Remember me?

It’s been quite a while. A lot has happened, more so in my life than in my archaeological sphere. There just wasn’t much interesting to “blog” about. Mostly report writing and being thankful I’ve still got a job. In fact, the cultural wing of my office is apparently the most productive in the whole company.
For the last few months, archaeology has been more of a secondary part of my life. Partly because what I was doing was so boring, that I couldn’t think of it as more than a job. More so because I had a new passion.
But now that’s gone.
So here I am again, and I’m going to try and rededicate myself to my field, find a way to reignite that passion.

Food for thought

“Hell, you were going to suffer in this life anyway you might as well do it doing something you love.”

Kwana Jackson, referring to a lesson learned from Frank McCourt.

I sometimes come across perspective in the least expected places.

Back on the line

The big pipeline project just keeps on going, and I’m back in the field. This is the last big push. The client is going to have us survey everything that is accessible in Oklahoma and Texas, and then whatever is left will have to wait until construction. I suppose that means there will be monitoring eventually, but that’s a year or two in the future at this point.

So right now I’m in Oklahoma. I was actually looking forward to being here, but I don’t know why, because I realize that I don’t really like it. It’s pretty where we’re working, but it’s a lot of really small towns, so-so hotels, and crushing rural poverty. It’s seriously depressing. We’ve also been moving around a lot, which is a little difficult for me.

The company we were originally subcontracting for was removed from the project, so we’re now working for a different group. They’ve been on the project, so it’s not someone totally new, but they have a slightly different approach to things. As I said to someone yesterday, we had perfected an imperfect process, and now every change is for the worse. We’re getting things done, but there’s a lot of stress and I’ve been really struggling. I’ve been on the verge of tears several times, and my mood has definitely been really shitty. I need to suck that up, because the crew chief can set the mood for the crew.

It’s also been really hard because I was having an amazing summer in Austin, and I’m desperately homesick and missing my friends. I chose this life, and I love what I do, but this project has really scarred me emotionally. I’m making a lot of money, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

It’s going to be a long three or four weeks.

Cha-ching

I found $2.27 surveying on Thursday and Friday. I’ve found pennies from time to time, sometimes a nickel or a dime, but this was the first time I’ve found paper money. The two bucks were in one place, then I found 10 pennies and a nickel a couople of miles down the road, and a 1962 dime by a razed house foundation. Who said archaeology doesn’t pay?

Today was a good day

Yes, it’s been a while. Work got crazy, then life, and at some point there will be a series of blog posts about the effects of living the life archaeological.

Today was the first day I’ve been in the field in something like 6 weeks. Back on the Hill Country fiber optic survey, which is such a great project. Go to one of the prettiest parts of Texas, walk along the side of the road and dig a shovel test from time to time. Plus, we’re staying in Bandera and working in the Tarpley area. It’s an all around good thing, because I was starting to crack in the office and I get some per diem and overtime AND I don’t have to be in East Texas dealing with all the bullshit with that project. Soon enough, I suspect.

One of the stretches we surveyed today is mostly on private property, and for this particular project we only survey the portions of the proposed line in the public right-of-way (ROW). The maps we got from the client are weird and not to scale and so trying to match their sketches with actual topo and aerial maps can be difficult. So we’re digging a shovel test by the driveway to a ranch, and there’s maybe a meter-wide area of soil between the road cut and the fence. Lo and behold, the shovel test is positive. In fact, there’s nothing until 50 cm below surface, and then two flakes and a really nice thin lanceolate biface (this means little to non-archs, but it’s pretty cool). So we start digging a couple of other shovel tests along the narrow ROW to check for more deposits.

Well, the ranchowner drives out to see what we’re up to. Probably in his late 60s-early 70s. Wranglers, Ropers, snap-button denim Wrangler shirt, knife on his belt, only unusual thing was no hat. He rolls up in an old-school military Jeep. Asks us what we’re doing, and I explain a little. He doesn’t seem particularly interested, but I could tell he wanted to talk. I mention how we saw the Indian mound up the road (it’s a huge burned-rock midden, but more on that another time) and he says that the landowner had to run some people off of it the weekend before. I show him the biface we got out of the hole, and he says he’s not particularly interested in that kind of stuff. Starts to tell me about a cemetery that’s on his land up on a hilltop. I ask him if it’s marked and he says it has a bunch of grave markers. Then he says that someone came out to visit the cemetery a while back (they had kin there) and while they were there they noticed some artifacts on the ground. He says they were much nicer than what we had, which was a little stunning as we had a pretty nice thin biface. Then he asks if I want to go look at the cemetery. I think about it for, oh, half a second and say “Yes sir, if you realy don’t mind.”

So I hop in the Jeep. He mentions it’s a 1946 Jeep, although I don’t remember how he got it. We drive up to the cemetery, talking about the land and how he owns it but his son lives on this part, nothing big. We get to the cemetery and it’s like a real cemetery. I was expecting 2-3 eroded old headstones covered in brush. There were 15 graves, belonging to 3-4 families, with a variety of headstones and footstones. The earliest grave was from the late 1890s, the latest was the early 1930s. It was well maintained, and the ranchowner (in case you can’t tell, I didn’t catch his name) says that when he bought the land 7 years prior, it was not fenced and a little overgrown and cattle were grazing on it and he thought that was disrespectful. So he cleared it and fenced it in, and he lets people visit it if they ask. He mentions that someone recently had come from Ohio looking for their ancestors’ graves. I mention that I was expecting a small cemetery, and he says that the town of Tarpley used to be based in the area. The original settlers were a bit north, where there are a lot of springs. He says there was a stagecoach stop further up the road we were on, and that you can still see the wagon ruts. Now the town is based along the intersection of two state-maintained Ranch-to-Market roads. Oh yeah, and there were flakes and burned rock all around the outside of the cemetery, and I found a pretty nice leaf-shaped biface. I think it’s all pretty much on a deflated surface, but cool.

There’s a lot of stories he told me about Tarpley and the people there, and I was mesmerized. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here before that I find a lot of the people we run into are salt of the earth folk, excluding the occasional nutcase or crank. This man was a perfect example of this. He didn’t seem phased in the slightest by my earrings or tattoos, he just wanted to talk about his land and I was very interested. He seemed interested in what I could tell him about the graves, and even about the prehistoric artifacts.

As we’re driving back, we pass some of the cattle and he mentions they’re a Mexican breed. He says they’re not very good beef but that they’re good for calf roping. I ask if they’re being raised for that, and he says no, but that his grandsons compete in calf-roping competitions. Then he mentions that both he and his wife used to make their living in rodeos. She was a barrel racer and he rode bucking broncos. I don’t think he could see because he was driving but I was both agape and had a big dumb grin because I just thought that was about the greatest thing EVER except maybe if he had been a bull rider. I’m riding across a ranch in a 1946 Jeep with a former roder bronco rider. I’m pretty much in heaven.

We get back to the road and chat a bit more, and I give him my card (and, as I said, I never catch his name) and he says that if we’re back in the area we’d be welcome to look around his land (after all, the other techs didn’t get to see it all). His wife owns the little store in town and we just need to go there and she’ll call him and let him know that we’re heading out. And you know what, even if we can’t make it back this week, I think I might just make some time for myself this summer and take him up on his offer. Even if it’s just to walk around the ranch and enjoy the country.

Addendum: I FORGOT THE PUNCH LINE…

As it turns out, I had read the maps wrong and the fiber optic line actually runs on the other side of the fence. In other words, we didn’t even need to be survey there in the first place!

I’m very glad I misread the maps.

An admittedly weak placeholder update

Work has been insane. I’ve been averaging 11-hour days, 6 days a week. Throw in time to get ready, get unready, eat, clean up, and sleep. With what’s left, I’ve been a very passive consumer of the internet (and media in general).

I’m currently in Tyler, filling in as crew chief for a couple of days while the regular crew chief attends a funeral. Thursday, I head back to Lufkin to help out with backhoe trenching for a day-and-a-half, then return to Austin Friday afternoon. Hopefully, I arrive in time to see The Watchmen with my friends, since they bought me a ticket. I was cleared to leave Thursday morning, but I felt like I should help out as much as I can since things are still pretty hectic out here.

I got pulled back into Austin to help with the reporting. We have some major deadlines coming up for this pipeline project. I’m glad, because I was already pretty drained and depressed being away from home and my wife so long. I was also going to be a little ticked to miss South by Southwest. I’m pretty lucky to be able to go back in time to have fun, and also be in demand.

Incidentally

I got an unpleasant taste of leadership this weekend, dealing with incident reporting. I spent two days in my hotel room making phone calls, writing and answering e-mails, and filling out forms. Meanwhile, the crews who I had been spending the most time with went and found another very cool site.

Safety training and reporting is a relatively new dimension to my job in archaelogy, and I suspect to archaeology in general. I mean, we all know that archaeology isn’t what we see in adventure movies, but for a long time there was a very macho tinge to it. We called ourselves the “Cowboys of Science” and prided ourselves on working hard and playing hard in rough places. Even as times have changed and being macho is somewhat frowned upon, we still pride ourselves on working hard and playing hard. We love telling stories of all our close calls and bumps and bruises, staring down danger and playing through the pain. Even with OSHA and our half-hearted efforts to follow the rules.

But, in the words of Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changing. Major clients are demanding that we have strict safety standards and a documented safety record. We have to be in compliance with their safety standards, and are treated the same as the construction workers and roughnecks. In this particular instance, it means wearing a side-impact hard hat, even when we’re walking though a mile-long cow pasture. We have to wear OSHA-standard steel toe boots, even though we may be walking 4-5 miles.

It also means we are supposed to report not only every injury, but every “near hit.” Did you see a venomous snake 50 feet away? That’s a near hit. Get cut off driving to the site? Near hit. Get bit by a mosquito? Yep, you guessed it. In other words, the basic day-to-day tasks of archaeological survey in Texas (and likely most everywhere) are likely to produce at least 2-3 “near hits” daily, each of which is supposed to get a report filed.

If you’re thinking this is stupid and excessive, you’re not alone. The result is not necessarily safer behavior, although I think all the safety training has made us more aware of the severity of some hazards we have downplayed. The main result is people not reporting potentially more serious things because of the paperwork and the interviews. A couple of spots of poison ivy or a tick bite are the kind of things we’ve all had a hundred times. It itches, you take care of it, it goes away, no harm, no foul. If it gets worse, you tell someone, you take care of it, it goes away, etc. Unfortunately, the client and the company don’t quite see it that way.

In this instance, a crew member had an embedded tick. He removed it, but the head stayed in. He told the field monitor, along with several other people, that they had been bit by ticks the day before, so that a batch “near hit” report could be filed. After hearing about Lyme disease and the symptoms of an infected bite, he checked and noticed that it had the signature bullseye. He checked his insurance, found a doctor, got it checked out, and got a prescription for antibiotics to treat the potential infection. Pretty standard. Only, he didn’t follow the proper protocol, particularly when it came to reporting. He actually wasn’t going to say anything, because he didn’t think it was a big deal and didn’t want it to be one. However, one of his fellow crew members mentioned it in passing to a field director, and his crew chief also reported it the following day. Which, if you’ve been reading through everything I mentioned above, meant it was now a big deal. The client’s safety procedures weren’t exactly followed, nor were our company’s. It turns out that neither the tech nor the crew chief were aware that our company had a separate, if somewhat similar, set of procedures to follow. The tech did nothing wrong as far as treatment, in fact he did everything right, and if he had followed the procedures as laid out, he would have been doing the exact same thing (even going to the same doctor). The uproar was over the break in the protocols, and I spent the better part of two days dealing with all of that, including a brief morning training session with all of the techs discussing the company safety reporting procedures, and trying to convince them that reporting all of these minor incidents and following the protocol was important for reasons beyond keeping their jobs and making my life easier.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re not a CRM archaeologist or an archaeology student, then you can maybe feel my pain, or at least see how different my world is from what you see on TV or in movies beyond the scientific aspects. If you’re a CRM professional or someone considering the field, view this as a glimpse of things to come. I’ve told the people out with us right now that right now this may be an abberation, and not all jobs are like this, but eventually all jobs will be.

The end of the road

Camino Real middle road

Originally uploaded by texasrobo

Although it’s kind of hard to see, this is a photo of the Middle Road of the Camino Real within our project area. Our location matches one identified by a graduate thesis on the area.

On Wednesday, we finally finished the site delineations that I talked about in the last post. Additional findings include:
- A few ceramic sherds discovered on the site west of the slave quarters. These may be Caddo or an Early Ceramic occupation.
- A lithic production area in the prehistoric component near the plantation house (we finally got access to that property, but didn’t find the house). They also may have recovered a glass flake.
- Two additional thermal features on the enormous Caddo site, which was extended well to the west. Many more artifacts were located, including a quartzite mano/battering stone (discovered by yours truly in a road disturbance), two more petrified wood biface fragments, and some diagnostic ceramic sherds, including an sherd with a recognizable decorative pattern (a band with triangles protruding, referred to as Ticked Lines here). I’ll try and get some photos of these added to Flickr as soon as I get them from the field crews.
- We also had access to the pasture across the road where the Presidio may have been. Despite intensive shovel testing, no artifacts of any kind were located in this area. This was a bit surprising and disappointing, although it did help to establish an eastern site boundary.

Of course, it isn’t all finished yet. We still have to figure out a reroute, which may require a whole new survey area.

And then there’s the Texas Historical Commission. The SHPO himself has taken a personal interest in our work in this area, which means intense scrutiny of our methodology, our results, and the project impacts in the area. There will be a meeting next week involving the SHPO and probably other THC archaeological staffers, several of our archaeologists (myself included),  our client’s cultural resources coordinators, and other interested parties that I maybe shouldn’t name right now. I have no idea what to expect. At one point, it was mentioned that we would be going to look at some of the known road traces so we have an idea what they look like. But that’s probably changed with so many interested parties involved. All I know is that we did a very thorough job investigating the area and recording our discoveries, and will make every effort to insure that the Middle Road and the sites in the area are fully documented and not impacted.
Obviously, we’ve grown so used to the charlie foxtrots that one more doesn’t phase us.

An archaeologist’s dream, a client’s nightmare

I haven’t updated the blog this week because we’ve been really busy. A part of the crude oil pipeline we’ve been surveying for months crosses through an area in East Texas that contains segments of the Camino Real. This was a Spanish colonial road that ran from somewhere around Monterey, Mexico to Los Adaes, Louisiana. It has been designated as a National Trail, which makes it a part of the National Parks system, and it’s also listed on the National Register of Historic Properties.

As a part of our survey, some of our archaeologists identified a 10-mile stretch where known (such as SH-21) and supposed sections of the road are located. This was accomplished using historic maps and accounts. For this 10-mile stretch, even in areas that have already been surveyed, we’re excavating shovel tests every 30 meters, and checking carefully for any road traces or large old trees. Ironically, much of this area is presently used as timber farms, so that most of the trees are youngish pines planted in linear rows, with logging roads interspersed. If a positive shovel test is excavated, or if something else screams “historic road trace”, then we chase it out, shovel testing at 10-meter intervals. We can stray from the proposed pipeline corridor as long as we stay on the approved tracts (this is to assist with re-routing the line around sites).

We’ve spent most of the week on a large timber farm near the Angelina River, in Nacogdoches County. A portion of the Camino Real known as the Middle Road is said to run through this tract. Furthermore, a Spanish mission and presidio were somewhere in the area. Missions were generally placed near large native populations. So this was one of the highest probability areas of the entire 500+ mile Oklahoma and Texas stretch.

Thus far we have encountered the following:

- A mid-19th to mid-20th century historic residential site with a small prehistoric component and one possible Spanish ceramic sherd. As it turns out, this is a previously recorded site that includes the slave quarters of a plantation. The main house is on a property to which we have been denied access.

- An extensive prehistoric lithic scatter and campsite that includes the slave quarters area and covers a large ridgetop for 300+ meters.

- Running through this prehistoric extension is a section of the Middle Road, in the form of deeply eroded ruts that cross a minor drainage at a rock outcrop.

- A second mixed component site, with a historic component likely related to the plantation house (it’s right at the property line) and a prehistoric lithic component.

- A mid-20th century historic debris scatter that has been extensively disturbed by the timber farm.

- And, finally, a large Caddo site across a huge ridgetop overlooking the Angelina River. It was initially identified by ceramic sherds and lithic flakes in the existing pipeline corridor. Since then, it’s been extended by positive shovel tests across a couple hundred meters to the south and west. More interestingly, we’ve located it eastward as far as a road, and our PI believes that the area across the road might include the location of the presidio. We’ve recovered a couple of hundred ceramic sherds with a variety of decorative techniques, petrified wood and chert flakes, a Harvey/Mineola biface, and a chert arrow point (in a possible feature). About the only thing we haven’t recovered are European trade goods that would confirm that the site is related to the Spanish occupation.

As the title says, for us it’s a dream, getting to chase two huge, very cool sites. On the other hand, our client faces a major reroute of the line, which will probably require additional survey. I suppose the two (or maybe three) pipelines that cross these sites were built back before Section 106 and the National Historic Preservation Act. As much as we may gripe about the sometimes extreme safety requirements of the client, they’re definitely taking their cultural resources obligations very seriously.

I hope to get some photos up soon!

Radio radio

Just a short anecdote from the day that I had to share.

This morning, we had three vehicles, including mine, in a caravan to the survey location. So we each had a radio so we could communicate between the cars. It’s against the safety rules for the driver to use a cellphone while driving, and I was on my own. I had a problem getting mine on the right channel, so someone set it up for me when we stopped for gas and water.

About 10 minutes later, my phone rings, with a number I don’t recognize. I blow it off, because I don’t feel like pulling over to answer. Less than a minute later, the same number calls again. I pull over to take the call, and one of the other cars. They say, “John, we’ve been enjoying the reggae, but your radio is leaning on the talk button.” They were nice enough not to mention the fact that I had been very loudly singing along to “Stepping Razor” by Peter Tosh at one point. Oops!

As it turns out, the guy who set my radio had accidentally put it on voice-activate! I’m sure I’ll hear a lot of teasing about it tomorrow, but I think it’s hilarious. I already told them they were lucky it wasn’t on the 80s alternative station or the old-school hip-hop station at the time, since I don’t know the words to most of the songs on the reggae channel.