Copy of Lab 6 - How do archaeologists find sites_

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science Dr. Kara Fulton Lab 6 - How do archaeologists find sites? Your Team Name: Your Team Motto: Remember: this is a team assignment, so anything you write here should be the voice of the team (i.e., use “we” NOT “I”) Tip: As you read through the introductory material in this lab, highlight important information as you go. Resource : How to Use a Highlighter to Improve Your Grades. Archaeological Survey Archaeological survey is when archaeologists search for evidence of past human behavior and record information about the artifacts, features, and other data they find. Data from surveys can tell us about the past - for example, the distribution of settlements across the landscape and when they were occupied. Depending on the research questions guiding the project, the archaeologist may stop investigations after the survey or use the information from the survey to guide excavations. In the materials from this module, you learned about a variety of ways archaeologists survey for evidence of human behavior. In this lab, we’ll explore two specific types of survey: aerial photography and pedestrian survey. Aerial Photography You may have seen news headlines about heat waves revealing ancient monuments. How, exactly, does that happen? Here’s an example to illustrate. Let’s take an enclosed Iron Age settlement that consists of a roundhouse in the middle, a few buildings around it, an earthen bank to protect it, and a ditch on the outside (which is where the material to build the bank came from) (Figure 1-A). As time passes, the Iron Age roundhouse goes out of use and in the Roman period the occupants of the site build themselves a new rectangular house with a few garden walls (B). The banks and the ditches of the Iron Age are still there, but the roundhouse is gone. Over time, after the end of the Roman period, this site ceases to be inhabited at all. All the traces of the buildings have disappeared from sight, but the bank and ditch from the original roundhouse are large, durable features, so they last much longer (C). Over time, plowing by medieval farmers and through the centuries into the modern day gradually erode the bank and ditch so that, eventually, there are no bumps visible on the surface (D-E). However, there are buried features - the traces of the ditches that were dug to build the earthen bank and ditch, the drip gully around the roundhouse, and the footings of the stone wall of the rectangular Roman building. These features are still there below the surface and they affect how the crop grows, leaving marks on the land (F). These marks on the land are often visible in images taken from the air (aerial photography). If the site were to be excavated, the top soil would be taken off and those features

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science would gradually be revealed (G). Other slighter features, such as fence postholes from the Roman period, that aren’t visible from the crop marks would also be revealed during excavation (H). Figure 1. An archaeology site over time.

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science fewer nutrients for the plants to grow in. Thus, the plants growing there will not be as healthy, creating a parchmark . So, plants on the filled in ditch will grow taller and plants on the wall will grow shorter. Figure 3. Diagram of cropmarks and parchmarks. Figure 4 shows another example of this idea when looking across the surface of the crop. In this diagram, there are the remains of a ditch around a burial mound causing cropmarks. The ditch has a greater depth of soil, so the vegetation is darker, taller, and more lush. There’s another linear ditch that’s even deeper, resulting in even higher, healthier plants. On the right side is a pale area where there was a stone wall - a parchmark. The vegetation here is thinner and not as healthy, so if it’s hot or dry, it’ll die off sooner than the surrounding plants. Bear in mind, however, that variations in soil depth can occur for a number of reasons, not all of them due to archaeological remains. Pipelines, land drains, recently removed field boundaries – all can produce cropmarks, while agricultural practices such as irrigation and weed killing techniques can also affect crop growth, often producing circular or linear variations in growth that can resemble the shapes and forms of particular types of archaeological monuments. ‘Natural’ causes include patterns in crops forming above geological features such as fissures and frost-cracks.

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science Figure 4. Anatomy of a Cropmark. We can see the sort of effect this process has when we’re looking from the air at archaeological remains using aerial photography. Take a look at Figure 5, which shows an aerial photo of a few fields in the top image. The bottom field doesn’t have a crop in it at the moment, it’s just brown, bare soil. However, it’s not consistently the same color - you can see lines and markings that are darker showing where there were ditches which have since been filled up with soil - these are soil marks . The multiple parallel lines are most likely modern plow lines, so we can ignore those. At the top of the image, above the road, there is a field that has green, growing crops. In this field, you can also see features - lines and rectangular turns - though they’re not as clearly visible as in the bottom field. We don’t know exactly what these lines represent because we haven’t excavated them, but we can get some idea based on the shape of the features. It’s these features that can then be traced and marked on maps, so that even if the conditions aren’t right for them to show up in the soil again, we’ve recorded their existence (bottom image in Figure 5). We can compare the features with other sites that have been excavated in order to give them a likely date.

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science Q1. Make a copy of this Google Slide file: Lab 6 Aerial Photo #1 . In the slide, trace the archaeological features you see. When you’re done, download the slide as an image (File > Download > PNG image) and paste the image below. Hint: the many parallel lines running diagonally are marks from a modern tractor. Q2. Were the features visible on the landscape walls or ditches ? Highlight the correct answer. Explain your answer in 1 sentence: The square in the picture like diggin marks Q3. What were the features made of? Explain your answer. Like dirt dug from underground Q4. How many small rooms were there on the right edge of the feature? 9 small rooms

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science Aerial Photo #2: Tixall Hall Answer the following questions using Aerial Photo #2. Q5. Were the features visible on the landscape walls or ditches ? Highlight the correct answer. Explain your answer in 1 sentence: The squares and rectangles in the picture and the small shed Q6. What shape were the buildings that no longer exist? A big building with like square/rectangular shapes like a house

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science artifact found, the location and type of the finds are recorded onto a map, then the artifact is collected. Figure 7 shows the results of a pedestrian survey from Covehithe, England. The maps show artifacts that were found during the survey by the time period. Note the modern road to the south of the survey area and a church to the east. Take a look at the distribution of artifacts - how did the number and distribution of artifacts change between each period? At which period did the greatest decrease in the number of artifacts take place? Figure 7. Artifacts identified during survey, categorized by time period. For the Prehistoric period, we’ve got a general scatter of flint flakes without a real specific concentration. This certainly suggests that people were using the area in the Prehistoric period,

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science but perhaps not heavily. For the Roman period, we have another general distribution, but there seems to be more artifacts in the middle of the area. For the Early/Middle Anglo-Saxon period, there is a sharp drop in the amount of artifacts found - only two squares produced any evidence of human occupation, with only one pottery sherd each toward the modern road. For the Late Anglo-Saxon period, we see another change - more pottery was found and it’s much more concentrated in the middle of the survey area. For the High medieval period, we have much more pottery than any of the previous time periods. If there’s more pottery, there were probably more people, or at least more activity. There’s also a concentration of artifacts in the southern part of the survey area, closer to the church, then another cluster toward the north. From aerial photography, we identified an abandoned road that runs between these two concentrations, so perhaps that road divided two properties (see Figure 8). For the Late medieval period, there’s still quite a bit of pottery, the settlement doesn’t seem to shrink much. However, there is a blank space in the northeast of the survey area that had artifacts in the previous period. This may suggest that there were houses that had been abandoned during this time. For the Post medieval period, that area of abandonment in the north seems to be getting bigger. There were very few artifacts found north of the road we identified and nearly all of the pottery is concentrated in the southern part of the survey area, near the church. For the 19th century, the concentrations are smaller and separated into two clusters - one near the church and one near cottages that exist today. You can see from this example how evidence from artifacts that were simply on the surface of the ground can tell us about change over thousands of years, even for time periods for which we have no historical record. We can also see which period had the greatest decrease in the number of artifacts (from the Roman to the Early/Middle Anglo-Saxon period), suggesting a decrease in the amount of people using the area. After that, the settlement is either growing or decreasing more gradually. Figure 8. Aerial photo of the survey area.

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science the lower left side (Figure 10). The number 7 tells you how far into that 95 square you are (so, just over halfway into the square). Then, we would find box 71 on the y-axis - the 5 tells us we’re halfway into the 71 square. Where these points meet is where Entry #1 is located, indicated with a red circle in the figure. The circle is red and large because Entry #1 was designated as a large site. Figure 10. The location of Entry #1, located at 957, 715. Table 1. Survey data. Entry Number X-coordinate (along) Y-coordinate (up) Size of Site Age of site 1 957 715 Large Roman 2 960 705 Small Roman 3 968 710 Small Roman 4 974 719 Large Roman 5 974 763 Small Roman 6 976 734 Large Roman 7 979 749 Medium Roman 8 981 728 Small Roman 9 982 733 Small Roman

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science 10 986 760 Small Roman 11 990 745 Medium Roman 12 993 711 Medium Roman 13 994 754 Small Roman 14 998 724 Small Roman 15 000 702 Small Roman 16 003 747 Medium Roman 17 007 719 Medium Roman 18 005 696 Small Roman 19 006 720 Medium Roman 20 009 728 Medium Roman 21 010 762 Small Roman 22 010 700 Medium Roman 23 013 705 Small Roman 24 013 724 Medium Roman 25 016 736 Small Roman 26 020 706 Small Roman 27 021 707 Small Roman 28 021 741 Small Roman 29 022 722 Small Roman 30 023 744 Small Roman 31 032 704 Small Roman 32 034 722 Medium Roman 33 959 714 Medium Anglo-Saxon 34 977 720 Small Anglo-Saxon 35 978 726 Small Anglo-Saxon 36 979 745 Small Anglo-Saxon 37 984 763 Medium Anglo-Saxon

ARCH 2800 - Archaeological Science Q11. How did settlement patterns change in the Anglo-Saxon period? Make one inference supported by observations. Explicitly state what your observations and inferences are (e.g., “Based on our observations of [insert your specific observations ]…. we infer that… [insert your specific inferences that connect to your observations]”).