The Hatch Site: Halfway There

Friday, June 2nd was the halfway point in the Juniata College excavations at the Hatch site. A lot has been accomplished and learned.

To date, the students and staff have moved all the 19th and 20th century colluvium off two 10-meter square excavation blocks, and excavated through the buried A horizon in the central areas of both blocks. The underlying B horizon has been carefully cleaned and prepared for final photographs and mapping prior to continuing excavations into the underlying deposits.

As expected, thousands of pieces of jasper have been recovered. Less expected were smaller, but consistent amounts of a black colored chert (again a type of flint). There’s good evidence that the chert is encountered only in specific parts of the excavation block. This in turn means that the horizontal distribution of artifacts isn’t random. We will very likely be able to tease apart both task-specific and possibly time-specific episodes of occupation and use at the site.

We also have exciting news on the time front. Normally, you don’t find many complete projectile points (the business ends of spears, darts and arrows) at quarry workshop sites like the Hatch site. Sites like this are the result of manufacturing new tools, tools that the former occupants normally took with them when they left the site. Since projectile points were made in very specific shapes and sizes at very specific times, their scarcity can make it really tough to provide good dates for the occupations at such sites. During our earlier excavations here in 2015, we recovered a single, partially completed point or pre-form, that appears to date to Transitional Archaic times, some 4,000 years ago.

In the course of the current excavations, we’ve added a notched point and a stemmed point, both of which are likely Late Archaic forms that are closer to 6,000 years old.

On Friday, right at the bottom of the A horizon, another pre-form was unearthed with a distinctive deep notch on its base. Such points are called bifurcates and they date exclusively from the end of the Early Archaic period some 8,000 years ago.

In addition to the points, a small fire reddened area with charcoal and jasper flakes is emerging from the top of the B horizon.  This may be a location where jasper was heat-treated to improve it's durability and predictability as a raw material.  If the feature pans out, the charcoal will allow a radiocarbon assay that will further help us date some of the site occupations.

The picture that’s emerging is one of regular visits to this place over not centuries but millennia. These visits appear to have all been focused on the manufacture of tools rather than on more generalized day-to-day activities like food preparation. There seems to be a long-lived tradition of site use that spans thousands of years and many groups of people. While it’s very likely that each individual visit might have been a fairly short-term affair involving only a few people, when you multiply such visits across hundreds and thousands of years, you wind up with a landscape covered with the remains of tool manufacture, not unlike a factory floor. Indeed, that’s sort of what the site is!

Another important development this week did not directly involve the archaeology of the site, but instead the site’s namesake. Diane Hatch, Jim’s wife, stopped by to visit, and brought her daughter and grandkids! I was not on-site and missed them, but I hope they come back. I think the sight of all the students hustling around a busy archaeological excavation, and his own family, especially his grandkids, having a chance to check it all out, would have had Jim grinning from ear to ear.

We’ll be exploring the process of stone tool manufacture in more detail in a future entry, which will feature the world’s worst flintknapper…

Until then…

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