The Berry Site Field School

Final day of the field school was a success! We were able to get all the artifact washing, sorting, AND cataloging complete this year (and on time??) plus we were treated to a project Caden had worked on concerning some really cool potsherd-filled posts excavated at the site in 2009! Thanks to everyone who helped us make this field school so great!

It takes some effort to finish the notes and the maps, and to sort and catalog all the artifacts, and to make sense of it all. Thanks for abiding efforts by our field school team to do so, and for contributing to the process of entering the archaeology into the archaeological record, and generally for help in wrapping up our recent field season and helping us get ready for the future.of

Heat wave outside, and we are mostly inside, processing artifact finds from the past month, starting the artifact cataloguing process, making maps and finishing notes, and otherwise wrapping up our recent fieldwork and talking and thinking about what next steps to take in further investigations in the future. There are still interesting artifacts to find and to identify. Here is an overhead picture (taken by Michelle Pigott) of our excavation area at the Berry site for this past field season (with Table Rock in the background) on our second-to-last day of digging (Thursday).

Finish strong Friday! Today we did planview maps of 72 square meters and drawings of 24 meters of excavation square profiles. Map on, field schoolers! Then we finished some digging and sifting of a couple last squares and a bit of backfilling. Dig on, archaeology students! And we had visitors, including friends and scholarly colleagues (Melissa Birkhofer and Paul Worley) and one of their students from Appalachian State University, and family (parents of Michelle Pigott), and friends and Berry site family (Burton Berry and Owen Knutson). We were glad to have Larry Beane back on site, with his Dad, and Larry told us his Dad helped get him interested in archaeology, and he got students involved in playing chunkey and learning about atlatls. After folks were back at the field house, UNC students gave final presentations about interpretation, community outreach, and curation in archaeology. Cool folks, hot day, good work, well done!

Today is likely our second-to-last day of fieldwork at the Berry site for this season. We had some photos to take and maps to draw today, in planview and profile, and we plan on more mapping and some last bit of digging tomorrow. We removed some artifacts from the top of deposits in Structure 10 and Feature 292 and recorded those proveniences with the total station.

It's a good morning out at the site!

Lab day today, including some new approaches to artifact photography. UNC field school folks finish Friday, so we had a fire and made s’mores yesterday evening. Also included are some photos from Tuesday troweling…

A sneak peak of Structure 10! Swipe to the end to see Structure 10 fully troweled! Don't worry, Chris has great balance!

Before getting chased away today by an afternoon thunderstorm, we troweled and photographed several excavation squares and took photos of squares where Structure 10 and Feature 292 are present, to be prepared for drawing planview maps and profiles.

More plow zone excavation as well as flat shoveling and troweling over Structure 10 and Feature 292 today. Several students gave presentations today about topics they have been thinking about, reading about, digging into, and studying, several related topics the theme of “stuff,” or related to the theme of landscape. Today was the last day for some members of our field school team for this season, and so we bid them farewell for now, but many folks will still be here next week and the week after that.

This small chipped milky quartz artifact is actually a "micro drill"! See that tiny point on the top edge? This was likely a great tool for making shell and soapstone beads and inscribing other finely made items.

Good day digging and seeing Structure 10 and Feature 292 more clearly. Artifacts for the day include more clay pipestems, chipped stone arrowheads, and several pieces of pottery from a pot that predates the Burke phase.