Ervan G. Garrison

Radar prospection and cryoprobes—early results from Georgia

A combination of ground penetrating radar and cryogenic soil probe techniques has led to an interesting and non-invasive approach to the characterization of archaeological deposits. In Georgia (USA) this combined approach has been used on both prehistoric and historic archaeological sites. The cryoprobe technology is a variant of that developed in Germany and Switzerland. Our soil-freezing system is quite portable and provides non-compressed soil sections, which in turn aids in the calibration and interpretation of radar data.

Three ironclad warships—The archaeology of industrial process and historical myth

Three ironclad warships, C.S.S.Georgia, U.S.S.Cairo, and U.S.S.Monitor, are discussed as examples of industrial process in the United States Civil War period. In their archaeological study the author and others have relied principally on explanatory methodologies that stress their definition within social and technological contexts. This explanatory protocol is examined within concepts of technology which involve the function, and functioning, of manufactured things both within their own era as well as in present-day life. This consideration examines the mythologization of historic things, particularly shipwrecks, and cites the need to identify and account for this occurrence within the archaeological and historical analysis of these or any other industrial sites.

Geophysical Techniques for Archaeology

The objective of this chapter is not to make the reader adept in the theory and application of geophysical techniques used in archaeology today. The goal is to present a relatively comprehensive survey of “shallow” geophysics, ranging from electrical — resistivity and conductivity — to magnetic and radar methods. The methods to be discussed are the ones most commonly used in archaeological geophysics. Less frequently used methods — seismic, gravity, thermographic, induced polarization, self-potential — to name some of the other methods used in shallow geophysics, will not be examined in any detail. Many of these other methods have achieved interesting results, in regard to archaeological prospection, but for a variety of reasons they remain of marginal interest to archaeology today. As with all the geophysical methods utilized by archaeology, none were developed with archaeological prospection in mind. As is true with most, if not all, of the various methods used by archaeology, these methods have been borrowed and adapted to fit archaeological goals.

What is past is prologue: excavations at the Econfina Channel site, Apalachee Bay, Florida, USA

ABSTRACT Offshore submerged sites can retain valuable data concerning many questions of interest to archaeology, including what form coastal occupations may have taken during periods before the establishment of modern coastlines and late Holocene climate and ecological conditions. However, submerged offshore sites experience postdepositional forces entirely unlike those in terrestrial contexts, including erosion/deflation of sediments, and degradation of artifacts and/or features caused by the marine environment. Methodological and theoretical approaches to assessing submerged marine sites, versus terrestrial ones, must be adjusted accordingly to extract valuable data and interpretations from them. This study demonstrates the application of these different approaches at the Econfina Channel site (8TA139) in Apalachee Bay, Florida, USA. The site appears to contain significant evidence for coastally adapted occupation during the final part of the Middle Archaic period (∼8600–5000 cal BP), but we needed to address marine site formation processes before we could assess human activities at the site. Sedimentological and archaeological traces of human activities can be teased out using geoarchaeological methods, which differentiate between nonhuman postdepositional processes and the cultural material remains left behind by those who used the site before it was abandoned and subsequently submerged.

Statistics in Archaeological Geology

Waltham (1994) considers statistics the most intensively used branch of mathematics in the earth sciences. His textbook, along with that of Robert Drennan, Statistics for Archaeologists (1996), is an excellent introduction to statistics appropriate for archaeological geology. Following Waltham, the definition of a statistic is simply an estimate of a parameter—mass, velocity, dimension, etc.—based upon a sample from a population. Unless that population is composed of a relatively small number of items or objects, then it is almost certain that estimates must be made of the populations using independently drawn samples. As archaeology is largely a study of population of “things,” reliable estimates of these collections are best made using statistical techniques. These techniques include parametric measures of central tendency and dispersion such as the mean, the standard deviation, and the variance.

Techniques for Archaeological Sediments and Soils

Undisturbed Versus Disturbed Sampling—Profile Samples, Soil Monoliths, and Solid Cores: Undisturbed sampling of an archaeological sediment can be as straightforward as the description of an exposed profile in the field. It can also mean the recovery of a representative fraction of those sediments for studies to be performed in a laboratory rather than in a field setting. Disturbed samples are those taken from individual horizons or strata in which structure and morphology information is sacrificed. The sense of the term “sample” used in this discussion is not one commonly associated with statistical evaluations but simply the acquisition of a portion of the sediment or soil for analytical purposes. Sampling (statistical) procedures can, in many cases, be used to assure the representativeness of the field or laboratory fraction of the sediment or soil being examined. This issue will be addressed in the following section. In this section, we shall examine a variety of techniques commonly used to acquire data on archaeologically interesting sediments.

Metallic Minerals, Ores, and Metals

This chapter may seem somewhat unusual to those readers more accustomed to other discussions of archaeometallurgy. Typical of those researches, one often finds the focus on the metal artifact foremost with ancillary areas such as manufacturing, utilization, and provenance archaeological/geochemical) examined at various levels of detail. These emphases are important and well placed particularly from the standpoint of the materials science, but it is the aim of this chapter to characterize archaeological metals, minerals, and ores from a geological perspective. By this, we mean to discuss the geology of ancient metallurgy without any special emphasis on the end product, e.g., the metal artifact.

Clay Minerals and Ceramics

The study of ceramics and the clays used to produce ancient earthenwares fill detailed and discursive publications in archaeology. Geoarchaeology chiefly concerns itself with those aspects of ceramics and clays wherein it can make the most pertinent contributions in geology, petrology, and mineralogy, to name the most obvious areas. As an aluminosilicate mineral, clay is practically ubiquitous. As a marine sediment, it floors the deepest portions of the world’s oceans (Thomsen 1877). Because of its geological commonplace, clay is the potter’s equivalent of ore for the metallurgist.

Sediments, Soils, and Stratigraphy in Archaeological Geology

Since the principal focus of this chapter is the description of sediments and soils and their use in archaeological geology, a programmatic approach to their study is used in modern geoarchaeology. Many of the methods, discussed in this chapter, and their use in both terrestrial and marine/lacustrine environments will be within their specific applications to paleoenvironments. For the assessment of subsurface deposits and their spatial/stratigraphic extent, these techniques provide the most reliable and efficient means of doing so. From the geomorphological perspective, any paleosol, unless found to outcrop in the vicinity of interest, is exposed and described using them. Likewise, for ground-truth purposes of geophysical data, they provide a reliable means of assessing depth of features such as subsurface contacts and anomalies. These field techniques allow the investigator to recover representative and depth-constrained sediment, soil, and rock samples for purposes of laboratory studies.

Petrography for Archaeological Geology

In the first edition of this textbook, it was asserted that the most common artifactual material of prehistory is lithological—rocks and/or minerals. This is still the case. Stone is, and was, the most durable of all materials available to early humans and, in most environmental settings, the most readily available. Its durability made it desirable for a multitude of tasks as well as helping insure its survival in archaeological sites. For the archaeologist, the survival of ancient human stone tools and artifacts has been both a blessing and a source of unintentional biases in terms of the reconstruction of past cultural behavior. Even with the earliest of human culture surely, there were other implements other than those of stone, but by their durability, the latter have survived, while other materials have long ago perished from the archaeological record.