<<<<< 29 June 1999 >>>>>
Archaeology Field School
Weeks 3 and 4

When I spoke to the students at our morning meeting yesterday, I explained that I thought we could complete our work at the Knudtsen site that day. We have focused most of our attention on this enormous site for the last two weeks, making surface collections of Paleoarchaic artifacts and conducting test excavations there. They and I both were getting tired of the 45-minute drive over the bumpy, and increasingly dusty, road that meanders across the floor of Grass Valley, finally arriving at the spit, a remnant of the Pleistocene lake that once covered the basin, where the Knudtsen site rests. However our luck did not hold. We came close, but the archaeological record conspired against us! The 60 x 100 meter area that we have been systematically collecting in 2 x 2 meter squares simply contained too many artifacts for our work to progress rapidly. Indeed, I spent nearly two hours in one 2 x 2 meter square alone yesterday, picking up tiny flakes, the by-products of stone tool manufacture.
Though a rough estimate, I would guess we will collect between 20,000 and 40,000 artifacts from that area. Of these, about 400 will be broken remnants of spear points and knives, each exhibiting the distinctive morphologies of the point types of the Paleoarchaic era (ca. 11,500 - 7500 years ago). Although we’ve made exceptional progress sampling the surface record, our attempts to find buried artifacts haven’t been nearly so fruitful. There are artifacts of tiny chipping debris, to a depth of 20-30 centimeters, but I suspect they don’t represent distinct occupational surfaces but are somehow a product of mixing with the surface, from rodent burrowing or some geologic process. On the other hand, the unweathered appearance of all of the artifacts on the surface suggests they have not been exposed for very long. My pet hypothesis about that for the moment is that the site has been deflated by the wind, aided by horses and cattle milling over the site. What is left after the fine sediments have blown away is a carpet of artifacts. If we had visited the site a hundred years ago we perhaps would have found the buried cultural deposits we were hoping to find.

Our focus next week will be on the location from which the Paleoarchaic folk were obtaining the raw stone material from which they made their tools. This is an enormous site, what archaeologists call a quarry, even though the stones are weathering out on the surface that covers many square kilometers. Obviously, we’ll only look at a small part. We’ve made a preliminary reconnaissance of the quarry and learned several things. First, the densest part of the site lies next to a broad channel cut into the alluvial fan. At this part of the site it’s not uncommon to find projectile point preforms (not quite complete points), all broken in the process of flaking, which are the size of your palm. They are very clearly the parents, if you will, of later-stage preforms found at the Knudtsen site. Second, all of these preforms are strongly weathered with a deep red patina. We find other scatters of flakes that exhibit no weathering but these also contain no large point preforms, only flakes. It seems clear that these represent at least two episodes of use of the quarry, one perhaps 10,000 years ago and one much more recent. So, unless we find evidence contradicting this distinction, we will focus attention only on the weathered artifacts and leave the others to archaeologists whose interests are in later time periods.

We ended our week with a fabulous taco dinner and then moved to a spirited game of wiffle ball. Nearly everyone was involved and even the ranchers’ cattle dogs didn’t seem to mind greatly as the occasionally errant ball landed by their pens. All in all, the Gund Ranch has adapted to us as we have to it. As the sun came to rest, the game was called for darkness. From there we headed to the hot springs to frolic and soak our tired bodies under a nearly full moon, then back to a campfire at Pine Canyon. I chose to go to bed.

Tom Jones, professor of anthropology

 
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