In April of 2003, Panamerican sent around thirty employees from offices all over the Southeast (mostly Tuscaloosa and Pensacola) to Wynn Haven Beach, Florida, to excavate a Phase III site. (For more info on Phase III, see my Shiloh pages) I worked with some people from previous sites, Stewart and Bragg, as well as people I hade never met from every corner of the US. This lent quite an interesting tone to the project, as most of us stayed in one hotel together in Navarre.
Our two head supervisors were Greg Mikell and Ryan Wheeler. Ryan, in addition to be head of the lab in Talahassee, is also the editor of Florida Anthropologist, a really great publication. He wrote a great book which we all recieved signed copies of, and taught me and my lab partner Heather a great deal about the material culture of Florida.
In addition, we had several specialists from the Eglin Base and from Florida universities come out to help and take samples. A archaeo-botanist took samples of the soil and cochina (little shellfish, which look kind of like tiny clams) to see what if any seasonings or herbs the inhabitants had used in cooking, and a zooarchaeologist who was studying the types of remains in our shell/ bone middens, as well as doing some research on the difference between the cochina and seahorse of the East and West coast.
Okaloosa 239 was a Santa Rosa Swift Creek site. These types of sites appear to be clusters of small villages located near coves, bayous, and marshes on larger bays and in larger river valleys. Ceremonial structures are often located away from villages. Subsistence practices appear to change little between Deptford and Santa Rosa Swift Creek, although it has been suggested that Swift Creek peoples probably practiced horticulture.
(This info from: Research Design for Data
Recovery of Arch Site 8OK239 within
Eglin Air Force Base, Okaloosa County, Florida
March 2003
Pan Am Tampa.
We dug most of our units near the shoreline where concentrations seemed to be the greatest. Some features uncovered included an area with at least 40 postmolds from different time periods, a huge amount of shell middens, coquina concetrations, and an area which was presumed to be a living floor. This area had a hearth, a rather large pit (we removed 23 garbage bags of matrixto be water screened and fine screened), and an odd ball of white clay. We also found a stone which had been placed over a drill, as if absently placed and forgotten to the hands of time. There were also several modern trash pits, one of which was a single Pabst beer can 40 centimeters below the surface.
Most amazing of all, after sorting through thousands of artifacts including Floridian point types (made mostly from quartz and some chert or flint derivitive), bone awls, a fid (which I found... very nice), grinding stones, nutting stones, a soapstone pendant, an odd potsherd which may have been an ear from effigy, an almost complete pot, shell: turtle, alligator, small mammal and rodent, deer and canine, historical oddities, and gazillions of rocks and stones... was the types of potsherds uncovered.
The pottery of the Swift Creek and Santa Rosa peoples is amazing. They have very intriquite designs and patterns. I've heard from several people they were the "Picassos of their time". Much of thier ceramical works are stlyistically experimental. There was the popular check stamp, Deptford, fabric impressed and some other types of shell impressed pottery. And there were the wavy lines which varied in shape and size from concentric cirles to what resembled paisley. The sun pattern was the nicest of all. It was a small circle, outlined by triangles to form a sun shape, sometimes full and sometimes on a horizon. There were also five or six pieces of sherds with red stain on them, very unusual for the area.
Oh, yes, and there was the tooth we found. I was working in a unit with two other people when the tooth turned up in the screen. It was very exciting. It was definitely human, and a molar. I'd never seen a tooth similar to this one: the top was completely flat. People who lived on the coast had a large amount of sand in their diet as they ate seafood, and also used their teeth for much more then just chewing, which led to ground-down teeth.
I'm waiting on photos from Eglin which someone is sending me, so be patient and check back for beauty and science. As one of my co-workers claimed "We're doing serious science here!"
Archaeology Terms:
atlal, baulk, distal end