This weekend is the 88th annual Society for American Archaeology conference, held in Portland, Oregon this year. IUP is well-represented this year with our undergraduates, graduates, and professors attending and presenting in various poster sessions, paper sessions, and panels.

 We also had an ethics bowl team comprised of graduates Laura Broughton, Emma Lashley, Arthur Townend, Liz McCreary, and Emily Sykora, with Elena Frye and Victoria Albert as alternates. This team went up against one team in a double-elimination competition debating the best ethical proceedings in given case studies. Our students have been preparing for this all semester so we were proud to see them compete!

We also had a number of students present their posters in poster sessions. Kristopher Montgomery, a second-year graduate student, had a poster related to his thesis project entitled A Macroscopic Lithic Analysis of South Mountain Metarhyolite Quarries: A Focus on Intersite and Intrasite Assemblage Comparisons of the Green Cabin Site (36AD0569), South Mountain, Pennsylvania which was included in the “Rock Hard Science: Lithics Analysis Part II” poster session. Another second-year Sonja Rossi-Williams presented her poster analyzing an advocational lithic collection titled Changes in Indigenous Occupation Strategies in Eastern Pennsylvania: An Exploration of Changing Land Use at the Red Hole Site which was in the poster session entitled “Remote Sensing Part II: Geophysical Techniques.” In the same session, Arthur Townend presented a poster titled Baree Forge: A Pennsylvania Forge Town analyzing his findings from his thesis project. 

Amanda Telep was recruited to present her paper at a symposium titled “Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration”. Her paper was about her thesis site which is on public lands and it was entitled “An Investigation into the Archaeological resources of Irishtown Gap Hollow”. 

Our professors also contributed to the conference through both poster and paper sessions and panels. Dr. Ben Ford presented at a symposium titled “The Future of Education and Training in Archaeology”. He talked about our Applied Archaeology MA program and how it trains students for a future in cultural resource management in his presentation titled Our Future is Applied: The Applied Archaeology MA Program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He also contributed to a panel discussion titled “Where Are All the Archaeologists?: A Forum for Collaborative and Equitable Preparation for a Career in Resource Management.” Dr. Francis Allard presented a poster titled Glass Beads along the Early Maritime Silk Route which he presented in the poster session “The Current State of Archaeological Research Across Southeast Asia”. Finally, Dr. Lara Homsey-Messer presented a paper with colleagues Kristina Gaugler and Kevin Gubbels titled An Experimental and Ethnographic Approach to the Analysis of Fire-Cracked Rock at Three Monongahela Sites in Southwestern PA: The Case for a Middle Monongahela Stone Boiling Technology. This paper was in a symposium titled Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and NonCooking Contexts. 

We had a great turnout of IUP conference attendees this year and we couldn’t be prouder of everyone that presented!

Last weekend, March 9-12 was the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference held in Ocean City, Maryland. I was able to attend amazing sessions, panels, and student events and this was the first archaeology conference that I have presented at which was a great accomplishment as well. I arrived bright and early on Friday to attend a session on the Archaeology of Schools and Education in the Mid-Atlantic. This session included presentations on marbles and writing slates and how they can be analyzed to understand what students were learning and how they were learning it. There was also a brilliant presentation on the way we talk about Black schools and education. The presenter showed examples of exhibits and written reports that devalue black intelligence and education by not exploring what they were taught thoroughly and frankly being lazy when analyzing artifacts related to black schools.

The second session of the day was entitled Archaeology of and for Native Peoples of the Mid-Atlantic. The papers in these sessions included a comparative analysis of projectile points from three sites around the same area in Maryland and a look into a middle woodland site in Delaware that was found during compliance for a road widening. There was also a very entertaining talk about cupules, which I have never heard of, that were found on the Roanoke River by archaeologists who were kayaking in the area. Cupules are depressions in rock that resemble an inverse spherical cap or dome and in this instance might be a marker from the indigenous groups of the region. 

The final session of the day was Case Studies in Community-Based Archaeology which was fascinating and definitely inspired me for future community-based projects that I will help organize. There were too many good papers to list and I am amazed at how much Mid-Atlantic archaeologists have taken communities into account during their projects. Collaboration and communication with stakeholders were big themes at this conference. I am excited to see how these themes grow in the next few years as community archaeology becomes the norm. 

There were also a lot of great student committee events that I was able to participate in all weekend. The first was a networking event where professionals sat at round tables and each group of students circled around to each person to learn more about their careers and how they became professional archaeologists. This was a great event to meet people that you could then find later to network with. There was also a coffee hour and “archaeolympics” which was a series of archaeology activities that allowed students to talk with each other and talk about their experience in archaeology and career plans. These were great events that really helped build connections as you met a lot of people. 

This year’s plenary, or keynote, speaker was Dr. Alexandra Jones, founder of archaeology in the community. She holds many positions in a variety of archaeological and cultural resource management environments but she mainly focused on her work bringing archaeology to D.C. and surrounding communities. Her central theme was her effort to bring sustainable archaeology into her practice as a way to empower different communities. She cites her work at the Estate Little Princes Archaeological Project in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands as a way that she could try this method in an isolated environment. She runs a field school where previous year’s participants are paid crew chiefs and TAs and she ensures that they all have a say in what happens to their cultural resources. Sustainable archaeology is one of the best ways of ensuring we have meaningful connections with our community partners where they benefit as much as we do. It was clear from the rousing applause and many questions, that the other members of the conference were just as excited about this idea as she was. 

The rest of the conference passed in a blur and I heard some amazing presentations and discussions in panels that really made me think about the future of archaeology and where I could fit in. Conferences are great because they make people feel connected to other researchers in a visceral way and can help produce new and amazing ideas through sharing different approaches and methods. I know I am brimming with a new appreciation for Middle-Atlantic archaeology and I am looking forward to next year! 

Yesterday was world anthropology day so we thought this would be the perfect time to reflect on the relationship between archaeology and anthropology. It’s important to say that archaeology is anthropology through and through (at least in the U.S.) and archaeology developed with anthropological principles of wanting to understand and respect the cultures of the people that we study. But while other subsections of anthropology focus on languages, cultural ideas, and the physical make-up of humans, archaeologists tend to study the history of people and cultures through the stuff they left behind, or material culture.

As we know, archaeology tends to adopt methods, theories, and practices of other social sciences. One of the more recent methods that we have adopted is ethnography which is the study of people through thorough observation in order to understand their rich social lives and culture. In archeology, we use ethnography to try to understand past cultures and the patterns that we discover at archeological sites.  By studying a present-day culture that is analogous to a past culture, we can better understand the parts of cultures that we aren’t always able to find through material remains. 

The ways that archeologists use ethnographies vary depending on the site they are studying. Some look at historical ethnographies which are both published and unpublished sources such as archives and field notes. This information is especially helpful if the archeology involves a group that was observed and interacted with in the past but is no longer living, or, who had many cultural changes. Additionally, some archeologists rely on oral histories. These oral histories are like ethnographies but instead of asking questions related to cultural systems or participating in the culture through participant observation, the archeologist invites individuals to share their histories through their experiences or stories that were passed down through generations.  By consulting present-day people about the past and emphasizing group histories that have been passed down archeologists gain information on the lives of the people in the past. This information can then be applied to the material culture of the past groups related to the present-day cultures who gave oral histories. 

Archaeology is best when it consults all the sources it can, and ethnographic sources are some of the most informative depending on the site. We hope you enjoyed anthro day 2023 and we’re looking forward to seeing what the future of anthropology and archaeology holds!

Further Reading:

https://www.americananthro.org/anthroday

https://www.thoughtco.com/ethnoarchaeology-cultural-anthropology-archaeology-170805

Parker, Bradley J. 

2011 Bread Ovens, Social Networks and Gendered Space: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Tandir Ovens in Southeastern Anatolia. American Antiquity 76.4: 603–27. 

Schiffer, Michael Brian. 

2013 Contributions of Ethnoarchaeology.” The Archaeology of Science. Vol. 9. Manuals in Archaeological Method, Theory and Technique: Springer International Publishing, 53–63.

Politis, Gustavo

2015 Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology. Pyrenae 46.

Yesterday was Groundhogs day! A day when Punxatawney Phil (or Buckeye Chuck, or Woodstock Willie, depending on what state you live in) climbs out of his borrow and decides if it will be an early spring or 6 more weeks of winter based on the presence of his shadow. 

This day originated from a Christian Holiday called “Candlemas” where Christians would bring their candles to the church to have them blessed and ensure their household was blessed for the rest of the winter. Over the years, this tradition became a day of weather prediction as they believed that if there was good weather and bright skies on Candlemas, winter would continue, but if it was cloudy spring would arrive soon. 

Punxatawney Phil held by his handler.

As this tradition spread to other countries in Europe, the Germans had a variation that included a hedgehog seeing its shadow. Then, as German settlers arrived in Pennsylvania and other nearby regions, it became a groundhog that was the prognosticator for a continued winter or an early spring. 

This year, a few members of the upper cohort went this year and saw Phil proclaim that we will have 6 more weeks of winter to the crowd’s exasperation. As I stood there cursing Phils’ prediction and dreading a longer snowy and bitter-cold Indiana winter, I began to think of other ways rodents tend to interfere with the environment and make archaeologists’ jobs harder. 

Both present-day, and past rodents share an affinity for burrowing and creating tunnel systems under the ground that has a habit of disturbing sites throughout the United States. Their burrows tend to have a different color and texture than the surrounding soil making them stand out. Not only can they trip up archaeologists who might assume these rodent burrows are archaeological features (guilty), but they make it increasingly difficult to understand the stratigraphy of the site. Additionally, their back dirt tends to include artifacts that are thrown out of context and into upper levels, sometimes meters away from their original location. If that’s not enough, their borrowing can also disrupt larger features and artifacts caches which travel down centimeter by centimeter as the ground around them is displaced by the rodent.

Rodent Hole disrupting the stratigraphy of a unit.

We can’t always blame rodents, because humans have a history of disturbing archaeological sites just as much as they do. Plow scars and cut-and-fill areas are just two examples of the ways that different occupations of people can interfere with the features of a site. Lucky for us, Harris Matrices can help us understand and analyze the stratigraphy of a site including areas that have been bisected by rodent burrows or plow scars. All you need is plain gridded paper (or Excell) and a lot of patience as you start to relate the different stratigraphic levels to each other by context and characteristics. After your finished, your matrix will hopefully look like the one depicted here and will let you understand how each deposit relates to others.

An example of a Harris Matrix and an the associated stratigraphy.

So, while rodents do seem to make our lives harder as archaeologists, especially by predicting more winter which could curtail our spring field projects. We have tools that make it easier to understand why some artifacts are out of context and where the rodent borrows disrupted natural stratigraphy. Given this, I think it’s fair to say that groundhogs are our frenemies.

Further Reading:

https://www.groundhog.org/legend-and-lore

https://thesubversivearchaeologist.net/category/burrowing-rodents/

https://germannaarch.wordpress.com/2021/07/12/rodent-burrows-into-our-heart-and-our-site/

https://www.thoughtco.com/harris-matrix-archaeological-tool-171240#:~:text=The%20Harris%20Matrix%20%28or%20Harris-Winchester%20matrix%29%20is%20a,cultural%20events%20which%20make%20up%20a%20site%27s%20history.

Spatiotemporal data as the foundation of an archaeological stratigraphy extraction and management system

Since November is National Indigenous Heritage Month we want to feature an archaeological site that is pretty well known, Machu Picchu, Peru. However, while most people know that it was a ceremonial place for the Incan empire, they may not know that it was also likely a place of agricultural innovation. In fact, there is a whole area that the Incans devoted to agriculture. Through the archaeological evidence, we can see the intelligence and creativity of the Incans as they navigated the steep Andean Mountains.

Machu Picchu Agricultural Terraces

 The agricultural area is comprised of cultivation terraces that look like large step platforms following the incline of the mountain. These platforms were made of many layers of material such as mulch, sand, and gravel that facilitated drainage and prevented flooding which would cause landslides. Additionally, the steps utilized natural drainage as an irrigation system directly from channels that connected the levels. The terraces also maximized the amount of land Incans were able to use to cultivate crops.  The agricultural sector is divided from the urban area of the site by a long 400- meter retaining wall with a water drainage channel to prevent land erosion. By creating these terraces, the Incans could develop and adapt their agricultural practices to the surrounding landscape without worrying about landslides. 

Estela Cóndor
grows five different
varieties of potatoes
to sell in the market,
along with a yellow
tuber called mashua
(Tropaeolum
tuberosum ) that she
cooks for her family.
– Image credit: Jim
Richardson, National
Geographic

Machu Picchu resides in a subtropical climate making the environment mild, warm, and damp. This climate made it perfect for cultivating large amounts of crops. While there is still some debate on if this specific area was where the pinnacle of agricultural innovation occurred, it is true that there were many different types of crops grown at this site leading archaeologists to believe that the indigenous people of the Andes experimented with agriculture more than any other group in the world. In fact, today there are over 3,000 varieties of the potato found in the Andes alone including species such as Pitiquina, Limena, and Phureja. Some of these potatoes were even used to treat headaches and skin rashes.  Not to mention the numerous tomato and pepper varieties that we have in the world today. Most of this innovation and variation is due to the experimental agriculture of the Incans and the other indigenous groups that inhabited Central and South America.

So, if you’re looking for someone to thank when you eat mashed potatoes or french fries, it’s probably the Incans. And, if you plan on visiting Machu Picchu make sure you ask the tour guides about the agricultural innovations that occurred on the very land you’re walking on. 

Further Reading: 

Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford

https://www.pptoursperu.com/machu-picchu-areas-agricultural-urban-quarry/

https://www.perurail.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-machu-picchu-terraces/

https://candide.com/GB/stories/a0e2f664-6c08-4c86-a768-59716b19c894

https://www.ticketmachupicchu.com/platforms-agricultural-terraces-machu-picchu/

It’s been getting chilly and crisp in Indiana, PA this past week and I don’t know about you but fall weather makes me want to sit inside and make something. If you are like me, you might be interested in experimental archaeology which is a practice where archaeologists make and utilize technologies of past people in order to understand them better. Archaeologists use experimental archaeology to test hypotheses of how and why people used different technologies. Typically, materials are gathered from the environment around you making it an accessible hobby for anyone interested in the technologies of the past.  Here are some experimental archaeology crafts that you can do while you enjoy the lovely fall weather! 

The first and most beloved example is flintknapping! This is a process that pre-contact societies used to make stone tools. It involves carefully chipping away at specific parts of a “raw” stone, also called a core. You first start with percussion flakes which chip off because of the force you apply to certain parts of the core. Then, you take off smaller pieces by applying pressure to an edge of the core with a deer antler or some other type of sharpened tool. This step refines the tool into whatever you want it to be such as an arrow/spear point or an adze. If you have kids or if you’re worried about injuring yourself you can also try “soapknapping” which takes some of the same ideas of flintknapping as you carve your stone tool out of a bar of soap. The supplies needed for flintknapping are flint/chert which is what you make your stone tool out of, a hammerstone, a piece of leather to protect your leg, a billet made from deer antler or hard wood, and an antler tine or sharpened wood for pressure flaking. 

The process of flintknapping. Credit: Closter Nature Center

If stone tools aren’t your thing maybe you would like to make a basket out of pine needles, sweetgrass, or other dry plant materials that you can forage. There are many ways to make a basket but one of the most comprehensible ways is by coiling. To make a coiled basket you first have to collect the materials. Once you have your pine needles or sweetgrass make sure to wash them, bundle them, and lay them out to dry before you start working with them. Once they are dry, you can finally begin by wrapping a cord that is attached to a tapestry needle around a bundle of around four to six pieces of your material. Your foundation cord should be wrapped 10-15 times and be ¾ inch long at first. Then, you will curl the end in and start the spiral formation by pushing the needle through the middle of the two beginning rows and sewing the new rows into the previous coil. If this sounds incredibly confusing don’t worry, there are step-by-step instructions linked at the bottom under “Sources and Further Reading”. 

Making a coiled pine needle basket.

If you’re looking for an easier project, you could make a pinch pot which is one way Native Americans made pottery for food storage and cooking. To make a pot you need to either find clay in a local clay bed,  buy it at your local craft store, or make it by looking up a salt-dough recipe. If you collect your clay, you will likely have to process it so if you are looking for a really easy project you might want to stick with air-dry clay. Once your clay is prepared, roll it out and then roll it into a ball. Then you will put your thumb in the center to make a crater in the clay and from that crater you can pinch the sides of your pot to your desired thickness. From there you can add imprinted designs using a pencil or anything else you have around your house! If you are using air-dry clay then you can simply set your project out to dry but if you are using a salt-dough or you gathered clay you will have to bake and fire it respectively. 

A pinch pot made by a young girl from Abbott Farm excavations. The center scar is from a twig impression in the clay. NJSM # AE98089.

No matter what project you choose, you will be able to get into the mindset of the people who created and used these technologies many years ago. This is what archaeologists are interested in, understanding the people of the past through the materials that they produced. By making these materials ourselves, we can get a sense of what it was like to make them and experiment with different processes to test the feasibility of certain hypotheses. We can also have fun while we’re at it which is a big benefit! 

Sources and Further Reading: 

https://exarc.net/experimental-archaeology

Flintknapping: 

https://archaeology.uiowa.edu/flintknapping-0 https://www.elymuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/HAH-worksheet-Pre-history-Stone-Age-Knapping.pdf 

https://wildernessawareness.org/articles/stone-tools-and-flintknapping/

Basket Weaving: 

http://www.nativetech.org/basketry/coilinstr.html

https://www.knowitall.org/interactives/anaturalstate/pine-needle-basket/

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/sflarch/collections/seminole-baskets/technique/

Pinch Pot:

https://exploreandmore.org/sanity-savers-make-a-pinch-pot-for-the-archaeological-society-anniversary/

https://www.instructables.com/Harvesting-Your-Own-Clay-Dirty-But-Delightful/

https://exploreandmore.org/sanity-savers-salt-dough-unicorns-and-easter-eggs/

https://thepotterywheel.com/pinch-pot-history/

https://newjerseyarchaeology.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/miniature-clay-pot-an-ancient-toy/

Image Credits:

https://closternaturecenter.org/?event=primitive-technology-2

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/how-to-weave-pine-needle-baskets

https://newjerseyarchaeology.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/miniature-clay-pot-an-ancient-toy/