Garden Creek Archaeological Project

After a whirlwind week of photography, profile mapping, micromorph sampling, and backfilling, we successfully completed the first and longest phase of fieldwork for the Garden Creek Archaeological Project. Alicia and I made the trek back to Michigan over the weekend, and soon, I will begin analyzing the artifacts from the site at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology with several of the students who joined us earlier this season. Throughout this process, we plan to regularly update this blog with our ongoing findings, so please check back often!

For now, we offer a few photos of our last week in the field, including the final shots of the 110 cm deep earthwork ditch that kept us busy in August. We would also be completely remiss if we didn’t take this opportunity to thank our local archaeological colleagues for their help and advice this season (in particular, Scott Ashcraft of Pisgah National Forest, who spent a week in the ditch with us) and the many residents of Plott Farm who facilitated our work this summer, especially Will and Brittany Warren, Joe, Brenda, and Jordan Worley, Tom and Susan Anspach, and Robert and Julie Cathey. The ability to work so closely with the local community made this one of my most fulfilling field experiences, and I can’t wait to continue our collaboration in the near future. Project members plan to be back in Haywood County intermittently through the next year, to give talks at the local schools, install at exhibit at the Canton Area Historical Museum, and undertake some quick and focused excavations next spring — we’ll see you all again then!

Scott and Alice clean scraping the ditch for a photo. The holes on the left are bisected stains and postholes.

Unit 8, with the ditch entirely excavated, looking grid southwest (about true west). The filled-in unit in the upper right was the crosssection tench. According the the magnetometer, the ditch turns a corner in the grassy area between the two units.The ditch, looking grid south. It just barely starts to turn a corner in the southwest portion of the unit. The ditch itself comes out of the west wall at an angle.

The ditch looking grid north. In the bright, late afternoon sun, you can really see how yellow the subsoil clay is! The dark area of the west wall (lower left) is actully ditch fill, because the ditch itself exited this wall at an angle. The dark stain in the upper left portion of this wall is an intrusive pit the probably dates to the lter Pisgah phase use of the site. In the north profile, you can see the three major zones of ditch fill, some of which include lenses of dump and erosion episodes.

Southwest corner of Unit 8. The three major (some homogeneous, some striated) zones of fill are visible in both the south and west walls here.

Inside the ditch, looking north. The dark spot in the north wall is the remains of an isolated dumping event that included quite a bit of charcoal. Note how steep the walls are and how flat the floor is!

Backfilling with John Wright and Rita Pelczar (my parents!) who drove down from Madison County to help us close down the site for the season.

Today’s Haywood County Mountaineer newspaper published two great stories on the Garden Creek Archaeological Project. If you want to check them out:

Dig at Garden Creek shows renewed interest

Property owners preserve history

Thanks to Peggy Manning and the Mountaineer for the coverage!

As of today, we have one more week at Garden Creek this season. To my considerable surprise, we seem to be on track to finish without much stress orscrambling (famous last words). We now have backfilled all but one of the eight units we opened this summer, so we are able to give our full attention to the earthwork ditch.

Cross-section profile of the earthwork ditch in Unit 6, before Stephen Carmody (PhD student, University of Tennessee) removed the flot column last weekend. The top zone of fill is dark, charcoal rich, and includes a considerable amount of mica sheet fragments. The middle zone of fill is yellow and more clayey. The bottom zone is subtly striated with brown and yellow sediments. We think these represent a series of dumping and erosion episodes that followed the initial excavation of the ditch. For scale, the floor of this unit is about 1.5 meters across.

When we last posted about the ditch, we had removed the first of three zones of sediment that filled the ditch, which revealed a line of rock filled postholes that more-or-less followed the shape of the ditch. The help of Pisgah National Forest Archaeologist Scott Ashcraft and some local volunteers have allowed us to move a lot more dirt since then!

Jess and Alicia successfully removed the middle zone of fill just before public archaeology day. Some of the rock filled posts continued into this zone, but we’ve discovered that they all end before we hit sterile at the base of the ditch itself.

Jess and Alicia at the base of the ditch, on top of the third/bottom zone of fill. The mottling in the high area on the right is caused by differential drying.

This past week, we moved into the third zone of fill. This zone has much fewer artifacts than the zones above it. Luckily, it is pretty easy to differentiate it from the homogeneous, yellow clay underneath.

Scott cleaning the ditch wall and floor, under Jess's supervision.

As mentioned above, this zone includes bands of gray and yellow sediment, which we think represent different dumping and erosion episodes. Some of these dumps are pretty discrete, and include fire cracked rock, cobbles, and broken portions of pots. Jess excavated one of these episodic features near the base of the ditch.

Cluster of rocks and potsherds (lower left) possibly representing a dumping episode in the third zone of ditch fill.

Next week, we’ll finish cleaning out the little bit of fill that’s left in the ditch. Then we’ll bisect the postholes we’ve identified outside the ditch, take some micromorphology samples, and backfill, backfill, backfill! Then back to Michigan for artifact analysis….

Last Saturday, we hosted Public Archaeology Day at the Garden Creek Site. Thanks so much to everyone who came out to support the project. We really enjoyed sharing the work with you all!

It’s true, most of our attention for the last few weeks has been devoted to the earthwork ditch, where there’s quite a lot of material to excavate! However, we have not left the rest of the site behind, particularly as we approach the end of the season.

Chatting with a site visitor in Unit 3.

Last week, I spent two days back in Unit 3, with its large stratified pits. I collected two different types of samples that will be processed for further analysis. First, I took a series of sediment samples for flotation from a 50×50 square cm column that cut through all identified levels of both pits. Matrix from this”flot column,” which was collected in natural levels, will be run through a tank of moving water. This will not only separate soil from artifacts, but also heavy artifacts (like sherds and flakes) from lighter remains (like seeds and charcoal).

The Unit 3 flot column, with the plow zone partially removed.

After removing the flot column, I proceeded to take micromorphology samples from several profiles of the unit. Following the advice of geoarchaeologist friend Dr. Sarah Sherwood, I carefully removed cubes of dirt from different layers and at the boundaries of different layers. Soon, we will look at these samples under a microscope to see, among other things, if there are any microartifacts or evidence of weathering between layers that we couldn’t see with the naked eye.

One of the micromorph samples. This one catches the fill of the bottom (first, larger) pit, the burned clay wall of the top (second, smaller) pit, and the fill of the top pit.

With all of that complete, today we finally finished backfilling and re-seeding Unit 3. For now, our attentions are divided between the ditch (in plan and profile views) and on our Public Archaeology Day. If you find yourself in western North Carolina tomorrow (Saturday, August 20), please join us at the site from 1-3pm to learn more about the project in person. Just get in touch ([email protected]) if you need directions!