In the Field, Round 2:
Malvern, Arkansas and Novaculite Trade
I have just returned from my second round of fieldwork this summer...as you know from my previous post, my first round was working on the mission San Juan
del Puerto near Jacksonville, Florida...round two was the two week Arkansas
Archeological Society Summer
Archeological Training Program (AKA "the summer dig")...I love this dig as it gives professionals two weeks to work alongside many regular folks who are
intensely interested in archeology...it (along with Arkansas Archeology Month) is probably one of our biggest outreach events of the year.
This year it was hosted by Dr. Mary Beth Trubitt and my sister station to the north (Henderson State University)...we were excavating on two Archaic-period (6,000 old) sites near Malvern, Arkansas...these sites are very deep (2 meters of deposits or more) and FULL of novaculite flakes and stone tool debris...
What's novaculite you ask? Well novaculite is a sedimentary rock composed mostly of microcrystalline quartz...it is a recrystallized variety of chert....chert reformed under the intense pressure and heat formed during the formation of the Ouachita Mountains. It is dense, hard, white to grayish-black in color, translucent on thin edges, and has a dull to waxy luster.
The word
novaculite is derived from the Latin word
novacula, meaning "razor stone" which is appropriate as it is famous as a whetstones used in sharpening knives, scalpels and wood-working tools....
novaculite puts the "Arkansas" in "Arkansas Stone" (another word often used for these whetstones) because
novaculite only occurs within about 50 mile
radius of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
This distribution is what we're studying at these Archaic sites...it novaculite is famous for sharpening stones today, it was famous as a material to make stone tools in the Archaic period...we find traded stone all over the mid-continent...Dr. Trubitt is beginning to excavate these site by asking the question...how did this trade take place? Did travellers come to the Ouachita Mountains and quarry the materials "buffet style"? Or did local Archaic peoples set up shop as quarrymen and traders?....the latter would be extremely interesting as it runs against our previous picture of Archaic life as consting of small bands of people (20-30 family-related folks) wandering in a semi-nomadic season pattern worrying mostly about their own subsistence...
This year we have only scratched the surface...literally....we did not get to the bottom of the deposits at either sites...but we have excavated a great deal of material which might help answer some of our many questions.
Labels: aas, Archaic, archeology, arkansas, HSU, Malvern, novaculite, trade, Trubitt
Archeological Simulacrum in Service to OutreachFor instance, Lovata has a chapter on the fake Anasazi of Manitou Springs. Although there were never actually Anasazi living at this Colorado tourist destination, Troy points out that it has several advantages over "the real" thing (i.e., Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde). First Manitou Springs is on a much more beaten path (rather than the more remote cliff dwellings) this means that more people are likely to stop by and learn about the Anasazi (you don't just happen upon Mesa Verde)...secondly, the "ruins" at Manitou Springs are much more interactive precisely because they are "inauthentic"...tourists can roam among the rooms, touch all the stonework and interact with the sense of historical space and place...we could not allow tourists to do this at the "real McCoy" as it would lead to the rapid destruction of the site.
This brings me to a little project that the volunteers at the
SAU Research Station have been doing...my guys are very into cross-mending (that's putting together broken pots for the non-technical out there)...they spend hours every Wednesday putting together vessels excavated from various contexts around my station territory...but they have now branched out into replication...One volunteer in particular, Mr. Julian
Cranfill, has taken to making silicone molds of the reconstructed vessels and "slip casting" them using
Durham's Water Putty...after a little paint, the result can be quite convincing (the copy is in the foreground in the above image, the original is in the background).
Recently, after David Jeane (
SAU Station Assistant) showed them the cast of some of the reconstructed vessels from the recent digs at
Grandview Prairie, the staff at the
Rick Evans Grandview Prairie Conservation Education Center ordered three copies of each of the 24 vessels found on the floor of an
excavated Caddo house from the dig...they plan on exhibiting one set, using one in traveling programs and exhibits and using the
third during tours of the site...this is something you could never do with the originals....
archeological simulacrum in service to
public education and outreach...who would have thought.
Labels: archeology, grandview, inauthentic archaeologies, pots, sau, simulacrum, troy lovata
On a Mission... As I mentioned in
my post last summer, one of the things that
Charles Fairbanks was looking for in the 1960s Kingsley excavations was evidence of "
Africanisms" or cultural traits retained from the myriad of African cultures from which the slaves came. Fairbanks did not find evidence of
Africanisms, and now we consider the entire concept an over simplified one that
reifies Africa and
underestimates the complicated ways that culture changes and adapts to new surroundings and interactions...nevertheless, in a way, Davidson has
seceded where the
great Dr. Fairbanks had failed. On the last week of last year's field school Davidson and the
UF students uncovered what appears to be an intentional chicken burial inside the threshold of one of the tabby slave cabins. I'll let Davidson draw the parallels between various West African rituals (including house blessing rituals) that involve
sacrifice (and sometimes burial) of animals (often chickens)...but I'm here to talk a bit about one of the "other" projects going on at the
UF field school.
This year I spent two weeks helping out not at the Kinglsey Plantation, but at a Spanish mission site which is also situated on the island--San Juan del Puerto. I was serving as "aide-de-camp" to Rebecca Gorman, one of James' graduate students who has also been trained by Kathleen Deagan and Jerald Milanich...She was great to work with and it was a great group of students that cycled through the San Juan dig as well (Rebecca and students are shown screening at San Juan above).
San Juan del Puerto was a Roman Catholic mission founded around 1587 on Fort George Island, near the mouth of the St. Johns River (thus, Rebecca informed me, the name). The mission was one of the oldest and longest-standing missions in Spanish Florida (1587-1703). It was established by Jesuits & Franciscans to proselytize to the Timucua Indians who lived along the coast, but was quickly also a haven for the Guale Indian refugees fleeing attacks in their home territory along the Georgia coast.
The mission core area is now overgrown, but we had a good time finding majolica, gun flints, beads and the two dramatically different pottery types used by the Timucua and Guale...Like last year, I do not want to steal any of the UF thunder, so I'll let them tell you about this year's finds at the next round of conferences before I spill my guts....
More of my pictures from the UF field school can be found posted to my Flickr account:
Labels: archeology, davidson, field school, florida, gorman, kingsley plantation, san juan del puerto, uf
I Can't Go Back to Austin Anymore...In the 1970s Texas legend
Doug Sahm wrote a song by the above title...It appeared on
The Return of Wayne Douglas album...I
always thought it would be a great name for a radio program dedicated to Texas singer-songwriters...
At any rate, this title comes back to the forefront of my mind as tomorrow I am heading for Austin, Texas for the
Society for American Archeology meetings...I left Austin in 2003, I've returned only
briefly to graduate in 2004....It's been almost 5 years since I've been back to Austin...and I have mixed feelings.
Don't get me wrong...I LOVE the town and feel that I had the academic and cultural "time of my life" there...the program was exciting and
inspiring, the music scene was great, the food can't be beat (I DID have problems with the weather & traffic, however).
T.J. & I on south First Street in Austin, Texas in 1999.
But going back to Austin for a conference somehow feels weird...T.J. will be meeting me down there (It will be the first time I've seen my wife in a month as we are currently living on opposite sides of the state)... so combine that with the conference being in a town I once called "home" and it makes for an experience decidedly at odds with my usual conference behavior.
You see...I'm one of those "go to every paper, go to every happy hour" kind of conference goers...I feel cool stuff is being said in the papers and cool stuff is being said in the bars afterwards & I don't want to miss a thing! Unfortunately, that means I often do not leave the conference hotel (...ask Davidson..he'll confirm my story).
Well...This will not be the case at this year's SAAs as I get to e with my wife and hang out in the town that we both loved...get to go to the old haunts, the old eateries...
Yet...I still feel those pangs of responsibilities calling me to the conference sessions...."Come hear about the engendered archeology of the nineteenth-century Midwest" it calls ...or "You NEED to hear that paper on public engagement"...
I'll let you know if I find the happy medium...wish me luck.
Labels: archeology, Austin, conference, SAA, Sahm, Texas
Kingsley PlantationKingsley holds a special place in history for archaeologists interested in the African Diaspora as it is one of the earliest sites to be dug specifically to understand the enslaved Africans and African-Americans that labored on the plantations of the South. In 1968,
Dr. Charles Fairbanks, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, began excavations at Kingsley in order to understand the nature of cultural transformations that enslaved Africans went through after they arrived in the Americas. Fairbanks was looking for "
Africanisms"--cultural traits retained from the myriad of African cultures from which the slaves came.
Why did Fairbanks choose Kingsley to look for these Africanisms? Well, here's a bit of information on Kingsley Plantation... The
Kingsley Plantation, now administered by the National Park Service, is located on Fort George Island (near Jacksonville, Florida) and includes the plantation house, a kitchen house, a barn, and the ruins of 25 of the original slave cabins. The Kingsley Plantation was named for one of several plantation owners,
Zephaniah Kingsley, who operated the property from 1813-1839. Kingsley operated under a "task" system, which allowed slaves to work at a craft or tend their own gardens once the specified task for the day was completed. Proceeds from the sale of produce or craft items were usually kept by the slaves. Also, Zephaniah--born as a Quaker--didn't seem too sympathetic to Christianity...he ran off missionaries and encouraged the enslaved folks to practice whatever religion they claimed as their own. Moreover, Kingsley's wife,
Anna Madgigine Jai, was purchased as a slave, but freed in 1811. She was active in plantation management and became a successful businesswoman owning her own property. As an American territory, Florida passed laws that discriminated against free blacks and placed harsh restrictions on African slaves. This prompted Kingsley to move his family, impacted by these laws, to Haiti, now the Dominican Republic, where descendants of Anna and Zephaniah live today.
Fairbanks thought that these unusually circumstances of enslavement might help Africanisms flourish...After his excavations, however, he confessed that deciding what is and what is not an Africanism is a tricky business. In retrospect we can see Fairbanks' approach to as fairly simplistic in the way that it reifies and essentializes African (and African-American) culture. Nevertheless, he was a pioneer and his moral mission to understand the lives of the enslaved can still be admired.
Now my old friend and colleague
James Davidson attempts to fill the rather large shoes that Dr. Fairbanks left behind--both at
the University of Florida and at the Kingsley Plantation. Davidson ran
his first University of Florida archaeological field school this summer at Kingsley and, from what I saw during my visit, it was a success. Davidson has uncovered the floors of two of the tabby slave cabins and lots of interesting facts and artifacts are coming to light.
I'm fighting the temptation to write about all of the interesting things Davidson is uncovering, but I don't want to either "jump the gun" with preliminary interpretations nor "steal his glory" so I'll leave the specifics to another day. Suffice it to say, that I had a good time excavating with the UF field school...a great group of students and a very competent group of graduate students.
Labels: archeology, field school, florida, kingsley plantation
I have just returned from my second round of fieldwork this summer...as you know from my previous post, my first round was working on the mission San Juan del Puerto near Jacksonville, Florida...round two was the two week Arkansas Archeological Society Summer Archeological Training Program (AKA "the summer dig")...I love this dig as it gives professionals two weeks to work alongside many regular folks who are intensely interested in archeology...it (along with Arkansas Archeology Month) is probably one of our biggest outreach events of the year.
