Tuesday, September 30, 2008
I have many blisters on my hands from digging yesterday. I am running an excavation about 2,000 ft southeast from my house, clearing an area where large trees will be planted and buildings constructed at a park.
We are finding many pithouses, dwellings occupied by Native Americans from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 1300. The earliest is a large round house (about 4 m across) and dates from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 50. It has the typical ring of postholes around the inner edge of the house, each of which once held a small sapling bent to formed a domed roof covered with thatching and mud. Also present in the house are a large upright stone on the left that may be a post support and a grinding slab on the floor a few feet to the east. The center of the house had a thick area of ash and burnt earth where the hearth was, used to heat the house and cook food.
Allen is mapping the pithouse (click to make bigger). The line in the middle is where we removed a modern tree root.
A nearby house dates to the timespan when ceramic vessels were first made in large numbers. In one house we found two or three large seed jars, which were basically a globe with the top sliced off. In the picture below you can see a grinding stone (a mano) and a round ceramic lid for one of the seed jars, broken into pieces but reconstructible.
Artifacts dating from about A.D. 50 to 600.
Below is a seed jar found at another site from this time period, an excavation my company did in the 1990s. You can see the top of the pot, where the round ceramic disk could be placed and sealed with clay, preserving seeds or food from exposure to the elements, insects, or rodents. Before these pots were made, people stored food in below ground pits. Often the food in these pits was damaged by water or eaten by burrowing mice or rats. The development of the large storage jars helped insure people had food to eat and seeds to plant for the next growing season.
Seed jar at left, photo by Arizona State Museum.
I have one more week and a lot of work to do, I'm sure I'll have a few more blisters by the time we are done. And that concludes today's anthropological lesson.
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We are finding many pithouses, dwellings occupied by Native Americans from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 1300. The earliest is a large round house (about 4 m across) and dates from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 50. It has the typical ring of postholes around the inner edge of the house, each of which once held a small sapling bent to formed a domed roof covered with thatching and mud. Also present in the house are a large upright stone on the left that may be a post support and a grinding slab on the floor a few feet to the east. The center of the house had a thick area of ash and burnt earth where the hearth was, used to heat the house and cook food.
Allen is mapping the pithouse (click to make bigger). The line in the middle is where we removed a modern tree root.
A nearby house dates to the timespan when ceramic vessels were first made in large numbers. In one house we found two or three large seed jars, which were basically a globe with the top sliced off. In the picture below you can see a grinding stone (a mano) and a round ceramic lid for one of the seed jars, broken into pieces but reconstructible.
Artifacts dating from about A.D. 50 to 600.
Below is a seed jar found at another site from this time period, an excavation my company did in the 1990s. You can see the top of the pot, where the round ceramic disk could be placed and sealed with clay, preserving seeds or food from exposure to the elements, insects, or rodents. Before these pots were made, people stored food in below ground pits. Often the food in these pits was damaged by water or eaten by burrowing mice or rats. The development of the large storage jars helped insure people had food to eat and seeds to plant for the next growing season.
Seed jar at left, photo by Arizona State Museum.
I have one more week and a lot of work to do, I'm sure I'll have a few more blisters by the time we are done. And that concludes today's anthropological lesson.
