also have to think about how we cart out all of the artifacts we find at the site. There are a lot of moving parts, but we have it down to a science (mostly).

We plan to be on site by July 9th and will continue excavations until August 7th or 8th.

The dock at Sunnyside on a foggy day. 

Introduction to the Stock Cove Archaeology Project

Hello Everyone,

Today we are starting a new blog to keep people informed about the work we are doing at the Stock Cove Archaeology Project. This project began in 2008 when Dr. Christopher Wolff (Chris) of the University at Albany and three graduate students from Memorial University conducted test pits at the famous (or infamous) Stock Cove Site (CkAl-3) near the southern end of Trinity Bay in southeastern Newfoundland. Since that time, Chris and the co-principal investigator of the site, Dr. Donald Holly (Don) of Eastern Illinois University, have been regularly conducting archaeological research at the site and on the collections recovered from it and nearby sites. The site has turned out to be very important, with evidence of almost every culture that lived on the island going back perhaps over 5,000 years! We can tell this mostly from the thousands of stone tools we found at the site. The site is also in need of protection, both from the elements as it is being eroded every year, and from people taking important artifacts from the site and its beach area. Our hope is to work with nearby communities to bring the information that this site can provide to the public and to collaborate with those communities to study and preserve the heritage of the island.

This summer (2016) is particularly excited for us, because Don and I received a three-year National Science Foundation grant to conduct new research at the site. The focus of this research will be to discover evidence of the very first people who occupied Stock Cove, the Maritime Archaic. To do that, however, we will have to excavate through deep deposits of other cultures, so we think this summer is going to produce lots of amazing finds! Future blog posts will inform you about our progress over the summer, and will start to fill in the details as they come. We will also introduce you to the key researchers at the site and some of the people who help make it all possible.

Please feel free to post any comments or questions here.

Chris

Picture of Stock Cove from a nearby ridge.