Excavating For Artifacts: A Story in the Dirt

hey guys if you ever go out artifact hunting or metal detecting sometimes we get skunked sometimes i catch myself thinking man i wish i could just see what i'm walking across the top of because you know you are well we don't have a machine that can do that not necessarily so sometimes to satisfy that curiosity you just got to dig a hole before you go digging anywhere you need to check your state laws some states allow digging on private land others don't then you need to get landowner permission and always stop if human remains are encountered [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] there's a metal detectorist well i dig a lot of holes but you can tell this isn't the normal hole it's a lot bigger i'm trying for something about four foot by four foot and i've started by just removing the surface dirt now from this point it's going to go a lot slower because that's what i'm using to excavate and i'm not really digging with it as much as i am just scraping just a little bit of the surface at a time working my way down maybe even in sections inside of this four foot by four foot square and then ultimately i'll take the whole thing down noting things like change of color in the soil really closely examining every little piece of rock that comes out and some other little clues that we're looking for this is a really slow process so i had a lot of footage for this video i'm gonna narrate my way through it and cut a lot of the video so hopefully y'all aren't getting put to sleep and who knows you just go dig a hole sometimes you find something pretty cool well little pieces of rock like that of course i'm checking every single one of them but i'm looking for even smaller things like that little black dot that's charcoal and we'll talk more about why that's important in just a few minutes so predominantly in my area quartz was the stone of choice uh for making artifacts so that's just a rock right there but i see a lot of quartz flaking in the this hole and the next one that i'm gonna dig and i pay especially close attention to those things now that's not a broken artifact at all because i'm looking for signs of napping and all i see there are just natural edges so that was something driven off of a larger piece of stone in the process of making a stone tool sometimes little things like that were used for scrapers but sometimes you really just can't tell all right guys i've got down to a different color and i went ahead and took just this one corner down until i got a color change just to see if i would get one so now i've got to take the rest of this area down and that's probably going to be a tomorrow thing although i may take this corner out uh this evening and so far i've got some debitage quartz flaking but nothing else super interesting but artifact nonetheless this this might be fire rock cracked fire rock it tends to get that reddish color but uh i'm not certain on that but it kind of resembles it but i've not seen much of that a fire cracked rock or fire altered rock well that's usually associated with cooking fires and so the native americans would dig a a small pit and line it with rock they would burn a fire in that pit on top of the rock which heated the rocks in the process of being heated sometimes those rocks had moisture in it and they would crack or pop another thing that the natives often did would be to heat rocks especially pieces of rock like this that maybe weren't very porous this is a piece of really worn river rock very smooth and that reddish color i've often wondered if that actually didn't come from being in a fire i'm not sure on that but these smooth rocks like this would be heated and then dropped into a pot or anything that contained water to to boil the water or to cook you know a stew and so sometimes a superheated rock dropping in liquid that would be enough to make them fracture and pop i'm not seeing nearly enough of this stuff to make me think that i'm relatively close to a fire pit but this sort of stuff would have littered the ground of any campsite that native americans inhabited it would be pretty much everywhere and it's not surprising to run across it even when you're just blind digging so this is all predominantly quartz flaking that came out of that first test pit and it's not uncommon at all campsites uh to be covered with this stuff and most of it's around this size and that tells us a little story too so these native american artifacts they started out as very big rocks and they had to be worked down and that process started at a quarry site maybe where there was an outcropping of the right material they would break these pieces of rocks up and get them to a more manageable size then transport them back to camp where from that point they would form them at the camp into their stone artifacts and that left much smaller flakes you just don't find a lot of real big material laying around camps it's this size and much smaller than this probably hundreds of flakes smaller than this that i didn't even bother picking up so this would be flakes that were used off of what was called preforms and they're just working it down to size and then once they had their artifacts well they would get dull and so they would also spend time re-sharpening re-flaking and that print that made those much smaller quartz flakes that we find but it would be everywhere now of all the rocks that came out of the hole this alone had a couple interesting features and not everybody agrees with this theory i've had some naysayers and hey that's all right everybody's entitled to their opinion but i hold to it so i'll show you the pile of rock that came out just general rock and this alone had a couple interesting features it's got a couple spots of wear where the natural pitting which is what you're looking at kind of right there natural pitting of the surface of the stone is worn down and you can kind of tell it in the sunlight by the way that the sun reflects and you see right there how the sun reflects off the end of that rock and not so much right off of the face of it watch again right in that area see the reflection it's because that's worn it's worn very smooth and it's also worn in one other spot so what were they doing with this i don't know they were grinding something maybe they were smoothing a hide with it really don't know but i believe that that is use wear and so i kept this rock aside it was the only rock that had those features and man there was a lot of rock that came out of this hole i want you to look what just popped up right there in the corner oh my goodness i hope it's whole so we are down about four inches like i said a lot of rock more charcoal but we still haven't even hit that color change yet but let's take a look at this thing oh my gosh that is finally made oh please be there oh no that moved way too easy sorry oh man it's gonna be broke there we go been laying here all this time oh look at god dad damn it that is a beautiful quartz blade or point wow that'd have been so pretty kind of got that pink peachy rose quartz hue to it oh my goodness all right well let's hope there's something even more interesting as we go down deeper and get that color change sometimes you get a real good surprise when you look real close at your artifacts now for years i have noticed something showing up on predominantly my quartz artifacts you see those little black dots to the left side of the artifact and this black dot right down here at the base i promise you that's not dirt this has been washed and you know lightly washed and scrubbed there's still dirt on this side but that dark piece right there that's not dirt it's all the same material like i said i've noticed it on other artifacts and i had an idea that it was not anyway part of a rock here you see some more of it on this other quartz blade but i had to reach out to an archaeologist friend because i didn't want to just postulate blindly and i asked him do you think that could be resin left over from the hafting process the archaeologist told me i needed to look at it under a microscope and look for a few features and so i did and i saw exactly what i was looking for so old resin what in the world is that well it's it's pine sap mixed with some beeswax sometimes a little charcoal was added to that and it was used as a glue and it would basically help seat the artifact onto a handle or arrow shaft and then the artifact would be bound with something like sinew and a cross hatch pattern and then that resin would actually be smeared over the whole surface of all the sinew to waterproof it and protect it and that old resin sometimes it hangs around on your artifacts especially i think these quartz ones they're more porous and i think they just held the resin better so that was kind of a mystery solved and kind of a cool thing that i look for now when i'm hunting artifacts do i see any resin on it a couple other things that i'm looking for as i go down one is charcoal and the other is called an archaeological feature now you're going to see both right here in these next few clips the first thing that i want to show you is see this dark stain well the soil around it's much lighter but in a couple areas once you've got all the dirt removed the dirt is noticeably darker that's called a feature all that means is that something back in the ancient days disturbed the surface of the dirt now that could be a tree root that could be a mouse burrow it could be something like a post hole it could be a fire pit anytime something dug into the dirt created a bowl or a dish or a hole that hole would ultimately be filled over time with the darker topsoil so when you expose that lighter colored lower layer and you see a darker stain that continues to go down you know that something disturbed the earth there now archaeologists well they know what disturbed the earth but i kind of have to guess but what i find in conjunction with these uh features is charcoal it's right there at the same level so that tells me there was human activity now charcoal yes the forest burns sometimes without the help of man but when you have these archaeological features and then all of a sudden a lot of charcoal starts popping up well you got to think of camp life where they had cook fires going all the time charcoal got spread around pretty much everywhere this particular feature i don't know if you can i think you can see it it's a very large feature the ground around it's that lighter color and then right in the center and i kind of shelved the dirt a little bit to show you that darker feature continues on down into the ground something was there now archaeologists if they exposed a whole lot of the ground maybe you could see that you know it was a post hole or and if it was a post hole and you expose enough of them well all of a sudden you have the shape of of a building or a wall of some kind it can tell you a whole lot well i don't know enough about it all i know is enough to know that's a feature of some sort and actually i decided to dig down and chase this feature see how deep it went it went really pretty deep but i it's something that i'm learning to look for as i do this process and it's always kind of intriguing if you think about a hole being dug in the ground and then the topsoil filling in what's interesting is that sometimes you can find things like pottery or charcoal or or even stone artifacts down inside these features where they have kind of slipped off and fallen down in the hole and been buried and you kind of got to pay attention to a future because if you're trying to use the layers of earth to date the materials that you're finding well a feature can kind of throw you off because it's a hole so something that would naturally sit higher in the earth level has slipped off down in a hole and gotten buried much deeper but that dark stain right there tees you off yeah something broke the ground here we have unnatural layers of dirt here well guys that is it for my little test pit there and i know this video is a little bit slower paced than mine normally are but i hope you enjoyed it this uh for me i really enjoyed that process uh it's not always about how much you find it's it's about what you learn in the process and for me that was a learning process um i i i enjoyed it i don't know maybe it takes a little bit more of a nerd to enjoy that but i hope some of you did and uh i hope you learned something maybe the next time you're out there uh digging the ground or maybe somebody's running an excavator or well maybe you'll look a little bit closer in the dirt and find that there is a story lying there after all all right guys hope to be back real soon maybe some metal detecting probably some more artifacts thanks for watching [Music] so [Music] um [Music] god [Music] you

Channel: History Hound Detecting

Views: 631

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Archaeology, History, Artifacts, Native American, Arrowhead, Arrowheads, Artifact hunting, How to find artifacts, History Hound Detecting, Stone tools, Indian pottery, NC artifacts, Discovered, Digging artifacts

Id: Ki9w5lOhywE

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021