Columbus Day: I have a better idea…

Today is, for lots of folks, a holiday. Sadly, it’s a holiday that pits people I love against each other. My mom was an Italian immigrant and I’m a very proud, first generation Italian-American. I also lived and worked through most of my 20’s in the Northern Rockies and Plains, and I have old and good friends who are Native American. This puts me in a rather joyless space between the celebration of my own heritage and disrespect for another. There is, actually, an easy way out of this.

First, a little background:

Columbus Day nominally celebrates the arrival of the Spanish in the Western Hemisphere in the guise of a three-ship reconnaissance led by a Genovese sea captain. That’s not really why the modern holiday was formally declared by Roosevelt in 1934. It became an official state holiday in Colorado in 1907 and a federal holiday in the Depression largely through the lobbying efforts of Italian-American union members (my own Grandfather, Giuseppe, was a proud member of the BOWE and very likely supported the call for a national holiday) and in the Knights of Columbus Lodge. Italians were among the great waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia that built and maintained the American rail network, dug coal, logged, made steel and otherwise built the 20th century’s economy and infrastructure. These same immigrants overcame a depression and fought and died in two world wars for their adopted country. Like every wave of immigrants, they were treated badly by those who were already here, and who viewed them as a threat to the job market, as well as dirty and prone to criminal behavior (sound familiar?). They craved recognition and acceptance and respect, and Columbus Day gave them a sense that they were an important part of America.

Sadly, the symbol they chose to celebrate was a mighty poor choice for a couple reasons.

First, Columbus was not an Italian. He was Genovese. If this seems like a fine point, remember that the country we know as Italy was founded after the Resorgiamento in the mid to late 19th century. Citizens of the powerful city-state of Genova in the 15th and 16th centuries wouldn’t have known what the hell was meant by an “Italian Nation”. There was no such thing. There was a peninsula called Italy and there were regional dialects of a language that was eventually codified (mostly through the Tuscan dialect) as the Italian language, but there was no red, white and green Tricolore’ when Signore Colombo “sailed the ocean blue” and there wouldn’t be for over three and a half centuries.

The second reason speaks to history, to character and to historical tragedy.

Columbus was not the first European to “find” the New World. There were Norse settlements in the Canadian Maritimes some couple-three centuries before he left Spain. His voyage was an impressive accomplishment, but hardly a first discovery. And of course, both the Northmen and the Spanish found innumerable people already living here who were surprised to be “discovered” as they did not view themselves as lost.

Columbus was a merchant captain in the employ of the Spanish crown. He was typical of his profession, his times, and his culture. Every European country unquestionably assumed the superiority of their own cultures, religions and traditions, and the inferiority of the cultures, religions and traditions of the many countries they colonized. This assumption was the justification for a lengthy list of abominable crimes ranging from slavery through rape, murder and theft to out-and-out genocide. The incidents are many, the head-count appalling, and the documentation voluminous. There is nothing to argue about here. Columbus and his men had blood on their hands pretty early on, as did the many Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English colonizers that followed him. Christopher Columbus is not a heroic figure, and the arrival of the Europeans is nothing to celebrate, especially if your family was here already when they showed up.

This is not an argument for failing to celebrate Italian-American heritage. We deserve recognition for who we are and what we did. We just need someone else to celebrate. Fortunately, we have a better choice.

I give you San Giuseppe! 

Saint Joseph’s Day, March 19th, was and still is traditionally celebrated as a festa for many Italians, especially Sicilians and Southern Italians and their North American descendants. There are already parades for Saint Joseph’s Day in New Orleans, New York and other cities with big Italian-American populations, and there are traditional dishes, music and customs associated with the holiday. Given the date two days after Saint Patrick’s Day, this sets up a week-long celebration of immigration that has the potential to turn into a prolonged and quite merry whoop-ti-do with lots of eating, drinking and music! What could wrong with that?

I’m aware that I’m one little voice in a big wilderness of anger, but this Son of Italy is all for giving our Native American brothers and sisters our October day back to them as a gift to celebrate their heritage, and for reclaiming our old traditional day in March to celebrate ours. I’m also in favor of the change for who it represents. The biblical references to Joseph depict a quiet blue-collar guy who was a good dad, and who decided to trust and support his wife when she gave him some surprising news. This strikes me as a better role modal than a Genovese mercenary. Being a good father and a kind, trusting and supportive husband is a real accomplishment. I think we need more of that these days.

The Hatch Site: Adventures in Flintknapping

Almost two weeks ago, the students in the Hatch Site field school had the misfortune to witness the art of the flintknapper as demonstrated by yours truly; possibly the world’s worst practitioner. This came about due to a schedule conflict for Susanne Haney, my colleague and friend in Indiana Pa, who is a real flintknapper. That said, I do know more about it than the students, and I’m an accomplished talker (some would say BS artist), and since I got through it without smashing a finger or cutting my hand or otherwise making a spectacle of myself, I managed to carry it off nicely.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the craft, a flintknapper is a producer of chipped stone tools. By carefully removing sharp flakes from a piece of suitable raw material via percussion with harder rocks (aka hammerstones) or with softer hammers such as antler, bone or even hardwood batons, a chunk of flint or jasper can gradually be reduced in size (or thinned) and shaped into a variety of sharp and durable tools and weapons. The resulting tools can be chipped on both sides (bifaces) or on just a single side (unifaces) depending on the kind of tool the flintknapper has in mind. These tools are really the points or bits in compound tools and weapons with handles or shafts made of wood, cane, or bone and bound with sinew or leather, and glued with pitch. After centuries, only the stone components survive, and that’s frequently all an archaeologist has to work with in the careful reconstruction of the past. Incidentally, thats where the term “stone age” comes from: a misleading name for what might have easily been termed the wood, bone or leather age. While stone tools are just a single component of a complex and functional prehistoric technology, through careful study and experimental archaeology, they can tell you a lot about the people who made and used them.

At manufacturing sites like the Hatch Site, and indeed at most stone age sites, the overwhelming majority of artifacts are termed flakes or sometimes, debitage (a French term: many pioneering archaeologists in the 20th century were French). A good analog might be the workshop floor of a woodcarver. There are no finished carvings to be found there, but many, many shavings. While the ubiquitous debitage doesn’t seem particularly impressive, close study reveals much about how it came to be.

Modern flintknappers have reconstructed the prehistoric techniques and processes. This begins with the removal of the outer rind from a rough nodule of material, to reveal the smooth and glassy interior. This work is done with a large and heavy hammerstone, and is called primary reduction. The results are large flakes (usually bigger than an inch or more) with cortex (the outer rind of the nodule) visible, and the roughly prepared piece of raw material, called a core. The flintknapper then switches to smaller hammerstones and batons, and begins to methodically reduce the core. This involves preparing the edges of the core to allow for the efficient and successful removal of material (aka setting up a platform) and then carefully striking flakes off the core. The result are somewhat smaller flakes with no visible cortex, and often with small remnants of the platform still visible at the precise spot where the blow fell. These are middle stage or secondary stage flakes, and the larger examples can become tools themselves. The core and the larger flakes are then further reduced and thinned with smaller and lighter hammers producing smaller and thinner debitage as the bifaces are brought to an oval shape (a blank). These blanks are then either taken away for trade or stored for later final reduction, or they are immediately reduced to finished tools. Final sharpening is actually accomplished with the tip of an antler tine or sharp bone and simple pressure. Pressure flaking, i.e. pushing small flakes of the edges of a nearly finished tool, produces a durable and sharp serrated edge, and very tiny flakes (1/8 inch or smaller). These small flakes resulting from final shaping and then sharpening are final stage or tertiary debitage.

It’s worth noting that at this point in the excavation, it appears that the bulk of the artifacts being recovered at the Hatch Site are middle stage biface thinning flakes. The picture that is starting to emerge is of a workshop dedicated to the production of thinned blanks rather than the final production of tools or the initial roughing out of larger chunks of raw material. We will see if final analysis of the artifacts supports this impression or not.

Another obvious feature of many of the Hatch Site flakes is their red color. This is a result of the intentional exposure of the jasper to heat. Heat treating tempers the material, increasing its durability and making it behave more predictably during the reduction process. As part of my foray into the world of the flintknapper, I decided to conduct an experiment in heat treatment.

As part of my research into the proper method, I was first instructed in how NOT to do it. A colleague explained that his first attempt was at a camping outing with family and friends. This outing may have involved the consumption of a moderate amount of strong drink. Just before retiring to his tent for the night my colleague remembered he had a good sized chunk of jasper in the back of his truck, and thought he might make good use of the remains of the evening campfire to heat treat it. Without a second thought, he tossed the nodule into the hot coals, and then went to brush his teeth.

Now it happens that jasper nodules often contain fine cracks just like the sedimentary rocks they form in, and it also happens that these cracks may contain some water. Heat, of course, converts water to steam, and steam expands rapidly in a tight or closed space.

Soon there was a terrific report, and the air was suddenly filled with jasper shrapnel and flaming coals, along with shrieks, swearing and the barking of dogs! Mercifully, no one was injured, but it produced a good deal of excitement in the campground, and was also a very teachable moment.

Armed with this knowledge, I took a palm sized bifacial jasper core I somehow succeeded in producing, and packed it in sand inside a coffee can. I placed the coffee can into the bed of coals in my charcoal grill in the evening, and the next morning I found the brownish-yellow core was now a uniform brick red. I have yet to attempt further reduction, but I’ll do so soon, and report back on the results.

A final note on flintknapping. In any and every Stone Age settlement and encampment, while all the residents undoubtedly understood flintknapping, there were certainly experts. It’s very likely that these experts were able to barter their expertise to their friends, neighbors and kin in exchange for food, clothing and other good and useful things. Flintknappers were very likely among the very first entrepreneurs and part or full-time professionals. They were the vanguard of a cultural evolution that gave us a world of auto mechanics, software designers, football coaches, chefs, EMT’s, office administrators, and yes, archaeologists. They were among our first toddling steps toward a modern economic system dominated by specialists and by trade. The archaeologist’s window into the past doesn’t just allow us to look in on our predecessors, but also to peer at our own reflection. Actually, it’s not a window, it’s a mirror.

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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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