Open a box to a 1,000-piece puzzle and find there are only a dozen or so pieces left. Can you imagine the picture?
That’s the challenge five archaeologists have had in the last month trying to coax bones, shell, charcoal and pottery shards from an American Indian site at Cherry Point air station.
Carmen Lombardo, natural resources and cultural resources manager at Cherry Point, said that Southeastern Archaeological Research spent the better part of July digging at one of more than 80 sites located at the air station.
One of the most significant findings by the group was that of a fire pit where the burned bone of a white tail deer was found amid scattered pieces of fabric-impressed pottery that date to the Woodland Period of American Indian history, anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 years ago.
“We’ve got deer, we know that. So it could be a small cooking pit, maybe a hearth,” said principal investigator Bryan Harrell of Kinston. “The great part about this is we have ceramic pieces found right at the same level.
“It more than likely represents a single discreet event. There’s a good possibility that it has been reoccupied through time. We have no idea if it was by the same people. It could have been over several hundred years. It’s hard to get an idea of how many times.
“This is like a small single snapshot at a single instant. These are probably going to date, if they are a medium to fine sand tempered, we’re looking at around 500 AD upward to maybe 800 to 900 AD.”
The group dug 11 square “test units” to various depths in the search. One of the holes turned up about 220 fragments of pottery.
The oldest artifact discovered was also the deepest, a small quartz projectile point that may date back 3,500 years.
“It’s too heavy and too large to be used as an arrowhead,” Harrell said. “This is probably a small dart or a spear point.”
He said lab work would help determine its age.
“It could be earlier than what we think. I don’t think it’s later,” he said. “It looks like it could be a small early Woodland projectile point, but it could be earlier. It can’t be ruled out at this point.”
Harrell said finding the rock point is rare, especially in the coastal plain, where the raw stone materials needed to make arrowheads and spear tips were hard to find.
“It’s what gets everybody going,” Harrell said. “The fact that somebody has taken this rock and made it into a tool, I think everybody in archaeology likes that stuff.”
One of the best aspects of the site is that it has not been disturbed by years of plowing, as is the case at many other archaeological sites, Harrell said.
“We’ve been on sites before where there were lots and lots of artifacts but it has been mechanically plowed for many, many years,” he said. “The most significant thing is that burning feature because it lets us know that there hasn’t been significant or heavy disturbance to the site.”
There is a possibility that some of the early American Indians were in this area during the Archaic Period, which dates back 10,000 years.
But 10,000 years ago the water level was, perhaps, more than 40 feet lower than it is today. Many archaeologists believe that much of the evidence of these people is likely under water today.
Curiosity is what is driving the team to dig during 90-degree days.
“It makes you wonder what was really going on here back then and to see that particular piece, based on its depth, may be a little older than the material that’s here,” Lombardo said. “I’m going to be really interested to see what the dates come back for the entire site and the time period that’s covered.”
Lombardo is hoping that enough evidence can be gleaned to qualify the site for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
He anticipates a report on this particular site by around Thanksgiving.
Author: Drew C. Wilson | Source: ENC Today [August 05, 2010]