Old Dirt – New Thoughts

Art is one of the more exciting finds in archaeology and one of the more challenging materials to interpret. Our excavations at Aniakchak have produced a small, but intriguing assemblage of artwork and decorated objects.

One of my favorite artifacts from our last field season is this small face. It is obviously broken in half, but the face still resonates a kind of quiet presence. I’m not sure whether this object served a utilitarian purpose. It appears to have been a hollow tube made from cancellous sea mammal bone. Pronounced polish on the bottom edge of this artifact is suggestive of use-wear.

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The field phase of our Methodist church excavation is officially done. Yesterday, Hamline’s Grounds Services hauled back all our excavated dirt and filled in our trench. No backfilling by hand for us. My students will never truly appreciate their luck in missing this traditional part of archaeology.

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^{Stained glass shards found along the church foundation.}

We’re finding a lot of small shards of colored glass. We believe these are from the rose windows. The interesting aspect is the diversity of colors – mostly greens and yellows, but also blue and amber colors. I just held them up to the sunlight a few minutes ago as I photographed some of them for this blog.  While snapping this picture I realized the symbolism. After 80 years of darkness, sunlight is again shining through the church’s stained glass windows.

^{BAG #001 – The first bag of excavated artifacts from our 2007 dig.}

We excavated the first level at the Hamline Methodist Church site today. We’re digging through a layer of rocky fill with a light scatter of 20th century artifacts. Some nails, slate shingle fragments, a limestone suggest we have building demolition debris, but are these from the church or some other structure? We need to keep digging to find our answer.

Ryan made the find of the day – a white ceramic sherd with a prominent maker’s mark. It’ll be interesting to see if we can identify the mark.

This Saturday is our first open dig. Stop by between 9 AM and 3 PM if you want to check out what’s happening.
^{Ryan’s find of the day}

Since we have ancient masks as a recent topic on this blog, I decided to continue my Aniakchak field reports by highlighting one of this season’s more spectacular finds – a portion of a miniature ivory mask. It came from one of the dense midden deposits (Strat Layer VII) eroding out of the headlands overlooking Aniakchak Bay. We have not dated this deposit directly, but we believe it belongs to the 1300 BP occupation. (more…)

The Amaknak Bridge site in Unalaska has produced another spectacular find – a 3000 year old whalebone mask.

I and my crew actually heard news of this find shortly before we left Anchorage. The mask displays quite sophisticated bone carving technique and will certainly add an important dimension to our understanding of eastern Aleutian artistry.

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I spent today messing around with photographing a basalt point from the King Salmon site. I struggled getting the lighting and the camera settings to capture all the details of the flake scars and yet still show the proper black basalt color.

Here is the end result. I’m using a digital Nikon D70s with an old 105 mm macro lens (the lens doesn’t work with any of the camera’s electronic functions). We have a pretty basic photo stand and lamp set up in our lab. I use a frosted glass plate to lift the artifacts above their shadow. For editing the images I have an old copy of Corel Photo-Paint left over from my dissertation days. I’d never stitched images together before – so I felt pretty pleased with myself that I could figure it all out.

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I have not posted one of these “finds” for a while. We’ve recently shifted our lab work from sorting shell midden to cataloging, so we’re starting to handle a lot of unusual objects. This “hook” thingy is made of sea mammal bone and clearly part of a composite tool. The two triangular parts are nicely finished and appear designed to extend out from the tool, while the center piece is where this artifact would have been lashed or fitted into the larger object. The triangles have several faint lines scratched onto their surfaces. The lines are so haphazardly inscribed that I don’t think they are meant to be decorative, but they also don’t seem to be functional, nor are they usewear. Any ideas of what kind of tool this object is from? I’m guessing possibly part of a harpoon, boat hook, or kayak frame.

 Bone artifact from Aniakchak.

My archaeology lab class has been busy cataloging these last couple of weeks. They had two artifacts from Aniakchak that I find particularly interesting.

One “find” is a miniature bifacial “point”. It’s even smaller than the one I highlighted from this summer. I’ve seen small points like this one described in archaeological reports as “toys”. I suspect, though, that the Aniakchak miniature points are functional tools because we have so many (and virtually no larger points).

 Miniature biface of black chert.

The other find is a piece of copper sheet rolled into a tube. I’m assuming it is a “bead”. We found this bead near the site surface, but I believe it is native copper and from a precontact context.

 Copper bead.

 Haden just found this small chalcedony point while sorting  shell midden from Aniakchak. We’ve found a couple dozen of these tiny points and hardly any larger bifaces giving the Aniakchak chipped stone assemblage a very different look compared to our Unimak and King Salmon materials.

We have spent most of this summer sorting materials from the 2005 field season at Aniakchak. This week we cleaned and “rhoplexed” this interesting bone “knife”. (Rhoplex is an acrylic consolidant useful for preserving ivory, bone and antler artifacts.) I’m not sure of this artifact’s function, but it reminds me of a butter knife. We found it on the house floor in an area where we also recovered a lot of sewing needles. Any ideas on how it may have been used?