Getting Ready for the Summer Fieldwork

Tools of the trade: putting some things together for this summer's research. 

It's been a while since I've posted. That is mainly because as a professor I have many other things that pull at my time, including; teaching, exams, grading, university service, writing, supervising students,  meetings, and graduation events (to name a few). Excuses aside, it is time for us to begin to seriously consider this summer's research efforts. Along with Don and I, we have a couple of graduate students from the University at Albany, and an undergraduate from Eastern Illinois University joining us for the bulk of the excavation season this year. It is important to note that we also couldn't do any of this with the support of the amazing community of Sunnyside and that of the Provincial Archaeology Office.

This season we plan to try and excavate more of the Maritime Archaic occupation of the site, which means we will also be recovering material from the more recent cultural occupations (Ancestral Beothuk, Dorset, and Groswater). So, we expect to have a lot more data to work through and analyze this year. We also plan to use some more modern techniques to document the site, including a Total Station and possibly a drone. A total station allows us to capture the exact positions of every artifact within less than a centimeter's accuracy so we can use that information to analyze spatial organization  of the various cultures' use of the site. It will also make it possible to document the topography of the entire site area so that we can make high-resolution maps. This is extremely important as archaeology is a destructive process, so the better we are able to document everything, the better our ability–and that of future researchers–to analyze or reanalyze the site and its data.

The drone captures high-resolution photos and video that we can use to not only document the site, but to make more precise 3D measurements and reconstructions for analyses and presentations. Photogrammetric analyses are becoming an increasingly important aspect of modern archaeological tool kits. Here is a good example of how it can be done effectively.

Stay tuned for more posts about our work this summer.

Environmental Reconstruction Efforts

The chemistry of bone can tell researchers a great deal about an organism and the environment in which it lived. Recently, a graduate student from the University of Albany, Jessica Watson (who also took part in excavations last summer at Stock Cove) and Chris, with support and lab space provided by Dr. Robert Feranec of the State Museum of New York, began processing the bones of various species of seals recovered from the Dorset Paleoeskimo levels of Stock Cove to have their isotopes analyzed. Isotopes found in the organic parts of bone can tell us about the diet of the seals and, hopefully, give us some information about sea conditions during their lives, particularly whether or not they were colder or warmer waters relative to today. This can help us to reconstruct environmental conditions during the Dorset occupation of the region so that we may better understand the choices they made when they lived there.

In brief, the processing of bone for isotopic analysis is a complicated recipe that involves the crushing of a small amount of bone and exposing it to various cocktails of acids and bases to extract the organic material. These samples are also intermittently rinsed and separated using a combo of a centrifuge and sonic baths (pictured here) to remove any contaminants that would affect the resulting data. The final process involves very fine screening of the organic liquids from inorganic materials in the bone and freeze-drying it to turn it into a fine powder that can be sent to a lab to have the relative isotopes measured.

Cross your fingers. We hope to have some good results by February that we can use to better understand the environmental context of Dorset occupation of the island of Newfoundland.

Crushed seal bone samples are on the right of the sonic bath in the red-taped test tubes.