by Connor
Sparks
Field
blog October 9th and 11th
This past week in field school was
not a very busy week. Tuesday in class, Dr. Dumas had to give a talk out of
town so we stayed in the lab and worked for a couple of hours. Michael and
myself wrote an article for the “Stone and Bones,” the newsletter for the
Alabama Archaeological Society. We wrote about our field school and provide a
brief history of the fort. Sarah and Daniel took some artifacts and bagged them
and properly labeled them with F.S. numbers (see Daniel’s post of last week for
an explanation).
Thursday was a very interesting day.
Dr. Dumas had her two boys out in the field with us and it was one of the best
days out there. We started doing some shovel testing in the woods, to the east
and north of the Indian village, where we found some pottery. We wanted to
extend our search transects, or lines of shovel tests, into the woods to see
how far we the Indian Village went. The pottery we found there, like the
pottery we have already found, was made of shell fragments (shell tempered) and
some grog. With the finding of different types of pottery, we have an idea of
just how long this area has been inhabited, as some types were popular at
different times or with different groups of people. Had we continued finding
pottery into the woods, we could have deduced that the village went much
farther than we thought. We stopped digging once we did not find any more
pottery. The shell-tempered, grog-tempered, and even some sand-tempered pottery
tells us that this spot of prairie near the Tombigbee River was lived on by
different groups of native people for many centuries.
Next
week we are returning to the fort to uncover an area in the barracks that was
excavated once before in 2014 by a previous field school. We look forward to
learning different types of excavation techniques. One funny thing that
happened this day was Dr. Dumas’s son (8-years old) gave all of us funny names
from Dr. Seuss books. Sarah was Thing One, Daniel was Thing Two, I was Red Fish,
and Michael was Blue Fish. He then gave Dr. D a funny nickname, Angry White
Fish, from her white shirt and then the fact that she was a little angry with
him. All in all, it was a very good week at the fort and I look forward to the
remaining weeks left in the semester.
