Archaeological Geology
The year has seen advances in provenance studies and discoveries bearing on Quaternary climate and ancient fabrics, as well as research on early occupation sites in North America.
Archaeological geologists often collaborate with archaeologists in cultural-resource management surveys of areas to be affected by federally financed or controlled construction projects, adding an understanding of geological as well as cultural history to the final evaluation. The University of Pittsburgh Cultural Resource management Program, among other projects, is analyzing cultural material and sediments from 2 sandstone rock shelters and 3 open sites near the Paintsville Reservoir in eastern Kentucky. The Pittsburgh group, one of the more successful programs, soon will be moving into a larger research facility, the former Gulf Oil Research Center in Pittsburgh.
In Nevada, the Desert Research Institute of the University of Nevada System continues a CRM program at the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site, directed by Lonnie C. Pippin and Davis have been experimenting with a conductivity meter as a guide to locating test pits in places with substantial soil depth.
Coastal Environments Inc. Of Baton Rouge is completing a CRM project that provides an assessment of the location and preservation of sub-merged Paleoindian and Archaic period sites int he drowned Sabine River Valley off southeast Texas. Vibracores taken from high-probability locales within the buried river valley penetrated minimally disturbed subaerial deposits. According to Charles Pearson, only 1 locale has been identified as possibly containing some cultural deposits.
Radiocarbon dating indicates that the potential ecofactual material recovered from the vibracore is about 8,500 years old. However, no identifiable artifacts were recovered and animal bones (apparently even burned ones) can occur in natural alluvial deposits. Nevertheless, the study advances considerably our understanding of how prehistoric sites may have survived the pot-glacial eustatic sea-level rise and will provide badly needed baseline information for federal managers of submerged cultural resources on continental shelves.
Many research projects in archaeological geology have been started or continued in the last year, both in the U.S. and abroad. Several involve evidence for early occupation of North America.
Wake Dort (University of Kansas) reports that member of the Quaternary Research Team continue to find sites suggesting the presence of humans on the Great Plains before 12,000 years ago. A site in south-central Nebraska has produced a chalcedony fragment bearing a microglaked cutting edge in direct association with boreal faunal remains and spruce wood dated 15,000 years ago.
Vance T. Holliday (Texas A&M University) is investigating archaeological geology and Late Quaternary stratigraphy on the southern High Plains of Texas and New Mexico. Much of his work has focused on the Lubbock Lake National & State Historical Archaeological Landmark in Lubbock, Tex. The site, in Yellowhouse Draw, contains a thick, well-stratified series of sediments that record more or less continuous human occupation from about 11,000 years ago to the founding of the city.
Julie K. Stein (University of Washington) is directing a new type of excavation on a Northwest Coast site located on San Juan Island in Pugen Sound. A 5-acre shell midden is being excavated using a geological approach; the lithological characteristics of each layer are measured, recorded, and classified into types. The types will then be correlated with depositional events observed through ethonoarchaeology and experimental archaeological studies.
Jonathan O. Davis, Cynthia Irwin-Williams, Roger, Jacobsen, and Amy Dansie (Mackay School of Mines, University of Nevada) have been investigating engimtic sites near Hazen, Nev., that seem to have been used in prehistoric time for control and enhancement of runoff, either for drinking water or for plant growth. In an application of experimental archaeological geology, test plots have been established in the vicinity with 55-gallon barrels to catch runoff, and infiltrometer experiments have been run. Preliminary results show that substantial enhancement of runoff from small rainfall events can be produced by clearing the desert pavement and piling the stones in small mounds.
In 1984 and 1985 the National Park Service conducted meatal detection surveys and limited excavations at the Custer Battlefield National Monument in South Dakota. Vance Haynes (University of Arizona) is doing geological studies at battlefield, including analysis of the subsurface distribution of cartridge casings to evaluate slopewash, repeat photography to estimate geomorphologic change, and backhoe trenching to determine local depositional-erosional history.
In South America, Richard L. Hay and John Isaacson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) are correlating tephra deposits associated with archaeological sites of the Middle to Late Formative Period (about 1,500 to 500 B.C.) In the Inter-Andean Valley and western Andean foothills of Ecuador. The study involves both mineral and content and chemical composition; thus far mineral content has been more definitive.
In the Old World, the geo-archaeological group of Tjeerd van Andel (Stanford University) continues several field research projects. Kevin Pope and van Andel have completed a 6-year study of Holocene soil formation and alluviation int he southeastern Pelponnese, Greece. The study revealed a clear correlation between times of alluviation and the vagaries and vicissitudes of land use and rural economics in the southern Argolid over the last 4 millennia. A project begun in the summer of 1985 is studying the famous Argive Plain of the Peloponnese, location of the archaeological sites of Mycenae, Argos, and Tiryns. Bronze Age land use, soil development, soil erosion, and coastal history are the targets for research.
Robert L. Folk (University of Texas, Austin) continues work in Mediterranean archaeological geology. His investigations at Tel Yin’am, Isreal have resulted in 2 recent publications on unusual finds: a layer of glass made from fused wheat and a probable Late Bronze Age smeltery, the earliest known by almost a millennium.
In Jordan, the important new Pre-pottery Neolithic site of Ain Ghazal on the outskirts of Anman is being salvaged by Gary Rollefson (San Diego State University) and Alan Simmons (Desert Research Institute, Reno), who have recruited William Strauss (University of Michigan) to help study site sediments and Rolfe Mandel (University of Kansas) to study surrounding soils. A geoarchaeological survey of the regional environment is planned for 1986 by Simmons and William Farrand (University of Michigan).
Fekri A. Hassan (Washington State University), in a study of the geoarchaeology of prehistoric sites in the western Faiyum, Egypt, has reconstructed the Holocene geological history of Moeris Lake. He also is investigating relationships between Nile River floods, paleoclimate, and the emergence of agriculture and civilization in Egypt.
Also in Egypt, Vance Haynes, with National Science Foundation support, is working on the stratigraphy and geochronology of buried river deposits revealed by Shuttle Imaging Radar in the eastern Sahara. With Carolyn Eyles and James C. Ritchie (University of Toronto) he is studying Holocene valved lake beds in the same area to provide paleoecological data in conjunction with archaeological investigations.
The first season of a 2-year project in Carthage, Tunisia, was started in the summer of 1985 by G.R. Rapp Jr. (University of Minnesota), with V. Vitali (University of Toronto) and J.A. Gifford (University of Miami). Goals are to determine the coastal paleogeography of the area and reconstruct the evolution of Carthage’s Punic harbors during the first millennium B.C.
Analytical and theorectical work of note occurred in 1985. D.H. Tarling (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England) is directing a study of the magnetic properties of obsidians from artifacts and geological sources. It shows that magnetic methods can ‘fingerprint’ obsidian sources at a fraction of the cost of conventional neutron activation analysis methods used in archeometric provenance studies. In some cases, neutron activation analysis is better; in others, magnetic separation appears highly effective and has predicted obsidian sources later confirmed by neurtron activation methods. That suggests we can now consider large-scale provenance studies leading to quantitative reconstruction of trade routes.
Kathyrn A. Jakes and J. Hatten Howard III (University of Georgia) and Lucy R. Sibley (University of Ohio) have discovered significant examples of copper mineral pseudomorphs after fabrics, yarns, and fibers from prehistoric Indian sites in the American southwest and from Shang Dynasty tombs in China. Mineralized fibers maintain their original structure and can be used to infer the fabric-producing technology of prehistoric people. Examples of mineralized feathers also have been found. Jakes and Howard are collaborating to understand the geochemical conditions conducive to pseudomorph formation.
At the University of Georgia, Norman Herz, director of the recently formed Center for Archaeological Sciences, continues to enlarge a data base of carbon and oxygen stable isotope signatures for ancient Greek and Roman marbles. The stable-isotope data base will be published by Herz and W.B. Hayes in a 1986 issue of Archaeometry.
More theoretical research in archaeological geology during 1985 has been devoted to rethinking archaeological stratigraphy and paleoclimatological studies.
The chaos of stratigraphic practice and terminology on archaeological sites is being attacked by the Workshop for Archaeolstratigraphic Classification & Terminology in Ghent, Belgium. Following an initial article in the Journal of field archaeology (v. 10, no. 3), the workshop has begun to publish Stratigraphica archeological (v. 1, 1984) to propose a method of stratigraphic subdivision based on multiple parallel criteria similar to the Geological Code of Stratigraphic Nomenclature, that is, litho-, chrono-, and ethnostratigraphy. The work will be important to any geologist involved in archaeological site stratigraphy. William Farrand, University of Michigan, is American correspondent for the workshop and has more information.
Rhodes Fairbridge (Columbia University) has spent the lat few years working on the new NASA-JPL Planetary ephemeris, calculating the alignments and torque developed on the Sun that trigger rare events in terms of solar particulate radiations. They are documented on Earth by sharp departures in the C-14 flux rate, as recorded in dendrochronologic series and terrestrial climates. Catastrophic droughts in North Africa and disastrous flooding in Peru from ancient El Niņo events are worthy of archaeological geologists’ attention, according to Fairbridge.
Publications in 1985 include 2 volumes that five an overview of methods and theory: Sediments in context, by Stein and Farrand (Institute for Quaternary Studies, University of Maine), and Archaeological geology, edited by Jack Donahue (University of Pittsburgh), will be published in early 1986.
Finally, at its meeting in Orlando last November, the Archaeological Geology Division, Geological Society of America, presented its annual award to Karl W. Butzer of the University of Texas, Austin. His contributions to explaining the interactions between people and their physical environment, culminating in his synthesis Archaeology as human ecology (Cambridge University Press) are recognized as fundamental to much of our research effort.