I’m keeping the “Old Dirt – New Thoughts” name. I have not decided what to do with this old blog. Possibly I’ll leave it up so I can reference the posts discussing my research.

I do plan on blogging on a regular basis again. So check out my new blog. The url is simply ‘olddirt.wordpress.com‘.

The students in my lab class are pushing hard to finish their projects. They’re all working on materials from Aniakchak – mostly the 2007 collections. They’re producing the first real data from these materials. I have students analyzing shellfish, mammal bones, chipped stone waste flakes, chipped stone tools, and bone tools. Other students are working on the catalog data and illustrations. It’s my favorite part of the class. I have 16 research assistants – all generating data and addressing questions. It’s a blast.

They’ll be posting the results of their studies on the Aniakchak Wiki. Check it out and see what they have to say. I’ve been telling this class that they have to do better than the 2006 class – analyzing larger samples, creating more stunning graphics, and writing better reports. The Aniakchak Wiki will have both the 2006 and 2008 reports, so everyone will be able to see if this year’s class really does ‘kick butt’ on the 2006 class as they claim.

CS Tool Group – Matthew, Josh, and Emily

What I’m most curious to learn from this year’s analyses are some of the differences between occupations at Aniakchak. This year’s class is focusing on a single 1 x 1 meter excavation (N462E455) that produced almost 2 meters of cultural deposits. The upper component started with a Koniag house floor (Strat II). Immediately below this floor was a thick midden deposit (Strat III) that probably dates to about 1200 years ago. About 80 cm below this midden is a very rich deposit (Strat VIII) that included a lot of shell midden, micro debitage, and burned bone. It looks this deposit could include a house floor or similar context. This deep deposit produced some fiber tempered ceramic sherds, suggesting a Norton tradition occupation dating around 1700 years old. Another 20 to 50 cms below the Norton component is another relatively rich deposit. This basal component had spongy wood preserved and a scattered midden. We haven’t dated this component, but it may predate the Norton component by a couple of hundred years.

I’m excited to see what the students have to say about these different components. It’s sometimes hard to tell anything when we’re digging. There is just so much blue mussel shell and fish bone that it’s hard to pick up any other patterns. This is why I always get pumped up when we get to this stage in the lab work. After hours and hours of sorting and cataloging, we’re finally going to find out what we have discovered.

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.

In an earlier post, I argued that the excavated art assemblage from Aniakchak differed from other published assemblages from the region. I’m less convinced of this claim the more I study the matter. The Aniakchak assemblage has strong parallels to the contemporary Kachemak tradition artwork, particularly the assemblage from the Uyak site on Kodiak Island occupied around AD 1-1100. Both Uyak and Aniakchak have small, ivory maskettes, animal figurines (including whale and caribou imagery), and other decorative pieces (Heizer 1956).

The maskettes from Aniakchak include this half face from the 2005 field season. This ivory maskette reminds me somewhat of the Phantom of the Opera mask. Recovered from a house floor occupied around AD 630, this perfect little carving is only 16.2 mm tall and 2.5 mm thick. The back side of the maskette is curved as if intended to be worn by a doll. Upon close inspection of the facial features I can see pronounced cheeks and shallow nostril holes. Faint tool marks suggest the face was polished, especially compared to the reverse side of the ‘owl face’ described in an earlier post. The hole above the left eye on the ‘half-face’ maskette indicates this artifact was attached to something else. A nearly identical hole can be observed on the maskette from Uyak. A somewhat similar maskette with suspension hole from Amchitka Island is illustrated in Lydia Black’s classic study: Aleut Art: Unangam Aguqaadangin, demonstrating these ivory maskettes had a wide distribution in the north Pacific (2003: Figure 46).

It’s interesting that the Aniakchak half-face maskette was unbroken and found on a house floor, while the other two ‘ancient faces’ from the site were both broken and recovered from midden deposits. As a small collection, the three faces display some of the variability in the Aniakchak artwork, with the ivory half-face maskette showing detailed work and careful finishing. The broken bone face is more simplistic, but also made of a porous material that limited the carver’s ability to add fine detail.

I plan to expand on these ideas regarding technique and condition, including looking at tool marks, use-wear, and breakage patterns when I discuss the remaining ivory pieces from Aniakchak. I’ve been inspired by the work of Randall White (2003, 2006) and his studies of ivory carvings from the European paleolithic. His strategy is to combine the study of iconography and context with a chaîne opératoire approach. Although our ability to interpret the symbolic meaning behind the ivory carvings from Aniakchak is limited, I’m hoping a thick description of these objects, following White’s approach, will lead to insight into the cultural practices associated with this artwork.

Ultimately, I think the most interesting aspect of the Aniakchak art assemblage are the similarities to artwork from the neighboring Kodiak Archipelago and Aleutian Islands. The cultural groups living throughout this part of the north Pacific differed substantially in many aspects of their utilitarian cultures, but apparently shared aspects of their artistic traditions. The ‘ancient faces’ of Aniakchak are a part of these traditions.

Update – Check out the artifact photographs from the Hot Springs Village Site (just across and down the Penninsula from Aniakchak) if you want to see more ‘ancient faces‘.

References

Black, Lydia T. 2003. Aleut Art: Unangam Aguqaadangin. Second Edition ed. Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Company Publishers.

Heizer, Robert F. 1956. Archaeology of the Uyak Site, Kodiak Island, Alaska. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

White, Randall. 2006. The Women of Brassempouy: A century of research and interpretation. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13, (4): 250-303.

———. 2003. Prehistoric art: The symbolic journey of mankindHarry N. Abrams.

Over the next week I plan to post on Aniakchak art, research being done by my lab class, and new developments with the Hamline Village History project. Check back soon for this new stuff.

For now, I’ll just add some photographs of modern pectroglyphs and Inuksuit I took while walking along Artist’s Point in Grand Marais this last summer.

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.

We are now in the lab phase of our project. Our first step is to clean and inventory our collections. What to do with mortar? What to do with lumps of oxidized iron and sand? These are the “fire-cracked rock” of modern urban sites.

The stained glass shards are still my favorite artifact. The splash of color catches my eye as I move around the lab, especially compared to the earthy bricks, limestone, and rusty metal that dominate our collections. We are also finding some dramatic evidence of the fire that destroyed the church, especially as captured in the fusion of melted glass, nails, and wood. Once we finish the inventory we will begin the analysis phase. That’s when we make the real discoveries in archaeology.

Today’s cold weather was well timed. No one in the class seemed disappointed to finish the excavations on a day when the blustery north winds made it feel almost like winter. Personally I like working outside when November turns stormy. It makes coming into a warm house (or a warm lab) feel so good.

I’m very pleased with our accomplishments. Although we didn’t find the church’s organ, we did discover a few new things about Hamline village history. Our lab phase will bring these discoveries into focus, but the stained glass and other architectural details are the most obvious of our finds. The project was also a success as a community archaeology dig and, at least so far, as an educational opportunity. Its great to see how far my students have progressed as field archaeologists in such a short time.

A collapse of our trench wall created the greatest challenge to our research goals. I almost gave up on trying to reach the church basement.

We were down about 140 cm (4.5 feet) in our easternmost unit (farthest inside the church) and just starting to remove brick and mortar rubble last Thursday when the north trench wall collapsed. The sandy soil used to fill the church site after the demolition is so loose that its almost like trying to dig in a sandbox. Although a discouraging setback, we returned on Sunday and in couple hours opened a smaller unit (about 75 cm square) and punched through to the basement floor (200 cm below the ground surface). We found a layer of burned wood about 20 cm thick immediately on top of the concrete floor. Mixed in this burned layer we recovered some wood molding, lots of nails and other metal, a little glass, one ceramic sherd, and a small curved sheet of wall paper. This last find has a paisley print of muted earth-tone colors. We are storing it in the lab refrigerator until we have time to bring it to the conservation lab at the Minnesota Historical Society.

So what should we infer from the sparse finds inside the church (excluding architectural remains)? My guess is that we can say very little. The general absence of church artifacts in the small area of the basement we exposed does not necessarily mean the rest of the church interior would be equally unproductive to dig. As I pointed out to my students, we could “dig” a dozen small squares in our lab and not hit any “artifacts” even though our lab is overwhelmed with equipment and collections. What we are left with, after all our digging, is an inadequate sample from the church interior. The burned layer underneath the demolition rubble suggests an undisturbed fire scene. I think we need to come back to this site for another dig. We now know the stratigraphy and the foundation location. We know where to dig and how deep to go. We could dig a really big hole and I’m sure we’d find that church organ.

^{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.

Slowly, very slowly, the church ruin is coming into focus. After six weeks of digging (well, really we’ve worked about 45 hours on site) we are starting to see the scene of what remained in 1926 after the demolition work. We see sections of wall pushed over and bricks strewn about. Everywhere we’re finding limestone fragments.

The stone foundation’s exterior has a mortar covering most of the exposed stone to create a smooth surface. The foundation’s interior has no such surface covering, instead the stacked rock is clearly visible. Our excavations inside the church are producing more and more rubble, including fire-stained stone and brick – our first clear evidence of the fire that consumed the church.

^{Brenna with fire-stained brick from interior rubble}

Even more intriguing are the few small fragments of colored class we’ve found while excavating the foundation along the south end of our “T” trench. Some fragments are a bright blue, but this week we also found yellow-green glass. Our glass compares favorably with fragments found years ago by members of the congregation, which they identified as from the 1900 church. Are we finding glass fragments from the rose windows? How thick was the stained glass in these windows? (Our glass is about the same thickness as normal window glass). How many different colors were used in these windows? It’s difficult to tell anything about the 1900 church windows from the historic photographs, but rose windows in other churches were often extremely colorful. As usual, we find something in our excavations and we end up with twenty more questions to research!

Wow, what a beautiful fall day! Plenty of sunshine and plenty of wind. The leaves were swirling around us and filling the pits as we dug. It felt really good to be outside doing archaeology on a day like today.

We continue to uncover more of the foundation. It has emerged as a substantial wall, over 50 cm (2 feet) thick. We’re also starting to hit rubble inside the building including small fragments of wood and lots of nails. I view these finds as a positive sign – that we’re closing in on the church interior and hopefully a glimpse of what might have survived the fire and demolition.

The only glitch in the entire day was when we lost Rayna. I never did get the entire story, but apparently one of the teacher’s aides thought Rayna was a 6th grader and made her go back to Hancock with the rest of the class. We eventually straightened out the mix-up and had Rayna returned to us. To avoid similar problems in the future, we’re asking Rayna to carry some form of ID whenever we have young kids on the site.

^{Rayna happy to return to our class}