The Archaeological Survey Manual

Gregory G White, Thomas F King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598740080
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315419114
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Arqueología

Governmental guidelines have forced a dramatic change in the practice of archaeological surveying in recent decades. In response to public and private development, surveying is needed to accurately inventory the cultural resources of a region and provide guidance for their preservation and management. Greg White and Tom King provide a handy introduction to students, field novices, and land managers on the strategies, methods, and logic of contemporary survey work. In addition to providing the legal and historical context for this endeavor the book provides a heavily illustrated, practical guide to conducting a survey to help beginners understand how it works in practice. This volume is perfect for an archaeological methods class, field school, or reference collection.

Field Work

9:	Prefield Research and Survey Design
10:	Types of Archaeological Field Survey
11:	Archaeological Field Survey Methods
12:	Adapting Methods to Purpose
13:	Archaeological bite Documentation

Griffin Valley — the hypothetical example used in the following chapters — as it appears today, looking northeast. That’s the Ford Farm on the hill above the Phillips River.

Chapter 9 Prefield Research and Survey Design

Students, managers, and cohorts in allied professions frequently express frustration at the pervasive “gray areas” that muddy the archaeological enterprise. For example, archaeological survey is not one thing governed by uniform guidelines and specifications. There has never been a detailed definition of the term “archaeological survey” on which all archaeologists—and others who use the word—have agreed. There are many standards used nationwide and even within federal jurisdiction there are agency-by-agency differences. Consequently, when a qualified archaeologist performs a survey we can’t assume that it will be conducted to a particular professional standard. What in one context might be call a “survey,” in another might be labelled a mere cursory inspection. Moreover, as noted in Chapter 2, the reasons for and methods of making surveys have changed considerably during the last century and a half and, most dramatically, during the last three decades. As a result, it is entirely predictable that if an area surveyed 20 years ago were surveyed again today many archaeological sites not noted in the first survey would be newly discovered on the second pass.

Thus, from the standpoint of actions and outcomes, chaos appears to reign. However, there is no reason to lose hope; this apparent chaos is actually welcome and a sure sign of healthy, problem-oriented field work. Archaeologists are not guided by one single-minded purpose—like finding all sites, or the biggest, or the oldest, or best-preserved—but by many and varied purposes driven by project-specific management and research needs. Thus, in its brightest manifestations archaeological survey design is guided by the prior articulation of its purpose, whether management, research, or—more often the case—both. Specific problems should be identified and field tasks and methods designed to solve them. Given thoughtful planning and adequate resources it may be possible to identify as much as one needs to address the survey’s purpose. In other words, archaeologists should control their methods, not the other way around.

This chapter explores the relationship between survey purpose and survey design and the predictable pitfalls to avoid in planning an archaeological survey. In order to describe the variety of archaeological survey types and activities and their results in the context of a standard environmental setting, we present Griffin Valley, in the state of Indeterminate.

THE GRIFFIN VALLEY ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD

The Human Past in Griffin Valley

Griffin Valley lies in relatively gentle, rolling country with a good deal of environmental diversity, along the Phillips River. Much of the valley is a part of the Ford Ranch, whose 75-year-old buildings appear toward the left side of the illustration shown on the facing page. Excluding these buildings from consideration for the moment, we can define the nature of the valley’s archaeological resources for the purposes of our example.

Human beings first entered Griffin Valley about 11,000 years ago. At that time, toward the end of the Pleistocene (“Ice Age”), much of the valley was covered by a pluvial lake (p. 70, top). The lake was shallow and marshy, and many large herd animals came there to drink. Waterfowl abounded. Because it was an ideal place for hunters to live, a small wandering band established a campsite at the low pass near the future location of the Ford Ranch buildings. These people produced and used what are now referred to as “Clovis points”—distinctive flaked-stone spearpoints with channels flaked into either side to accommodate their attachment to shafts.

The spot the Clovis people selected for their camp afforded them some shelter from the elements and was close enough to water to be convenient but not so near

as to frighten game away from the shore. It commanded a view of both the lake and the small valley to the north, down which game often passed. Generations of band members, who ranged seasonally over a large territory, visited this site recurrently for several centuries and hunted around the lake margins. One season, three hunters from the group surprised a mammoth foraging along the south shore of the lake. Floundering around, the mammoth became mired and could not escape. The hunters waited for him to weary, and then dispatched him with many spears. The entire band then moved to the kill site and butchered the beast, leaving his bones, most of the spearpoints that had killed him, some of their butchering tools, and their firepits when they moved on.

As the glaciers retreated at the end of the Pleistocene, a more diversified sort of hunting and gathering came to dominate the human economy of the area. Now the lake was gone and grasslands covered much of the valley. The really big game was also gone, and vegetable foods played a larger role in the diet of local people. Small, hard seeds from grasses were ground on milling stones, and small game was hunted. During this period a good spring flowed out of the low rocky mountains at the south side of the valley, and it was around this spring that a good-sized semipermanent village was established, (p. 70, bottom). This was a very convenient location, with easy access to fresh water and grasslands, and a short walk from the sage-covered low hills where the hunters had camped three thousand years before. During one period of about a century the climate turned arid and the available seed crop grew very sparse. Women now had to range farther afield to gather an adequate supply of seeds. A temporary overnight camp was established at the north edge of the valley, near a creek at the edge of the sage fields. Here seeds could be stockpiled and ground before being transported back to the main village; men accompanying the women could hunt in the nearby chaparral.

About 3000 years ago, a violent earthquake sealed up the spring, and the villagers had to move. Their new settlement was located at the foot of the pass through the Ford Ranch hills, on the bank of the Phillips River near the ecotone between grassland and chaparral communities. The oaks on the north slope of the hills were within easy reach, which was good since the people had recently developed techniques for leaching the tannic acid from acorn meal and making it edible. With this new source of food, and a moderating climate, the population increased rapidly and was soon in danger of exceeding the carrying capacity of the local environment. Fortunately, at this juncture, some of the people’s trading partners to the south introduced them to maize, and soon they had learned to plant and grow this important crop along with beans, squash, and sunflowers. At first, crops were planted along the floodplain at the immediate margins of the river, but later gardens were extended farther across the plain to the south (p. 72, top).

Population was now increasing elsewhere and strife inevitably followed as different groups sought to expand their territories. After being virtually wiped out twice by neighboring groups seeking their food supplies, the people of Griffin Valley reluctantly relocated their village to a less convenient but more defensible site: the crest of the ridge of hills east of the pass. Here they built a strong palisaded village. New fields were established along the north side of the hills, and the small creek was diverted to irrigate them.

In these times of stress, a religion developed that centered on arduous male initiation rites. Such rites prepared 10 to 12-year-old boys for the rigorous, dangerous lives they would lead as men. At one point in the ritual, each boy was required to run silently to the crest of the mountains to the south, where his tutor (usually his mother’s brother) awaited him. The tutor helped the boy assume a difficult position under one of the many overhanging rocks that topped the mountains, bending over backward with his nose a few inches from the top of the overhang. With a hammerstone, the boy was then required to peck a small, cup-shaped depression in the roof of the overhang. The work had to be done in silence and without food; it typically took 2 to 3 days, during which time the boy’s tutor instructed him in the history and ethics of the tribe and discussed what it meant to be a man. By the time the ordeal was over the boy was usually hallucinating; he was given paints and encouraged to illustrate his visions on any rock of his choosing.

In A.D. 1710, a French trapper brought the people their first iron tools and glass beads. In 1778 they were attacked, and their village was burned by a group of Seneca fleeing the decimation of their own homes by Continental troops. In 1780 a smallpox epidemic swept the community, leaving many dead. By this time the great palisaded village was no longer needed, and after the Seneca attack it had never been effectively rebuilt. The people now took up residence near their irrigated fields at the north edge of the valley (p. 72, bottom).

In 1820 the first white settler arrived, built a cabin, and established a small farm on the south bank of the river. By 1850 the white population in the area was substantial, and settlers began to worry about the threat posed by the Indians. They petitioned the U.S. government to rid them of the Indian peril, whereupon the government obliged by creating a reservation to which the various scattered tribes would be relocated. Because the refugee occupants of Griffin Valley did not want to go, they were removed by force. Although one group broke away and fortified an area in the rocky slope south of the valley, they were promptly and easily overwhelmed by a troop of irregulars from the nearby town, massacred, and interred in a common grave.

Once again the valley lay uninhabited. The Indians had been removed or murdered and the valley’s one white settler had abandoned his farm and fled to town during the period of unrest. It became part of a large and informally bounded cattle ranch, and no one lived there for a number of years.

In 1872, a wandering miner reported finding gold in the mountains north of the valley. More than 5,000 would-be millionaires descended upon the scene of the strike, only to discover after less than a month that the gold discovery had been a hoax to divert attention from a real strike about 100 miles away. The site was immediately abandoned and promptly forgotten (p. 72, bottom). In 1890 B. J. Griffin established a cattle ranch in the valley and in 1895 sold out to A. R. Ford, who in 1890 built the house and barns that remain the ranch center today.

What the Past Has Left Us

Eleven thousand years of human history in Griffin Valley have thus created a rich mosaic of archaeological sites (below)—the physical expressions of the many things people have done there over the centuries. None of these sites has a neon sign on it saying “Archaeological Site,” or “Dig Here.” In order for anyone to know about them, they have to be found. Finding them would be easy if in real life we knew all the things about the valley that have been recounted above and knew that our knowledge was accurate and complete. But of course, we never start out knowing these things. We have to learn them, and a major source of information on what happened in a place like Griffin Valley is the archaeological record—the very sites created by centuries of human life in the area. So if we are going to learn about Griffin Valley’s human past, we have to discover its archaeological sites. This, of course, is why we do archaeological surveys—if we are archaeologists, or other kinds of people interested in the past.

PREVIOUS INVESTIGATIONS

Why a Non-Archaeologist Might Require a Survey of Griffin Valley

A manager—whether managing land, a government agency, or a project of some kind—may or may not be interested in Griffin Valley’s past, but depending on what she is managing and the legal context in which she is managing it, she may need to undertake, oversee, or at least finance archaeological surveys. For example, one of the basic responsibilities of the Indeterminate State Historic Preservation Officer, as outlined in Section 101(b)(3) of the National Historic Preservation Act, is to develop a statewide inventory of “historic properties”—that is, districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects eligible for the National Register of Historic Places—including archaeological sites. And the manager of a project that would modify the valley in some way—for example, by building something in it—may need to be involved in a survey if his project involves federal funds, federal land, or a federal permit, triggering the requirements of the same act’s Section 106. Section 106 regulations, while they do not necessarily require the conduct of surveys per se, do require that historic properties affected by a project be identified for consideration in planning, and such identification may not be possible without a survey.

urveying Griffin Valley

Let us assume, then, that for one reason or another— because we are conducting the state historic properties inventory, because we are planning to fill the valley with toxic wastes and need a federal permit to do so, or because we are simply interested in the area’s past— we want or need to do a comprehensive survey of Griffin Valley’s archaeology. How will we do it?

We’ll undoubtedly start out by ascertaining, as best we can, what we already know, or think we know, about the valley and the larger area of which it is a part. By “we,” I mean not only ourselves personally but the world as a whole, or at least the community of scholars who have written about the past. Once we have our existing information under control, we’ll decide whether it’s sufficient for our planning purposes—whether it gives us a sufficient understanding of the valley’s archaeological sites to plan for their management. If not, we’ll need to figure out what further, new research is needed.

Review of Previous Survey Results

So, what do we already know about Griffin Valley? To find out, most archaeologists would turn first (and quite often only) to the official files maintained by the area’s archaeological authorities—such as a state historic preservation officer or a university’s archaeological program. In our case, the Indeterminate State archaeological site files include record of two previous surveys.

Dr. Beakey's Notes

In 1932, a group of deer hunters discovered elaborate polychrome paintings on certain protected overhangs in the rocky mountain south of the valley. In 1938, local...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Equipment
• Field Work
• Professionalism
• References Cited
• Appendices
• Index