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. 

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.