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HOW TO RECORD VERTICAL PROFILES - No. 18 Of An Occasional Series For The Practical Field Archeologist - HE’S BACK! “Woody” Woodenhead, avocational volunteer archeological fieldworker on Florida digs, (everyone knows one – right?) and general all-round misfit and masochist in other ways, too – has after the “free spirit” ethic and general entrepeneurship which governs such digs, decided to record for an (uncaring?) posterity and perhaps equally uncaring dig directorship, the carefully exposed vertical face of the north wall in his Unit.
Here is how he does it: First, he chooses a Unit with a perfectly flat ground surface. (After all, Mama Woodenhead didn’t go raising up a fool here you see!) Volunteer diggers will find it a shortcut to enlightenment to select only sites being dug on geological peneplains. “Woody” has previously strung a horizontal line level between the two corner stakes of his Unit. Since I am a dinosaur by most conventions these days, I will say for purposes of illustration here that he is digging a 5-foot Unit and these stakes are five feet apart - as they were back in my prime and before all this metric nonsense had crept in. (In the 50’s you see, metricity was thought to be a “commie plot”. Don’t laugh! In my other career as industrial publicist, I have heard no less than Roy K. Trowbridge, head guru of GM’s Standards and Measurements Division, give his much ballyhooed lectures on just this very thing – the fear being then that our railroads would not only fail to run on time if the metric system was instituted in the U.S. – the cars also would most certainly fall off the very tracks! Wonder if Roy ever found employment again?) Well – I wander. Sorry. One of the few perks of age here, kiddies. So anyhow – we see Woody here kneeling on a hump in the Miami Oolite (a beneficent Providence you see, having provided him with wooden knees just so he might serve best in this, his chosen avocation) and he is “dropping a vertical” from his leveled line. This latter line or the “local datum plane” it represents (his Unit), has been previously “tied in” – or can be – by leveling to the “site master datum plane”, so that all measurements on-site may be reduced to a common base. “Woody” is using his new super-duper, bright orange inch/metric tape for his measurements (see Practical Hints No. 7 elsewhere on this website). To see how “Woody” records his determinations, let’s take a closer look at his field book (below). Oh, and BTW, please don’t tell my mother I was an Industrial Publicist, will you? (or an archeologist, for that matter). It might break her old heart you see. She thinks I play piano in a whorehouse…
Here is what “Woody” finally entered onto his engineer’s forms or log sheets. (These having been supplied by the Dig Directors, or perhaps “Woody” – an upscale archeologist – has had resort to the local Office Max and found some profile sheets more to his liking). Light green is a common field engineer’s convention and easy-on-the-eyes. “Woody” has chosen (surprise!) a form ruled in (darker green) one-foot squares. He has let his “datum plane” level line fall along one of these dark-green horizontal lines. He can now plot direct (red line, red dots), his various readings as he makes them. The red line represents his measurement in the first illustration: it shows that the top of the ancient cultural deposit or “lens” of bones, shells and ashes, lies just one foot below his Unit “datum plane” (and about 10.5 in. below the current ground surface). By dropping a careful series of verticals from his “datum plane”, Woody can plot their corresponding locations on his profile paper. When he has enough of these dots located, he “connects the dots” to recreate the exact profile of the (in this case) surface of the Limestone basement Bedrock. In similar fashion, Woody can locate all other relevant features, boundaries and strata exposed in his Unit profile. A couple of things: note Woody uses more-or-less familiar line-and-stipple conventions to indicate his various entries. (A fine stipple for the sandy topsoil; a coarse stipple for the cultural deposits; slanted, parallel lines for the midden matrix: an open grid-like symbol for his limestone (this is actually an approximation to the symbol used by geologists themselves – reflecting the “jointing” characteristic of that kind of stone, etc.). Sharp, inked or penciled graphic symbols are preferred to crabbed “coloring in” with felt pens and colored pencils – which often degenerate into muddy pointillism creations at the hands of wannabe artists. Further, use of b&w inking for entries facilitates Xeroxing and faxing later if data are to be copied, or exchanged with colleagues elsewhere. Note also how “Woody” has entered direct into his log sheet some penciled notations as to the phenomena HE saw that day and how HE recorded them! (Photography, of course, is a must for serious profile recording, too – but as with all “mechanisms” including the new digicams, what’s “in the can” may be just a goose-egg when you get back home and try to bring it up!) There is no substitute for informed human observers with minimum sketching and recording skills on any dig! When I was a onetime Weather Forecaster long ago, it was considered a “courtesy” to invite a fellow wizard to “read” one’s synoptic charts – or again, think of physicians reading the smudges in each other’s X-rays… So then with “profiles:” they invite “readings” by others – as they should. What do we see here in “Woody’s” records? Well - to me – that tortuous contact between the “topsoil” stratum and the midden proper can only record here a sort of “uncomformity” as maybe our geological colleagues might put it – or rather, really that the upper surface of the midden was surely much disturbed openly at some time in the past, maybe by wheeled vehicles which grooved or rutted it – and that the “topsoil” was quickly deposited over it before it “weathered” back to a flatter surface. And “Woody” has correctly pointed out the “run” of marine shell fragments, all with long axes lying horizontal: sometimes taken as de facto evidence of a “trampling layer” or living floor in ancient sites. His other callouts indicated where bone fragments and “clutches” were exposed – possibly evidence of butchering or “burial” practices… It is obvious that if all excavators dig and record all Units in this fashion (an “ideal” situation on-site, admittedly) then they can be “stripped” together at a later date to provide authentic, continuous cross-sectional records of archeological deposits. BWP |
