Field School 2008: Hocking College

The following is from Hocking College about their field school this summer.

Enjoy!

Linda



Hocking College Archaeological Field School (June 30-Sept. 4, 2008)

10 Weeks of Discovery that will Put You in the Right Path to a Career in Archaeology

Join our seasoned field staff and the archaeologists at the Ohio Historical Society as we investigate Ohio's early Settlement history at Pickawillany.

Assist the city of Wellston in the re-discovery of their founding father by excavating the Harvey Wells Estate.

Find out about the daily lives of Marietta's first settlers while excavating a large prehistoric Indian Village that dates to A.D. 1300.

The program includes the following experiences:

• Orienting and Map Reading


• Survey and Excavation Techniques


• Mitigation of Archaeological Resources


• Historic and Prehistoric Materials Management


• Field Documentation and Report Preparation


• Site and Feature Mapping and Stratigraphic Analysis


• Water Flotation of Soil Samples


• Issues in Archaeological Ethics


• Public Archaeology in Cultural Resources Management.

Hocking student work closely with community organizations to help preserve the past for future generations. Awareness of the need for public education and outreach ensures that archaeological resources are properly managed.

It's more than just digging, archaeology is an exacting science and a rewarding career that serves the public. The employment outlook for incoming technicians is excellent.

Modeled after the real world workplace, the Hocking Field School is highly regarded in the Cultural Resource Management Industry and will celebrate it's 10th year of academic excellence.

Current tuition and general fee costs can be viewed online under "Tuition and General Services" at http://www.hocking.edu/.

For more information contact:

Annette G. Ericksen, Ph.D.

Archaeology Coordinator

740-753-6306

ericksen_a@hocking.edu

The Least Successful Historic Attempt to View the Newark Earthworks

In 1823, Major Stephen Long led an expedition up the Minnesota River, which at that time was known as the St. Peter's River. It was primarily a scientific expedition aimed at exploring this region. William Keating was the "Geologist and Historiographer to the Expedition" and his account, published in 1825, contains an amusing anecdote of their journey through central Ohio on their way to, what was to become, South Dakota and Minnesota.

Here are few brief excerpts from Keating's account:

"…we continued our journey [from Zanesville] toward Columbus, which we reached on the 19th. The route between these two places offered us but little interest…

The country about the Muskingum appears to have been at a former period the seat of a very extensive aboriginal population. Every where do we observe, in this valley, remains of works which attest, at the same time, the number, the genius, and the perseverance of those departed nations. Their works have survived the lapse of ages; but the spirit which prompted them has disappeared." (pp. 39-40)

"Newark is a pleasant little town, situated at the fork of Licking and Raccoon creeks, about twenty-five miles from Zanesville. Within a short distance of it are some very fine remains of Indian works, which we missed seeing, having been misinformed as to their real position…" (p. 44)

The Newark Earthworks, for those few readers of this blog that may not already know this, were the largest set of geometric earthworks ever built. More than four-and-a-half square miles of the land just west of Newark were covered with gigantic earthen enclosures of varying shapes and sizes. Given that, back in the 1820s, the Newark Earthworks would have been virtually intact, it's hard to imagine how Long, Keating, and party could have missed them

While in Newark, the party met John Cleves Symmes, Jr., the major proponent of the hollow earth theory. According to Keating, "The partial insanity of this man is of a singular nature: it has caused him to pervert, to the support of an evidently absurd theory, all the fact, which, by close study, he has been enabled to collect from a vast number of authorities" (p. 44). Perhaps the party relied on Symmes for directions to the earthworks.

Incidentally, although Symmes never wrote a book about his wacky theory, a fellow by the name of James McBride did. McBride happens to be one of the foremost early archaeologists of western Ohio. He contributed many maps of the earthworks of Butler and Hamilton counties to Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis's Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848. The Newark Earthworks were featured prominently in this report. Squier and Davis wrote that "these works are so complicated, that it is impossible to give anything like a comprehensible description of them."

Just maybe, if Long's merry band of scientists had actually gotten to see the Newark Earthworks, they would have found something of more than a "little interest" between Zanesville and Columbus.

The Newark Earthworks are, by the way, on their way to becoming a World Heritage Site. As you may have learned from the 28 January blog entry, it has been listed, along with Serpent Mound, Fort Ancient, and the earthworks at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, on the United States Tentative List. This means that sometime, over the next seven to eight years, it will be submitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization for its consideration. If it concurs with the assessment of the United States Department of the Interior, then the Newark Earthworks will become harder for visitors to miss.

For more information about the World Heritage List, see:
http://www.nps.gov/oia/topics/worldheritage/New_Tentative_List.htm

For more information about the Newark Earthworks, including how to find the three major surviving elements on publicly-accessible land, check out the Ohio Historical Society's webpages:
http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/places/c08/
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=2410

An Exceptional Flint Artifact

Among the resources that made Ohio attractive to its ancient native inhabitants was the seemingly endless supply of high quality flint. Flint was an indispensable part of their existence, allowing them to fashion the projectile points, knives, scrapers and cutters necessary to create other parts of their material culture. While there are several varieties of flint or flinty materials native to Ohio, the Flint Ridge and Upper Mercer (Coshocton) materials found in the Pennsylvanian age bedrock of eastern Ohio were the most widely utilized. These flints occur in massive bedded deposits that could produce large quantities of high quality flint. It’s not unusual for one or the other or both of these flint types to make up a major portion of raw material represented in just about any large Ohio artifact collection or that an item made from one of these flints to be found hundreds of miles from where it was made. That is not to say that there weren’t other flint sources nearly as important as these to ancient Ohioans, but sources that were only utilized on a more local level - like Delaware Chert. Delaware Chert is a Devonian age flint that occurs in the Delaware Limestone formation northward through the center of Ohio from Columbus to Lake Erie. Unlike colorful Flint Ridge Flint or the glossy blue-black Upper Mercer material, Delaware Chert has a rather drab earth tone appearance and texture with coloration ranging from light tan through a dark almost black chocolate brown. It is often observed in finished artifacts that there remains a certain amount the flinty carbonate matrix or cortex still visible. One of the more notable outcrops is along the Olentangy River in the vicinity of the Franklin-Delaware County line. Instead of being found there in massive beds like the Flint Ridge or Upper Mercer materials are at their sources, Delaware Chert occurs in small nodules and lenses or “stringers” within the bedrock matrix. It can also be found as small, reduced fragments in stream gravels. As a locally favored raw material it seems to have been most heavily utilized from the Early Archaic through the Early Woodland periods (9,000 to 2,500 years before present) especially for items such as scrapers, knives and smaller projectile points although it was likely used by all prehistoric cultures within its main catchment or area of occurrence. However, because of the somewhat dispersed and thin nature of how it is found geologically, larger objects made of Delaware Chert are somewhat rare. It should be noted that a modern flint knapper usually starts with a ”blank” 25% to 50% larger than the desired finished product when crafting a projectile point. The same was likely true in prehistory. In other words, to make a large spear point it takes an even larger piece of flint and relatively large pieces of Delaware Chert aren’t that common.
The attached image is of an exceptional flint artifact from the OHS collections. A306/58.001 is an Early Archaic Thebes series point, dating to about 8,750 years before present. Thebes points were so named by Howard D. Winters in 1967 for examples found near the town of Thebes, located along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. There are several related varieties or sub-types commonly found throughout the Middle-Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys which, for a number of reasons, more likely functioned as hafted knives rather than spear points per se. This particular object was part of the J.L. Smith Collection from Delaware County, Ohio. According to a newspaper clipping attached to the collection file, Mr. Smith was a dedicated Indian relic collector who, over a nearly 50 year span between the 1870’s and the 1920’s, amassed a very impressive 8,000 piece artifact collection that was found entirely in Delaware County. In its day it was touted as perhaps the largest single county assemblage in the entire state. In 1923 the Smith collection was placed in the care of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society for future generations to appreciate and accepted on behalf of the Society by Curator of Archaeology William C. Mills.
A306/58.001 is an extremely thin, well flaked point, measuring about 70mm long x 41mm wide x 7.5mm thick. It’s made of a high quality light gray/tan Delaware Chert with a sizable portion of the original carbonate or limestone matrix still attached. The point is notable not only for its relatively large size, raw material and workmanship but also for the fact that it is in an almost pristine condition, having been re-sharpened no more than once or twice. More typically the blade portion of heavily re-sharpened points of this type will develop a steep, beveled edge and acquire a slight “twist” when viewed on end; enough so that many old time collectors would refer to them as “rotary” points. Continued edge maintenance would eventually reduce the blade to a point where it appears completely out of proportion with the base and bear little resemblance to its original form. Blade re-sharpening would continue as needed until the service life was exhausted and the object discarded. It would be replaced by a newly flaked item and the cycle continued.
Exceptional flint artifacts aren’t always those made of exotic flint and found hundreds of miles from where they were made because of some elaborate trade network. Sometimes they can just be remarkably well crafted items made from selected local flint that were just never meant to travel far beyond the locale where they were made. They were to be used for ordinary tasks by the hand that fashioned them and perhaps should just be appreciated for the same aesthetics that inspired the maker.


Further Reading:

DeRegnaucourt, Tony and Jeff Georgiady
Prehistoric Chert Types of the Midwest
Upper Miami Valley Archaeological Research Museum,
Arcanum, Ohio

Stout, Wilbur and R.A. Schoenlaub
The Occurrence of Flint in Ohio
Geological Survey of Ohio, Bulletin 46
Columbus, Ohio

Perino, Gregory
Selected Preforms, Points and Knives of the North American Indians,
Volume I
Hynek Printing,
Richland Center, Wisconsin

Nautical Archaeology Workshop April 2008

The Great Lakes Historical Society's Peachman Lake Erie Shipwreck Research Center (GLHS/PLESRC) and the Maritime Archaeological Survey Team (MAST) will be conducting their annual Nautical Archaeology Workshop April 12-13, 2008 with skills practice dives scheduled for May 17 -18, 2008.

The workshop teaches divers why underwater archaeology is important, how they can impact and protect Ohio's wrecks, techniques they will use during shipwreck surveys and much, much more. For a good idea of what the weekend will be like you can visit http://ohio-archaeology.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html .

In conjunction with the workshop, MAST will hold their annual dinner on the evening of April 12 and the Vermilion on the Lake Historic Community Center. This years Keynote Speaker is Brendon Baillod from the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History. His topic will be Lasalle's Legendary Griffon: Searching for the Truth.

He will explore the myth and reality of the Great Lakes' most historic shipwreck, Lasalle's legendary Griffon. The first decked vessel on the western Lakes, she vanished after leaving the Door Peninsula in 1679. Brendon will give an overview of Griffon's place in history along with a critical review of primary historical material written by those who sailed her. Modern day discovery claims will be critiqued from an archaeological perspective and a reconstruction of the Griffon's likely fate will be made using the original letters of Lasalle.

Brendon Baillod has been researching, writing about and searching for Great Lakes shipwrecks for 20 years. He has appeared on the History Channel, Discovery Channel and has published over 50 articles on various Great Lakes maritime history topics. He is a director at large of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History and founder of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Research Foundation which holds Milwaukee's annual Ghost Ships Festival.

Both events are open to the diving and non-diving public. For more information on the workshop and dinner you can go to

http://www.ohiomast.org/IMAGES/WORKSHOP/WorkshopFlyer08.pdf