23 August 2008 Off to a bad start for a “last hurrah” of field work

We are steaming across the Sea of Okhotsk under sunny skies, making good time with the help of a gentle tail wind. This time we are headed west, on our return to Korsakov. I'll hopefully make a couple more posts from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. But this will be my last posting sent via satellite phone. After this, I will be able to send postings from the internet café in town.Throughout the summer I have talked a lot about how we find sites, how we decide where to dig, and what we do when we make that decision.

Well, lest you think that we always know exactly what we're doing, I think I should tell you about the experience I had in our last two days of field work. And the ways in which we are trying to make the most out of a careless mistake that I made!

I have wanted to return to the Kompaneskii site on Urup Island since we last visited there in 2006. The site is in the middle of a large series of sand dunes, many of when are being eroded by wind activity. In the bottom of the basins formed by the erosion (called "dune blow outs"), there are hundreds and hundreds of artifacts. Artifacts of all types and ages-historic glass, iron, and porcelain lying side-by-side with prehistoric pottery and stone tools (see photo).

This type of deposit is called a "lag" deposit. While the artifacts may have accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years, all the fine-grained sediment (sand, in this case) has been blown away. Lag deposits are really useful for getting a very quick evaluation of the range of ages represented by the artifacts. However, because they are all lying on the same surface, it is often impossible to assign many of the artifacts to a specific time period. For that we need either a culturally/temporally diagnostic artifact type (like Wedgwood china of a particular variety, or cord-marked pottery) or we need to find the artifact in an intact geological/cultural sedimentary stratum.

Luckily, at Kompaneskii, we also have some undisturbed sediment with very clear stratigraphic layering and fantastic marker tephras-this is the site that I have referenced before when describing the overall goals of the project (see Ben Fitzhugh with tephra layers photo from previous postings). My interest in returning to this site was to make controlled excavations of the cultural materials above and below each of the "marker" tephras to determine

a) whether or not the site was abandoned after each tephra was deposited,

b) if abandoned, for how long, and

c) when it was re-occupied, was it by the same cultural group or a different one?

The time available to us to work at Kompaneskii got cut from an original plan of 5-6 days down to 2 (due to weather delays and a longer-than-expected stay at Rasshua). So my team was under a bit of pressure to work quickly. No problem. Finding the correct location to place our excavation would be easy, because I remembered the site like the proverbial back of my hand.

Or at least I thought I did.

I walked our team directly to one of the several dune blow-outs in the area. Just like I remembered, there were abundant historic and pre-historic artifacts lying in the deflation lag. And in the un-eroded portion of the sand dune, the beautiful tephra stratigraphy that caught our attention back in 2006 was still obvious, even from a distance. So with the "we have to leave soon" clock ticking, I immediately had my team start clearing a 2 m exposure of the erosion face, extending into the wall about 50 cm (see photo).

We dutifully screened all of the sediment though 1/4-inch (6.4 mm) screens (which was really easy, since it was all sand) to recover the artifacts.

And we found nothing.

One of the things that scientists are often reluctant to admit is that we sometimes will see what we believe, rather than believing what we see. By that I mean that we will literally re-frame our interpretations to fit what we think is going on, rather than objectively noticing what is going on and admitting a mistake. We don't like to admit this because it is extremely dangerous and can lead quickly to incorrect conclusions. In this particular case, I was perfectly able to convince myself, and the rest of my team that all of the artifacts clearly visible in the photo Ben Fitzhugh with Tephra Layers had simply eroded away and we only had to dig a little bit deeper into the wall to re-expose the cultural material.

Well, after 3 hours of this, I finally came to my senses and had to admit that it was no longer worth digging through culturally sterile sediment-even with the beautiful tephra stratigraphy!

For a short time, I was still convinced that we had been in the correct place-I just assumed that what Ben and I had seen two years ago had been destroyed by erosion.

Finally, I could ignore the obvious facts (and the grumblings of my team) no longer. I walked around the corner and into another deflation basin and lo-and-behold, there it was. I sheepishly went back to my excavation team (who were just finishing an enjoyable lunch) and admitted my mistake, and then asked if they would be willing to try again at an excavation.

Among my list of surprises for the day, I received a happy one when all of my excavation team said "yes"!

So back to the proverbial drawing board. But this time the artifacts sandwiched between layers of tephra were immediately obvious, both on the exposed erosion surface and in our recovery screens. We didn't get much more work done the first day. But we got a nice reprieve from the forecast turn in the weather and were able to get everything done on day two that we needed to (see photo).

I learned a lot of things those two days at Kompaneskii. First of all, I learned that I should rely more on notes and GPSA Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system used to track the location or position of objects on the Earth’s surface. records than on my memory. Second, I learned that it is a good thing to admit your mistakes as soon as you recognize them for what they are. And finally, I learned to not underestimate the ability of your team to forgive those mistakes, but this is probably strongly contingent on having first admitted those mistakes.

And in terms of the archaeology, I have convinced myself (and I don't think this is completely motivated by wishful thinking) that the initial excavation was not a total waste of time. The first deflation lag deposit did, indeed, have abundant prehistoric artifacts lying on the surface. So it is interesting to have found that in an area that appears to have seen intensive human activity, some portions of the dune were apparently unused (or at least, did not accumulate any artifacts). Another thing that my team noticed about the first deflation lag is that there is hardly any pottery, whereas most of the other deflation lag deposits had abundant pottery fragments.

The second excavation also yielded nearly exactly what I was hoping it would: we have artifacts and charcoal recovered with good stratigraphic control (i.e., we can tell how old each deposit is) from between the two major tephras. I had hoped to find even earlier material below the deepest tephra, but we were only able to find charcoal and no artifacts.

So all in all, the two days of work at Kompaneskii did not pan out to be as extraordinary as I had hoped they might. But it was, nevertheless, a productive use of our last two days in the field. And the summer, overall, has been fantastically productive. It will take us another two years to complete our analyses of all the samples we have collected in the past three field seasons. So stay tuned-there are lots of questions that we hope we will be able to answer by the time we all is said and done!

---Dr. E.