ANT 309 Lecture Outline February 4, 2008

IV The recovery of archaeological data: Testing and Full-scale Subsurface Investigation

A Testing

B Full Scale Excavation

1 Conducted with constraints of time and money

2 Research Design: A plan

a Questions that investigators hope to address

b Types of data they need to address them

c Description of methods to be employed

d safety plan

3 Procedures: A Short history

a 19th century-- trenching and looting

b early part of this century-- more systematic excavation-- stratigraphic controls.

c crude technique: broadsiding or broadcasting

d 1930s-- grid systems and Quadrants

e Into the 1960s-- sites gridded into 5 ' x 5' squares.

f From the 1960s on-

i increased attention to ecofacts;

ii shifted to metric (exception: historical archaeology )

iii column samples

g Today

i Research designs-- methods driven by questions

ii Wide range of methods

iii Concern for sample size and representativeness of samples

iv Most subsurface sampling is driven by needs of Cultural Resources Management (CRM)

4 Return from the Field with:

a Artifacts

b Ecofacts

c Descriptions of Features (Burials) and associations

d Descriptions of Contexts (Level records and profiles)

e Human remains (?)

f Everything marked with provenience

C Laboratory Processing

a Washing

b Sorting

i Artifacts

(i) Material: Flaked stone, ground stone, shell, bone

(ii) Formal vs Informal (debitage)

ii Ecofacts

(i) Faunal (Bone versus shell)

(ii) Floral

iii Human remains

c Catalog

V. Dating and Stratigraphy

A Relative dating

1 Stratigraphy and the Law of Superposition

a Visual stratigraphy

b Cultural stratigraphy

c Terminus post quem -- date after an artifact or feature had to have been deposited or constructed.

d Terminus ante quem -- date before which a feature was constructed or an artifact was deposited.

2 Obsidian hydration (Invented by Friedman and Smith)

a hydration rim or band in microns

b Thomas Origer and Brian Wickstrom showed that obsidian hydration readings from projectile points patterned in a temporally meaningful way.

c factors that influence

i The chemistry of the glass- different obsidians hydrate at different rates

ii The environment-- obsidian hydration rims develop more rapidly in warm places than in cold places—

iii Difference in surface versus subsurface hydration environments

iv Water content in the obsidian before hydration begins

v Hydration rims can fall off.-- definitely when a forest fire goes through

vi The problem of re-use-- obsidian scavenging can lead to multiple hydration rims on a single artifact

B Absolute dating techniques

1 Radiocarbon Dating Invented by W. F. Libby in 1949.

a Associations key

2 Potassium Argon: relies on the decay of the unstable isotope 40 K which decays to 40Ar.

3 Dendrochronology (A.E. Douglass)