Journey to a different Ice Age

Well, it wasn't quite that bad. I love Gault.

Setting out Saturday -- This is the first installment of the story of how a bunch of people from the NH State Conservation and Rescue Archaeology Program (NHSCRAP) went to visit their friends in Texas to dig on a Paleo-Indian site and get out of the snow and Find Stuff, we hope.

It helps to know that last week I was visiting people in Northampton, MA, and woke up with a sore throat, a dry cough, and a surely unconnected flare-up of a sprained knee from 2 years ago. I also left the bag of current knitting there, adding a fine feverish confusion to the getting-ready process.
So I left work yesterday with the remnants of bronchitis and a doubtful left knee and drove in circles around Manchester till it was time to go to the airport and pick up Lisa (who has nothing to do with the rest of the story, at least so far). We went to the India Palace and then she took me to MattK's house, printed out her paper, and took my car away. Matt lives much closer to the Manchester airport than I do, so I and Linda (from Keene, even farther) spent the night with Matt because the relatively cheap flight to Austin left NH at 7:30am. I was seeking safety in numbers and some other people to drive. It had not then started to snow.

Matt's cat Squishy told me how Matt starves him of food and affection, and I passed out on Matt's couch. Matt made me tea around 4:15 this morning, by which time it was snowing steadily, but not too windy. There were about 2" new on the ground. Will came and picked Matt and me and Linda and our rather substantial two bags each, and we reached the airport just before sunrise. There were lots of people in the check-in and security lines, most of them heading to Florida. One flight had already been cancelled, but ours was in order and we boarded about 7:15.



Snow and dawn twilight in Manchester NH

I was still not really conscious. We were late taking off as they had to de-ice the wings. I taught the woman next to me a better way to cast-on and how to slip a stitch and how to knit into the front and back, which helped kill some of the time we stood on the runway watching it snow. Once we were above the clouds, it was lovely and free of snow. The flight to Baltimore was uneventful. Most of the passengers left to try to catch their connections. The SCRAPpers generally moved closer together to discuss menus for dinner this week. We have Jon E, Kurt, Dick, Mark, and me who have been to Gault before, and Matt K, Chris I, Linda, Will, & Kalila, who have not. George, Mikey, and Dawn are in Texas already.
As far as we can recall, we worked at Gault in 2000, 2001, and 2002, or possibly one year later along. Since then, Mike Collins the archaeologist who worked on the site before, has been able to buy the land and a couple of adjoining lots, including a house. He has formed a non-profit (The GaultSchool.org) and built some additional showers--twice, since the first set were taken out by a tornado. We will be cooking in the house and tenting around it. They have some semi-movable tents over the parts of the site where we will be digging; it's about a kilometer (a little over half a mile) from the house.

Gault is on the edge of the Texas hill country and the coastal plain, so you had the tastes of two quite different ecosystems, a wonderful place to be a hunter-gatherer. The Edwards Plateau is also the origin of some of the finest chert in North America, so it was ideal for making stone tools.
The site has been continuously inhabited from-- well, that is the question. It was pot-hunted quite systematicallly of a great deal of Woodland (say from 1000 BCE) and Archaic (say from 9000 BCE) material, but they didn't get down to the Clovis layers.
Mike Collins and the previous owners found the jaw of a baby mammoth and a bunch of Clovis (say 14 K years ago) tools around 1999 and 2000, and also Clovis-period living surfaces. This is unusual--most of the Clovis remains we have are hunting/butchering sites. Just before the excavations in 2003 finished, Collins's people found a meter or so square of what seems to be essentially Clovis-culture pavement, which is unprecedented. It is roughly North/South/East/West aligned (and being about a meter across, proves the Clovis were French, only of course this part isn't true. But they could have been. This is a clever joke because one of the proponents of the Clovis Iberian-not-Siberian theory is Bruce Bradley, who is also working in Austin this month. He is an important archaeologist and one of the best flint-knappers going as well as one of the nicest people in the field, so we hope we shall see something of him).

And under the thick layer of Clovis there appears to be quite a bit of not-Clovis, which according to some people cannot be true and is as exciting as it is controversial, so we will be happy whatever we find.

If we ever get there. It's only about 11 in the morning, we haven't landed in Jackson, MS, so as to take off for Austin so as to get driven to Gault and I have been up for a long,long time. So far I have forgotten my secondary boots (left in the car, I meant to change into them when I gave it to Lisa. Dick forgot to bring a book, so he has borrowed the one Lisa thoughtfully passed along to me. It is nice to know I can be relied upon for reading material if nothing else. Dick is the only one with food; his orange bran muffins are all the food we have.

And now we are in Jackson, MI, and they have thrown us off the plane (the hydraulic problem they said they had fixed in Baltimore, not our fault). At least there is food here.
Laura

Sunday morning -- a premature dateline, as the sun has yet to rise. After a couple of hours in Jackson, where we were able to eat mediocre food at inflated prices, they got us onto a plane to Houston. We changed planes in Houston (which looks like a very nice airport) and arrived in Austin at 5:30 local time. WITH all our people and all our luggage, which is as amazing as it was desirable. I was thinking we were no more attached to our luggage than any other travelers, but Dick pointed out most people were not expecting to sleep in their luggage.


redbud in Austin

Dick had stayed in touch with the people expecting to meet us at 2:30; they did meet people like Heather and Nathaniel coming in from God knows where. Anyway,
Mr. Collins met us with a pickup truck and a van. Some of us stopped at the small Florence grocery store, which has not changed much in the last six years. We are told the town is right on its way to hell, though, now it has gone from zero stoplights to two.

We reached The Gault School just as the sun was setting (big and orange and a huge endless horizon like Mars but with a few more trees). It was in the high 70's and humid. The people who were already there helped us put up our tents and showed us how to avoid the prickly pear.

The back of the house from the path to the portapotties



It is a long walk from the house. Note tent in far left.


The tents are about 300 yards from the house, over ankle-breaking ground with big lumps of limestone. The chemical toilets are halfway between the tents and the house. The house is very small and pretty nice (clean, has tile floors, roof, lights, a good-sized kitchen), but the cesspit is collapsing so we are discouraged from using the real shower or the toilet. I did have one of the great showers of all time before I went to bed.
The sun is up; it is lighting up the high thick clouds and making the air sticky. Apparently last year it rained 150% of normal and everything burgeoned. Since then rain has been 50% of normal and everything that grew last year is waiting to burn. No campfires.

We spent Sunday morning going over the history of the site and over the site, with PowerPoint presentation. Among many other things, Mr. Collins suggests it was neither "Clovis first” in the New World, nor in some cases were the fluted point makers, "Clovis" at all - a possible refinement of what "Clovis culture" really means, and we really actually care about these things.
They are making a sign to put up with 'NHSCRAP Lab, however many miles' to add to this.
We spent Sunday afternoon, generally, waiting for people to take levels, first with an ancient optical transit and then with the laser transit. One takes beginning levels to see how far to dig (we are digging mostly in ten centimeter intervals) and also because the soil, as God is our witness (or if you prefer, optics and physics) the soil rebounds. This was boring, and gave me an opportunity to develop a miserable case of performance anxiety ("This site is too important for me to work here.")


"Hurry up and wait..."

Around three we were allowed to dig. The soil has the texture, Dick said, of Elmer's glue mixed with pigment. I was thinking t was like beef jerky, only not so thinly sliced. I was unable to obtain a hand pick so I took a pick-mattock and skimmed it off by the centimeter, earning possibly the only compliment I have ever had from Dick on technique.

That night's team made a pair of tasty stews. We staggered off to bed after a rousing discussion of Mr. Collins's presentation, and beer. Then many of us had trouble sleeping while the wind howled and people wondered if their tents would still be standing in the morning. In the case of Matt’s and Yvonne's tent, not so much. Mine survived nicely but some of the stakes are bent, the strong aluminum kind with a quarter-inch round cross-section.

We are still alive Monday night, but it has been a near thing.


Now it’s Tuesday--As we have no radio (except the one that turns on and talks if we should worry pointlessly about tornadoes (no basement here)), TV, or computer, or newspaper, we are probably the only people in the US outside of Lancaster County not sick to death of the primaries.
To understand yesterday completely it helps to know that the day we arrived (Saturday) was warm and sunny, and Dawn had sunburn, and people were wondering about wearing shorts. Sunday was sullen T-shirt weather. Sunday night/Monday morning a front staggered through, 12 hours late and much much drier than forecast. The sound of crickets stopped (they have lots of crickets and no piles of snow here) succeeded by the sound of yards of flapping stressed nylon competing with the whistle of the wind. Cold wind.


A long cold walk from the tent to the water screening area, though they did have a cart to carry the full buckets out there.

They have had a system where the diggers water-screen their own buckets. Water-screening is not about being much drier than your material, so Dick had told us to bring rubber boots and rainsuits. Usually I wear fast-drying trousers and skip the rainsuit, because it is too hot and stuffy. Yesterday it was immediately obvious that the rainsuit’s warmth was a Good thing, not bad. The wind continued to whistle, sometimes with drizzle. For whatever reason the water pumped out of Buttermilk Creek is several degrees warmer than the air, but since they give you somewhat manic pressurized firehoses, you turn it off after you blast through the clay (being careful not to blast your material over the side of the screen). You can't really pick tiny, beautiful translucent flakes out of the screen in gloves--well, you can, but you have to be strongly motivated, which I was after that day.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v202/Passeriform/afewflakesinthescreen.jpg

There is more chert here than we have seen the past two summers combined, from ONE BUCKET

I got worried about Heather, who is carrying a broken rib from, she says, 'rock-climbing' with Nathaniel (I guess that's what kids are calling it these days). She has no body fat. She got all quiet. I got her another layer of jacket from the fat cats under the tent (where it was 42F during the warm part of the day. No wind there, either. Bastards). We learned that you could put one hand under some layers and get feeling back into it. I suggested they maybe bring the coffee and tea makings down to the barn so we could have hot drinks for lunch. The water in the barn is sulfurous but it tasted all right if you didn't inhale, and it was hot. Feeling in BOTH hands.


Linda is amazingly cheerful.

Cheeriness managed to struggle on until about 3:30. By then, the water making its way back to the creek, and the quarts of liquefied clay freed from the trenches, had made light- footedness more difficult than light-heartedness, and I was more than slow off the mark. Kalila was wearing Dick's boots and had trouble making her footwear stay with her. The sun, which had cruelly taunted us by trying burn through from time to time, began to sink. I hated everyone who wasn't screening with me. I still loved the really huge numbers of delicate (and the robust ones as well) translucent flakes. Most of them are the color of leftover microwaved coffee with milk. The density of wasteflakes is staggering. Apparently they get a much higher rate of recovery of flakes from the New Hampshire-dug layers because we are obsessive about recovering every last tiny one.

It was a pretty much foul day, and Chris and I and Dick were making dinner, so at least we were able to leave a bit early. Only Dick was the guy with the recipes, and he showed up an hour later with some pathetic tale of putting people's tents back up from the wind. Chris had by then, quite reasonably asked me 1400 questions about what Dick wanted us to do and I had apologized maybe 1300 times for biting his head off. Dick came and affirmed our efforts and gave me Scotch so I wouldn't draw blood. Dinner was ready before anyone actually died, so I suppose it was all right.


Wednesday, March 5

Tuesday was much, much better. It did not rain. Much of the day was cloudless and some of the wind died. No more tents were killed (Kurt's and Yvonne-and-Matt's were both from Walmart,and the poles were brittle). Though the people assigned to water-screen moaned a good deal, they had much less to complain of. Heather and I were under the tent digging and actually removed some layers.



Heather with a small pick


Karen, Jon, and Mike

I am cleaning out a back-filled trench from the 1990~, which pretty much obviates the imposter-syndrome. I got to use the big pick again. I also found a cute 2/3 of a rabbit-eared projectile point,


The fancy word is 'bifurcate base.'

along with a chunk of a whiskey bottle. Although I don't understand why, my knees are fine, considering that I squat and kneel and do all kinds of things that my knees usually resent (lots of ibuprofen?). My horrible plague cough is much better.

Some people are working in a pit called The Telephone Booth. Mr.Collins wants us to take it down 16 levels into the pre-Clovis. Matt found a Clovis blade yesterday, proving they had at least made it through the Archaic. Most of us are in the tent, a large semi-permanent plastic Quonset-style with zip windows. The tent covers the delicate area where have found the stretch of pavement. They have an old infra-red picture of the whole field from the early 1990's and it was Swiss-cheesed with pot-hunting holes _everywhere_ . So Collins's people were being a bit cavalier when they opened a big unit there with a backhoe. Then they started finding pockets of untouched, stratified Archaic, so they have had to slow down and dig properly. Heather and Jon (Jon always does this) found intact, stratified Archaic points within minutes and a couple feet of one another (different styles). Saved from the looters! And Mark is cleaning an intact burned-rock oven (he also found deer bone and some chert tools, scrapers and so on.


Mark and his burnt-rock oven


We are in generally good and hopeful spirits, except that apparently the nearest place that sells hummus or Italian bread is Georgetown, and I can barely express how vile the wine available is. Fortunately the beer is plentiful and delicious.

We ended a little early so we could watch Bruce Bradley demonstrate flint-knapping. Most of the good material hereabouts was used up in antiquity.

Bruce has a point, one he made himself.


Bruce lays it out for us

With what he had, he didn't succeed in making a Clovis point, though he made a nice scraper. Then we had a relatively long wait for dinner, which was fine as there was beer.

There was beer.


Much amusement was occasioned by the unwise people who decided they really wanted a shower. The water is piped, probably from Buttermilk Creek, through a long black plastic pipe into a 300 gallon tank. It is possible that the water in the pipe was warm, but the water in the tank was apparently not. Some of us are going to be staying downwind.

Now it is Wednesday night, after a beautiful, warm day. We had lasagna. People are making an emergency run to buy mostly eggs, beer, and wine. Our feelings of optimism have been tempered by more than half our time being over and a really awful weather forecast involving sleet and temperatures below forty. We are managing to keep the water-sifting up with the buckets of spoil (excavated dirt) by having a couple hours in the afternoon when everyone sifts. Dick is hoping we can all dig at the same time tomorrow morning and maybe the weather will pass through quickly. The people in the Telephone Booth are down to Level 10, but that's still sixty centimeters to go and it is not under a tent.
I took a shower today and it was NOT even as warm as my shampoo, which had been in a nice warm tent. We are compiling a list of things they need to tell people ("this is poison oak." "This is something Paleo and you should tell someone when you find it.") and Dick says that the shower situation is Not Okay at All. He rarely says anything so damning. And they need twice as many Porta potties.
But we like it here very much.

Note from Thursday morning: Now we know--Archaeologists use alcohol to stay awake. Which was a dismal inability without it. Silence reigned, except for the snores as Dick slept while sitting largely upright while we waited for the car to return, and in fact I gave up and went to bed sober It was clear and warmer then. The weather report this morning was simply grim. "The good news is that there isn't supposed to be any _accumulation_ of snow." Nor does tomorrow sound much better. Clark can get people into Austin to the Texas state Archaeology Lab (TARL). We look like digging this morning and lab this afternoon. Dick apparently regrets what did to the water-screeners Monday; he keeps using words like "unreasonable" and "zombies." Which makes some of us mutter that it wasn't THAT bad. He is supposed to initiate a series of 'distinguished speakers' (they take what they can get) tonight at the barn. Clark was previously concerned that too many Texans were intending to come for him to seat. We feel the weather should weed out the weak nicely.

They were wrong about 'no accumulation' Thursday night. But we are all still alive.

Thursday, March 6, 2008
was fully as awful as advertised. Clark had walked around being a prophet of doom on the nice Wednesday afternoon, and NOAA predicted steadily worse as time went on (the Weather Radio is our only link with the Outside, except when Kurt goes to the Rattlesnake Karaoke Bar). The morning dawned gray but not more than threatening. Dick arranged for a flotilla of rather distinguished archaeologists to pick us up and we expected to go to TARL and sort flakes. We went out to work and dug, even water-screened, until about eleven. We hoped it would get worse, because if it didn’t, we would rather have kept working. The weather was gray and spitting little bits of rain, but it was certainly not so bad as Monday.

We would have sorted flakes happily enough, but it turned out more entertainingly. Bruce Bradley and Mike Collins and Andy Hemmings (whom I claim as kin) are writing a book together while Bruce is on sabbatical, so they really can't come out and play with us, they need to be serious and dedicated. Unfortunately they find brainstorming together so stimulating they have Too Many Ideas, and they can't write the book because they keep thinking of neat things to research (hey, let's compare the lengths of projectile points found in caches with the projectile points found in kill sites or manufacturing sites [they threw everything under 10 cm away unless they were in some God-awful place without decent stone]).
But even though they are very very busy, they spent from about one to five telling us about what we were doing, and I am afraid I found my level of nerdity. They would say, "Any questions?" and no one would say anything (possibly because they were listening to the rain pour down outside, vigorously) so I would ask what exactly did distinguish the Clovis flakes from the things they had found thirty centimeters deeper? and it was fascinating. You really can, with faith and practice, learn to discern different levels of craftsmanship on rocks.


Dick and Mike

After Bruce telling us the day before, during his demonstration, about what made something Clovis, and then the three of them pretty much taking us through the same things again with different rocks (and casts of bone and ivory artifacts), we have actually learned things. Some of which I may even retain till I get home.
Among the heresies promulgated--not just the increasingly accepted idea that the Clovis culture were not the first into the New World--was the idea that not all the Paleo-Indians who were making fluted points were the same culture we have been calling Clovis. I call it "Not First and Not Clovis” and I cannot see it not causing a realyl nasty snarl among the academics. I recall the loud smelly middle of the "Clovis were SO first, and you're a dirty CIA-spy/commie site-salting SLOPPY methodologist" discussion, and I do not think people will be happy to hear that “their” Paleobraves were not Clovis o the (not to mention possible Native response to some possible continuity from glacial age European travelers). It reminds me of both the early Christians and the American Ornithological Union who both regularly have or had power struggles about 'lumping' and 'splitting' species.
All three of these gentlemen are good teachers, interesting to listen to and devoted to their subjects, even if they occasionally disagree (there is discussion as to whether the Clovis had the atlatl or just thrusting weapons). They love what they do and they are patient with people who would like to love it but sit in abysmal ignorance. So now, at least for the moment, we know a little bit about the distinctiveness of the Clovis technology (workmanship and tools) and some of the scandalous assertions that will be published in the next couple of years.

We would have stayed in Austin and partied, but Dick was supposed to initiate their ‘distinguished speakers’ series. By now it was getting dark and cold and very wet. We suspected the crowd would be thinner than Clark had feared. Mike Collins picked up his dog (a recently added dog of the Blue Lacey breed, a Texan variety of great charm; this puppy is named Blue Dog and Mike’s other dog is named Red Dog).


Mike and BlueDog, age 4 months

It squeezed itself onto his lap (and Linda’s lap) because the house was so cold and so full of weird strangers, and licked our faces. After dinner we wandered down to the barn.

Chiaroscuro in the barn

Clark was trying to heat it with a small propane heater and we clustered around it like moths. I think the SCRAP people outnumbered the Texas Archaeological Society members, but none of the Texans knew anything about glaciation and Dick is always an interesting speaker. No one lasted long afterward, even though we had a fresh infusion of beer and tequila. It was a cold night, and more people were forced to take refuge in the crowded little house.




The end, at least this trip.

Not-snow on the not-pumpkins

After an unpromising beginning Friday, involving what Kurt described as 'Thick frost' on the prickly pear, it warmed up to about fifty, with a fresh breeze. Really, really nice, although we were constantly aware it was our last full day of digging. If it wasn’t warm, it wasn’t wet; the sun was delightful, a deep blue sky with flying-ace vultures and some hawks, and just beautiful. The cool temperatures made it comfortable to wear one’s rainsuit while one water-screened. By the end of the day, Matt and Nathaniel had brought the Telephone Booth down to the top of Level 16.


Nathaniel in the Telephone Booth

I was set free with a large pick and allowed to make most of a level disappear. I found an unfinished, broken biface with some charm and became fonder of the hand-pick (which my wrists are discussing with me now, a week later). We stayed up reasonably late talking and hoping it would not be as cold as the night before. It was, at least, not raining or blowing anymore. Just before I went to bed I could hear coyotes.


Significant tree

Saturday was cool but lovely and we finished what we had hoped to in the tent (Dick, in fact, had them opening some more levels because we there and someone will work on those units eventually). We tried to leave the paperwork in better shape than we had found it. Local, regularly-on-Saturday people showed up and I think both sides were properly xenophobic. The cows came over and lay down to watch us.

Cows, watching.

I water-screened and felt invulnerable in Mark’s boots and my rain suit and cheap Playtex type gloves. The flakes are lovely here. Nathaniel crashed through to the bottom of Level 16, just as Mr. Collins realized they (Gault, not us, SCRAP, had made a mistake with the level measurements. Instead of being on top of where the Pre-Clovis, proto-Clovis, but definitely NOT Clovis layers were, we had plunged a meter underneath.


Bruce and Mike ignore Nathaniel.

Which is a fine thing, and needed to be done, and I think Matt and Nathaniel and Dawn and Yvonne had enjoyed being in a very small pit digging under their own feet. We had what we really, really hoped were pre(etc)- Clovis artifacts in the screen, but the ones we asked about were perfect ‘geofacts,’ made when you toss chert in a high-energy situation like a flashflood. The ones that looked like scrapers were quite convincing. I asked how Mike could tell, and it amounted to staring at stone things for thirty years. It happens fairly often. They said they would much rather we were finding false positives than discarding false negatives.

Time passed. We had to go. They had Linda draw the Old Man on the inside of a barn door and we all signed, and then we went up the rest of the hill to take down our tents and clean up the house. Several of the other women were obsessive-compulsive and it was by far my best plan to stay out of the way. They made the house look good. I was worried enough whether my stuff would stuff back into the bags, but it did (I had only gained a t-shirt and a shot glass). There was one final period of hurry-up-and-wait


Heather and Nathaniel

and then again came the illustrious post-docs to take us to the hotel. It was daytime and the sprawl around Austin was much worse than I remembered, probably because it has been five years and the sprawl IS worse. After time on the prickly-pear enhanced plains it was startling and ugly. The hotel was only slightly better and we were not used to being inside in beautiful weather. Although the shower did not hit me in the middle of my chest like the ones in Motel Six, I had to keep ducking my head under and I don’t think I would have liked being taller, but the water was hot and plentiful. The beds were flat and not prickly-pear enhanced. Every time I got in the elevator, it stuck, although as soon as I got off it ran, even if someone heavier got on. I used the stairs, my knees complained. Nor would the snazzy free computer print my boarding pass for the flight the next day. And I was hungry. We assembled at seven in the lobby and Dick called two taxis as there were nine of us (plus five in Kurt’s rented car).The desk would not call for him. The first taxi arrived after about ten minutes and was stolen by two drunk soldiers. The second showed up as four people Dick called the taxis again, already miffed. The taxi people were rude. Four of us peeled off to try to cross six lines of crazed interstate to reach a Bennigan’s, and the rest of us got the cab when it finally came.

They said Bone Daddy’s had great barbecue. It also had scantily clad waitresses under 25 with low BMI ratios, which reminded me that Texas is somewhat more sexist than I am used to. The food was good, though Matt said he had to go back to his room and read feminist gender-theory for a couple of hours in reparation. The margarita was delicious and contained no apparent alcohol, and most of the guys drank quart-size beers. As it turned out, this was a good thing on Dick’s part as he needed whatever mellow he could sum up.

We waited for the taxi. The taxi said no one had called from Bone Daddy’s. We were afraid Dick would do something bad to the cashier who had said she would call. After something well over half an hour, a taxi came. The driver did not speak English, or Spanish, and he did not know where the hotel was. We were afraid Dick’s head might explode. We pulled over to read the hotel’s phone number on the room key. There was no address and the number was for the local Pizza Hut, which did not know the hotel’s street address either. Kurt pulled in behind us and Jon tapped on our window. “820 North Langley,” he said. The driver nodded happily. “280 North Langley.” Dick spoke loudly and clearly. After driving us around for $25, the driver did get us to the hotel and insisted it was not either on North Langley, North Langley having ended a half mile away. He knocked $10 off the fare and Dick did not tip him, just stalked inside to ask the desk clerk where the hotel was (North Langley). Dick did not want to stay up and drink, it was very strange.

Sleeping was good. If you needed the bathroom, you didn’t have to put on shoes to avoid cactus or ankle-biting rocks. It was not cold or windy. The trip home was very smooth, and Midway Airport had many sources of food, moving sidewalks (which I love), and enough chairs. No delays.

New Hampshire is fine but full of untidy piles of snow and they keep it very cold here.


still life with hand picks