John E. Worth
© UWF Division of Anthropology and Archaeology
People who discover artifacts by chance or by choice
on their privately-owned land sometimes bring them to archaeologists working at
museums or universities in order to learn more about them. Apart from the most obvious questions like
“What is it?” and “How old is it?” (both of which archaeologists love to try
and answer), another not infrequent question is “What’s it worth?” While this question is usually intended to
elicit a dollar value, the answer from a professional archaeologist is always
going to be in terms of what the artifact can tell us about the person or
people who made and used it, and how that contributes to an understanding of
past cultures. The truth is that
archaeology isn’t about finding artifacts; it’s about finding clues to the
past. An oft-repeated mantra is “It’s
not what you find, it’s what you find out,”
and I’ve always told my students that real archaeology is less like
Indiana Jones and more like Sherlock Holmes.
What we seek as archaeologists are the scattered surviving clues to what
people did and how people lived in the distant past, and it is the clues that
provide us with the ability to reconstruct those stories. Individual artifacts are like printed letters
on the pages of an irreplaceable rare book; they all contribute to telling a
story, but if they are removed from their original context, they cease to have
any meaning or value on their own, and furthermore their removal ultimately
leaves the words and pages of the book full of gaps, eventually rendering the
book unreadable.
Most or all of the artifacts that archaeologists
normally find during their fieldwork are best described as the trash or litter
of the past. I’ve often used the phrase
“scientific garbology” to describe much of basic archaeological inquiry,
because what we normally find and analyze in our effort to understand past
cultures are the broken and lost or discarded pieces of everyday material
things made and used by people in the past, such as shattered pottery vessels,
rusty iron nails, and a wide array of scraps and bits of other things that
ended up on or under the ground in the past.
Additionally, for most sites, all archaeologists find are those few
durable things or parts of things that have survived decades or centuries of
decomposition underground, which is only a very small fraction of the material
culture originally in use. What this all
means is that while the vast majority of artifacts that archaeologists normally
find are of little to no monetary value at all to modern-day treasure-hunters
and collectors who traffic in antiquities, they really only have value to
scholars who can use them in concert with everything else found with and around
them as clues to the past. And in that
sense, an artifact removed from its original context can actually tell us very
little. However, this is not the case
for an artifact that is excavated scientifically as part of a professional
archaeological investigation that records the exact vertical and horizontal
locations of all associated artifacts in terms of soil and sediment layers and
intrusive pits or other subsurface features.
Even the most mundane and commonplace artifact can have immense
information value if excavated as part of a carefully planned and implemented
archaeological research project.
The Luna Settlement site is no different, and in
fact provides many object lessons in how important a single artifact in context can tell us. An example of this is a particular wrought
iron nail and a handful of Spanish olive jar sherds that were found three years
ago in the area we are currently opening new excavation units on for the 2019
UWF terrestrial archaeological field school. These otherwise common Luna-era artifacts
were different in several ways from the rest that were found in several
excavation units in this area. First,
they were located quite a bit deeper in the soil than the rest of the artifacts
found here, which is important because what we normally find is that Luna-era
artifacts are concentrated in a specific layer with a fairly regular range of
depths below the current ground surface.
The reason they are sorted out at those consistent depths is related in
large part to what archaeologists call “bioturbation,” which is the collective
effect of all life forms that live in or tunnel through the uppermost layers of
soil, including tree roots, earthworms and beetles, fire ant nests, gopher
tortoises and armadillos, and a plethora of other organisms that ultimately
create holes and tunnels that allow sand and artifacts from upper layers to
drop gradually and cumulatively deeper in the soil than they were originally
deposited in. Combined with the fact
that the Luna Settlement is situated on a coarse sand substrate, probably an
old marine terrace that was formed when sea level was considerably higher than
it is today, and has been subject to vibrations from nearby passing trains
several times a day for well over a century here, this has collectively
resulted in the migration of the original surface-scatter of Luna-era artifacts
quite a bit deeper into the ground than they were. But the caret head nail and olive jar sherds
in question here were well below this artifact layer.
The second difference is that they were found within
the stain of a posthole that had been excavated from the original ground
surface down deeper into the subsoil in order to erect a post as part of a
wooden structure. Through careful
excavation, mapping, and documentation under unit supervision by UWF graduate
student Christina Bolte, we were able to follow this stain from where it first
appeared within the artifact-rich layer down into the sandy subsoil, and thus
we were able to clarify that all these artifacts were found inside this
posthole.
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| Profile view of the bisected posthole with patchy charcoal staining. |
Related to this, the third difference is that
because these artifacts were all found together deep within a narrow posthole,
they could be contextually associated with other objects found in the same
archaeological feature (the posthole). And
in the case of this posthole, we actually discovered not just chunks of
carbonized wood in its fill, but a remnant of the charred wooden post itself. Clearly, the post had burned down into the
ground, leaving incompletely burned carbonized remnants of the post to preserve
across the centuries until we uncovered them.
And since it seems unlikely that a single, isolated wooden post would
have burned so completely down into the ground unless it were part of the wall
of a larger wooden structure that burned, we infer that this post was one of
the wall-posts of a Luna-era structure.
The large olive jar sherds were found oriented vertically around the
area where the central post would have been, suggesting that they may have been
shoved into the posthole beside the post to help shore it up in the soft sand
substrate before it was backfilled. The
nail was found in close context to the charred post itself, and may originally
have been nailed into it prior to the fire, though it may also have simply been
included incidentally in the posthole fill, or might perhaps simply have
dropped down into the posthole as the post burned above.
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| View of Spanish olive jar sherds within the posthole fill. |
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| X-ray of charred post with adjacent nail. |
This is where the story gets even more
interesting. Another of our UWF graduate
students, Emily Youngman, has been working with the hundreds of olive jar
sherds from this and adjacent excavation units, and has managed to discover
more than a few cross-mends between many of these sherds. While the majority of these mends are between
sherds that were found in the artifact-rich layer described above, several of the
sherds deep inside the posthole actually mended to the sherds in the original
surface layer, which means that the posthole was definitely dug after several
olive jars were smashed and scattered across the surface of the ground during
Luna’s time (possibly during the September 19, 1559 hurricane itself). It is reasonable to speculate that after the
likely destruction of any structures originally built before the hurricane
winds ravaged the site, the structure to which this post belonged was erected
as a potential replacement for whatever was there before.
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| Photo showing artifacts found within the posthole, including the nail and several olive jar sherds already mended by UWF student Emily Youngman with others from the original surface layer. |
When did the post actually burn? Another student, undergraduate Mirabela
Schleidt, recently used a grant from the UWF Office of Undergraduate
Research to obtain a radiocarbon date from the carbonized wood of the post, and
the results were wholly consistent with a 16th-century date, with
the years 1559-1561 falling within the calculated date ranges, just as would be
expected. This result provides even
further confirmation that the nail and olive jar sherds found within the
posthole and in direct association with the charred post are definitely part of
the Luna Settlement. We eventually hope
to date one or more of the olive jar sherds themselves using a technique called
optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), which measures the time since the sand
grains inside the clay matrix were last fired by using accumulated background
radiation after the sherd was buried.
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| UWF student Mirabela Schleidt weighs carbonized wood sample to be sent for radiocarbon dating. |
And finally, even beyond this, since we know that
these specific artifacts cross-mend with others that were originally on the
ground surface, we can also associate this specific post and the structure it belonged to with a range of other associated 16th-century
artifacts scattered across this specific area of the site. Since the area we are digging in is in the “core area” of the Luna Settlement,
an area with the densest and most diverse assemblage of 16th-century
artifacts on the site, and potentially near or adjacent to the hypothesized plaza, we can infer that the occupant of this structure was probably among the higher-status military officers or other officials living there. This should ultimately provide us with a very informative "snapshot" of mid-16th-century life on the far fringes of the Spanish colonial empire.
So what’s the value of a wrought iron nail or a
handful of olive jar sherds? Virtually
nothing monetarily, and of only limited historical value without its exact
archaeological context. If someone had
dug a hole here and pulled out the nail and sherds, they’d have exactly that: a
nail and a few sherds. But since we
excavated these artifacts as part of a broader archaeological project and in a
careful, systematic manner, we can associate these precise artifacts with a
wealth of contextual information that allows us to infer that these artifacts may have been directly associated with the residence of someone living in the heart of Luna's short-lived settlement called Santa María de Ochuse. After the hurricane that nearly
destroyed the settlement, they were deposited in one of the postholes for a
newly-erected structure that survived long enough eventually to burn down
either by accident during the expedition, or perhaps intentionally when the Spaniards evacuated it.
Without their undisturbed archaeological context, these artifacts tell
us very little, but in context, they provide clues to the scene of a compelling
historical episode that ultimately changed the course of history through the
failure and withdrawal of the Luna Settlement in 1561. And that, simply put, is their true value.
