Protecting a dead body with a live one  − 30 July, 1987

According to the state of Tennessee, any field that has lain fallow for over 25 years requires an archeologic sampling before large scale construction can begin. When, the city of Chattanooga wanted to build a fishing center next to the Tennesse river, the state law kicked in and so they hired the local archeologist (Nick Honerkamp) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga during the summer of 1987.

I took archeology field school because it gave me six hours credit toward my anthro minor and also included the promise of a small stipend.

Man, I earned every red cent...

There's no experience quite like preparing a wild area for a proper dig when you're next to a river and the temp averages the mid to upper 90s.

Unlike just taking a bush hog through the undergrowth, which would have been difficult enough, you've got to level off the ground as well as you can, survey where you're going to dig your pits and then mark them off with string. Many believe that archeology is about finding artifacts and cataloging them but that's not very useful scientifically. You have to make a 3D view of lat/long/and depth of where the artifact was found in order to date it.

So it's not at all like diggging a hole and recording what you find. Typically, you use a zone and level system, whereby zones are denoted by letters and mean that you can divide one strata of earth from another. A flood lays down a layer of sediment and you can tell by color and chemical composition that the layer is distinct from those above or below it. It's an actual event you can see in time.

On the other hand, levels are 10cm increments that help you subdivide zones. So if somebody at the site yells at me, "Hey Gauntt! C'm here! check out Zone D level 3", I'll know to start from the top of the hole, work down until I get to the fourth distinct layer, and then look down 30cm from the upper edge of that layer.

That's a lot of detail, I know but it's important because the essence of archeology is to extract scientific knowledge while you're more or less destroying the site. Once it's dug, it's done as far as cataloging. There's only one chance to capture it.

That's all the more reason why you plan your last hour of digging and collection very carefully. You want to leave the site at a clean stopping point, in terms of depth, mapping and cataloging. If the push comes to the shove, you spend the extra time to get to a stopping point rather than saying "hell, it's five o'clock. I'm late for a drink".

So it was about four weeks into the dig when we hit the Mississipian burial ground. We had been finding arrow points, pottery sherds, middens (trash piles) during the whole dig but they were scattered about and suggested a temporary camp, probably a well known stop for hunters. But as we closed on the finish date, we hit the first burial.

Mississipian Indians (around 1200-1400AD) did flex burials (eg. fetal position) as did other peoples. Along with the scientific descriptions (eg. likely adult female found in pit 4, zone c, levels 4-8), you adopt shorthand names for them in order to communicate quickly among the team.

We used the town of Mayberry to organize the names of individual burials. There was Andy and Aunt Bea (adults), Opie (older child), and unknown.

Then there was Otis...

You might remember him as the town drunk. We found this particular Otis not flexed but almost stretched out---face down, as was proper I suppose for an Otis. More important, he had a nearly intact jug of pottery placed between his head and the inside of the elbow.

We found him around 345pm on a summer day when afternoon thundershowers were common. Nick took over the excavation of the jug and possibly the skull. Otis' bones had shifted with the ground so his lower half was still covered with earth while the elbow, skull, and pottery jug were exposed.

As Nick gently scraped away earth, the clouds grew darker and it was obvious that a good shower was building.

This is not good given that rainwater brings with it the local pollutants of the day. We were about five feet down, which meant that the overall soil chemistry wasn't that different than when Otis had been around. Now, that the head and pot had been uncovered, we really needed to collect one or the other and then cover up the remainder that was still underground.

We had a few swatches of blue tarp to lay around the rest of the pit but the actual work area where Otis' head and the jug lay were exposed. The first drops started coming down, fat and lazy but we all knew that before long, it would get ugly.

Nick faced a tough decision. If he hurried things up, he'd probably lose a lot of the science. If he covered Otis up, there was a chance some moron would come in during the night and rip it up. Letting the elements soak it was not an option.

Then, someone got the bright idea that a big person like me should get on all fours just above the actual digging site and let Nick work underneath. That way, we'd only need about another 20minutes and could get it out safely and secure the rest.

So I found myself being pelted on my back with rain while Nick excavated and called out measurements for the book. During that time, the scientific and romantic sides of my brain took turns wondering in their own dialect. The left side thought about how it would be cataloged, the relationship of Otis to the rest of the burials, how we would date the pottery and so forth.

Almost simultaneously, the right side thought about the fact that it'd been about 500-600 years since Otis had seen the light of day. What kind of person was he? What type of existence did I have at that time. Was he a good man or even a drunk?

As the shower picked up the pace a little, I saw the humor of protecting bones with my live body. To this day, I haven't forgotten the combined sense of science and fantasy coming together.

I don't really feel lke I desecrated anything.

Indeed, I felt then and feel now that it was one of the best days of my life....

Comments:

intrepideddie (May 12, 2007. 03:27pm)

Great archeology story! Always been an interest of mine and I love reading first-hand accounts like this. Man, in another life I could have been that guy -- hunching on all fours in the rain over a several-hundred-year-old body. What could be better?