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.