In 2016 Hurricane Matthew hit
South Carolina reshaping its coastline.
In the process of re-mapping using satellite
imagery called Lidar two shell rings were
discovered on Pockoy Island located in the
Botany Bay Heritage Preserve.
Archaeologists chose to focus on the ring closest
to the beach first.
Due to sea level change and
rising oceans you know we're losing this
site at a pretty fast rate.
We're losing nine,
nine and a half meters of this site every single
year at best case scenario.
If current rates hold
and we do not get hit by another major hurricane,
we will lose the site by the year 2024.
We're doing what most people would call
salvage archaeology, trying to get as much as
we can before it's gone.
Excavation began in
2017 and has continued for four seasons.
In the summer of 2019 the site welcomed nearly
1400 visitors and over 400
volunteers who could participate in tours or
help sift for artifacts.
Individuals all over
South Carolina came to visit us and help us
screen.
Participate in the cleaning of artifacts and
cataloging of stuff, we take volunteers and
visitors of any age and experience level and
teach them about archaeology and South
Carolina history and heritage.
So just the
other day, we had a toddler up at the screen
on a stool sifting for artifacts and we were
teaching her how to ID things Visitors could also watch
live demonstrations of shell tools.
Archaeologists
were also aided by Mississippi State
University students were asked to dig shovel test
pits every twenty meters.
They're surveying the entire
island for us.
So we'll know where other locales
are on this island that are producing either
period artifacts from the late archaic shell ring
people or later or maybe even before.
Colleagues from the National Park Service out
of Tallahassee, Florida also assisted with metal
probing of the rings, confirming the LIDAR
imagery was true.
Dating the rings is
contemporary with the first great pyramids of
Egypt and Stonehenge.
That's approximately
4300 years ago.
There are about 25 known shell rings in
South Carolina and 60 on the east coast.
Typical shell rings or middens tend to be
horizontal.
But during the late archaic period for
some puzzling reason there are these donut shaped
rings the diameter of the rings of Pockoy island
measure about sixty to seventy meters across
with the centers being between twenty and thirty
meters.
Mounds of shell make up the outside with
the center of the rings almost void of shell.
We
refer to these as shell free interiors as plazas
which implies some sort of
maintenance of the area.
You keep it clean but in
fact this was not an area that's kept clean.
This is
an area that shows that the a lot of activity
took place.
We've got pits and posts and
shell piles and things like that.
The
archaeologists determined the first six to eight
inches of soil was overburdened from the
ocean.
So what we decided to do in order to make
this project though quicker and get down
below the plaza where we can find features is to
bring some heavy equipment and take that
material off.
Another use has been to remove dirt piles
out from under the screens.
We're very careful
with how we excavate with those machines and
we're slowly trying in all of our staff the use them.
Some artifacts come out of the midden while
others wash up on the beach that had been
washed out of the site.
Items believed to be
tools made from Whelk shells are one example of
this.
So what it looks like
their doing is using large whelks in a similar way
you would return a rock into an axe.
They're
breaking it by striking it with
probably another whelk, knocking a hole in it so that
they could put a stick into.
The archaeologists
suspect they were sharpened by using small
pebbles for possibly a juniper log with some
wet sand, then used to chop down
trees and hollow out dug out canoes.
Some of the
shells had two holes suggesting there were
used as both an adz and an axe.
Another significant find has been the large amount
of Tom's creek pottery which is the earliest
known form of pottery in North America.
These
were applied with the Marsh Perrywinkle.
Some
students may even choose to do their master's and
dissertation work on these objects.
Jones also believes the pottery was used as hones
or wets for sharpening bone tools used to stitch
leather together.
The archaeologists also
found an exciting item made of deer bone in
about the size of a pencil.
It was decorated
with concentric circles nested diamonds and cross
hatching.
You know these are my examples currently
of being grave bone pins.
The carvings tend
to be located in the rear half of the pins and the
archeologists have noted the special skill needed
to achieve them.
Finding them difficult to replicate
themselves.
They appear to be ornate enough where
they were some sort of a special item or maybe a
status item of some sort.
Whether they were eating
utensils hair pens, garment closures, net
making devices, we aren't really sure.
The
pointy end is sharpened often times and
highly polished and my speculation is that
they're used in the in the making of basketry.
Figuring it out seems like half the fun.
Something like this came off the beach the other
day.
Finally a shelled pendant was found,
probably made from the interior spiral of a whelk
and some shell beads most likely made from the
small shiny muscles that live in the marshes.
A hole may have been drilled in the pendant
and secured with a shelby.
I've got a fancy version of my stone drill here.
It's called a combo.
We don't know that Native
Americans used these but we do know that they
used a small stone drill.
Colunela in the area
also has a lot of mother of pearl inside and a
glitter like exterior.
Jones thinks that beads
would be for more than just a dormant, but also
used as currency like the Native Americans wampum
with purple or shiny beads being worth more than
white.
The artifacts are first
processed by sorting them into paper bags in the
field before being sent to the lab.
There
they are washed toothbrushes dried, labeled
and placed in archival quality plastic bags.
Artifacts are also entered into a database
sorted counted, weighed and studied by different
specialists.
We'll photograph a lot of
particularly the pottery and the bone pens.
We'll
have a final specialists.
This is a person who
studies animal bones.
The specialist return
information on the diet the people were eating
here.
For example, shellfish, turtle, dear and
hickory nuts.
We're not out here for the artifacts per
se.
We're out here to recover artifacts and
then learn from those artifacts.
What are people
doing with them.
And therefore what were their lives like.
The archaeologist still have many unanswered
questions.
And perhaps their biggest
question, how did they deal with sea level
change?
This year we're having those problem to
solve today so that we don't lose our way of
life.
The information they collect may help answer
these lingering questions and help solve these
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unwritten pieces of history.