Field school countdown

Field school at the Neville II site in Manchester begins the 28th.We are talking more and more about sorting things out, crew lists and housing and gear. Neville, a spot near the richest fishing grounds in central New Hampshire, was occupied at least from the Archaic Period on, say 9,000 years ago; we may actually Find Stuff, which we usually do but not very much and mostly flakes of stone. Sites near the field school have yielded beads and pottery as well as stone tools. It is going to be more modern than the Paleo (13,000 -9500 years ago) snobs are used to, but I can take the idea of Finding Stuff very calmly. Last week we finished cataloguing lithics from the last day of the first Neville Site, back in 1969; now we are cataloguing the pottery. (NB: these were objects very kindly donated by the heirs of PEM in the earlier entry; they haven't just been sitting in the lab waiting for someone to get around to cataloguing them.)

There was a "getting to know New Hampshire ceramics" workshop at the lab last Tuesday, with some people attending from SCRAP and some from the Sargent Museum, with whom SCRAP is running the field school. We looked at pieces from the different periods and agreed that the nice solid classification of form, decoration, and temper content was idealized, like most typology, but since many of us had never seen the local pottery, it was a welcome start. Pottery-making defines the beginning of the Woodland Period, say 3,000 years ago. Clay beds are fairly common, unlike really good workable stone; we have no evidence of people trading manufactured pottery from a central source.

The way the clay was treated -- what was mixed in to help it dry evenly, which is called 'temper,' or how they were shaped or decorated -- changed over time, but very slowly. This makes pottery a solid but not very precise way to date the layers in which it is found. Sometimes the pots were broken with food (most likely; possibly dyes or medicines as well) in them, or burned onto them; the carbonized residue gives a much more precise carbon-14 date than pottery style or even the wood from the fire. We shall be most concerned not to clean the promising-looking glop off the potsherds we find, even though the natural tendency would be to wipe them on your shirt and look at the decoration (I know; we did this in England constantly and if the pieces turned out to be painted there was trouble).

New Hampshire people did not make multi-colored painted pots, or even various shapes; they stuck to beaker-shaped vessels in a range of sizes, and all the decoration involved doing things to the clay: smoothing, stamping, and /or incising it. (picture by Lauren the radiant intern) The pots were coil-built, smoothed, shaped, decorated and fired in an open fire, so the outsides were patchy colors of brown or gray, tending toward black.

I am told the soil where we will be digging is very fine and sandy, and we won't have any trouble distinguishing pottery from stone or a crumb of regular earth, but as usual I am dubious (Can still find things? have I lost it?) and time will tell. This will be the first site I have worked on in New Hampshire (or the US, actually) that is likely to have ceramics.




You might see (http://www.nativetech.org/pottery/pottery.htm), although they are more assertive about their facts than the people I am around.

Petersen, J. B., and D. Sanger-- 1991. 'An aboriginal Ceramic Sequence for Maine and the Maritime Provinces.' in Prehistory of the Maritime Provinces: Past and Present Research, edited by M. Deal, pp. 113-170. Council of Maritime Premiers, Fredericton, is what we are all reading.