Phase Three

is a term used for as full of an excavation of a site as you will ever get before it is totally destroyed, in the contract world of Archaeology. This is the beginning of an early spring Phase Three near Allenwood, Pennsylvania. It was a Federal project for a pipe out flow to the Susquehanna River for the Federal Prison at said town area.

Oddly I had actually been on the Phase Two as well. It didn't always happen that way, but they did try to get the old crew back on the same site if they weren't elsewhere on the East Coast. If the Company, Louis Berger in this case out of New Jersey, got the contract again and we almost always did on Federal. (Wonderful per diem money on Federal, by the way.)

What you see is a local hired back hoe had stripped the plow zone down to a certain predetermined level. That saved much manual work, time, and then you shovel skim it to the more exact level. This is break time and the area is just beginning to be "cleaned" by trowel to expose and map the "features", which are the real things of interest. There is one non-cleaned up, as in not photo ready, shot of some dark stains. A few I can pick out in other shots as well. Look for the little orange "flags" in the ground, they are marking them, in some cases. And they warned us not to be stepping on them. Those are what we got all excited about. Well, I liked the lithic identification part better. Who am I kidding, I loved it all.

Unfortunately I blew out my other shoulder in the process of shovel skimming and was relegated to off. I was not happy. Phase Three's aren't common and Cortisone shots hurt. I was still on site as much as I could be. Kimber (Grizzled looking, older than me and I was about as old as they came, ex-Green Beret with a degree in Philosophy and a sweet heart of a guy.) told me to fucking slow down. But I had no such mode in me when doing this stuff. Did I listen? Hell no. So these are just the beginning shots and I do wish I had taken more as the project progressed. They would not look as you might think at all. Varying heights of units all over the place. Very untidy looking to the untrained eye.

This was kind of a, I told you idiots so, for me. I didn't stick to my guns enough on the Phase Two on what I thought some things were and they said they weren't. One was the biggest and deepest fucking storage pits I have ever seen and the other was a start of a post mold pattern. Both proved to be true and I couldn't remember all of the details from the Phase Two, but did try and I had kept good notes from it, but not with that in mind. Time, always time, hurry, hurry, never enough. As a matter of fact I was so fucking pissed off at my good friend Henry, who was supervising the Phase Two and this one, when he told me the the post molds were tree root stains, I slammed the flat shovel in the middle of one in a fit of anger and "bisected" it in a hot damn second and said, now look at it and tell me it's a root stain, and he did. Dork! That isn't the way you bisect a post mold, normally. Oh well, I tried.

This particular dig went deep, as in on the Phase Two I needed a step ladder to get out of some of the expanded 1 x 1 meter units, and a very very sweet dig. From Late Woodland (farming) to Middle Archaic (hunter/gatherer) and most all time points in between, with a very heavy Transitional Period, or Terminal Archaic to some, (which is the change from hunter/gatherer to the farming period) section. It had a partial Longhouse pattern, but you can't just keep going after it, if it went off the project area. Made you damn sick when that happened and that semi-sort of a thing did all of the time in contract work. I never did learn if they typed one the lower section projectile points as a Vestal, which would have made it the furthest south of any known. But, I stated my case on how the range was not determined and that I had expanded it many years earlier on my own to another full 100 miles, which got it from it's original nomenclature area to very near the dig. I would still like to know if they wrote it up that way. Not as glamorous as you thought such a thing might be?

Bob Wall was the head Archaeo-whore on this one and as I recall he had finally finished his PHD. He's in the middle of the bigger shots along with Julie Holt. She was my first unit mate with that company and a more strict, better teacher a person could ever ask for and some didn't like to work with her because of her precision. Their problem and their mistake. And Henry's loving wife, my god it was damn near syrupy just watching those two together. Fucking sugar overload I tell you. She was in the middle of getting her PHD as well and now is a Professor. A motley crew we were and as you can see, it was a bit nippy outside. The guy that is all prim and proper in the warm looking black jump suit was the local back hoe operator and a very good one and very taken with the whole operation. In some of the shots you can see someone working through the break, not uncommon at all. My wife is in there someplace, too and actually it does look like her coat, but I think I see her over with the rest of the crew. It would be fun to pick out more and talk in detail about each, but I'll stop with just a few names, for this post anyway.

Ahh yes, those were the days and I still miss it from time to time.