Field Notes

CONSERVANCY Field Notes

This dilapidated, abandoned house was demolished by the Conservancy.

house Removed From Fort Gibson Preserve

SOUTHWEST—This fall a small, wooden house more than 60 years old was demolished at the Conservancy’s Fort Gibson Preserve in east-central Oklahoma. The house had fallen into disrepair after being abandoned several years ago, and it lacked the structural integrity to be moved or rehabilitated. Local contractor Brad Klinkenbeard, who generously donated his services to the Conservancy, performed the demolition under the supervision of the Fort Gibson Historic Site’s staff.

The preserve, which consists of two residential lots donated to the Conservancy in 2009 by Adam and Angela Mason, contains a portion of the original stone foundation and associated features of the early 19thcentury log fort. White wooden poles will be placed on the preserve to mark the location of the fort’s buried foundation. A split-rail fence will also be built along the two sides of the preserve that face a street.

Fort Gibson was built in 1824, and was occupied through most of the Indian Removal period prior to its abandonment in 1857. The post was reactivated during the Civil War and the army stayed through the Reconstruction and Indian Wars periods, combating the problem of outlaws and squatters. In 1890, the army abandoned Fort Gibson for the last time.

The Fort Gibson Historic Site, which is owned by the Oklahoma Historical Society and is adjacent to the Conservancy’s preserve, features a reconstruction of the early log fort as well as original buildings from the 1840s through the 1870s. Exhibits detailing the fort’s history are located in the Commissary Visitor Center on Garrison Hill.

New Research At Graveline Mound

SOUTHEAST—Funded by a grant from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the University of Alabama recently spent three months excavating at the Conservancy’s Graveline Mound in Southeast Mississippi. Graveline is a platform mound approximately five feet tall that sits next to the Mississippi Sound, on the Gulf of Mexico.

University of Alabama archaeologists John Blitz and Baxter Mann excavated the mound in the early 1990s, before the Conservancy acquired it, and their data led to the conclusion that Graveline was built during the Late Woodland Period (ca. a.d. 400-700) and its construction took place in several stages. Blitz returned to the site with his crew last summer to gain a better understanding of the mound’s construction and use.

The researchers dug 13 test units in the mound, some of which were expanded into larger blocks. They determined that the mound was built in four stages. Its uppermost level is a sandy-textured soil that offered few artifacts. Below that is an organically rich midden level where most of the activity seems to have taken place. This level contained pottery sherds, stone

An example of the sherds recovered from the mound.

flakes, and preserved organic material such as bone, burned plant remains, and marine shell.

Beneath that is another level approximately 15 inches thick with few artifacts, and below that is the level where the initial construction occurred. This level, which was also occupied before the mound was built, also contained a variety of artifacts.

Testing was also done around the mound, and the few artifacts and features that were discovered suggest the area was of little purpose, and that the people who built and used the mound lived elsewhere.

More Excavations At Barton

NORTHEAST—Archaeologist Robert Wall of Towson University completed another season of fieldwork at the Barton site in western Maryland last summer. Directing a crew of Towson University students and members of the Archaeology Society of Maryland, Wall focused on groundtruthing anomalies found in a magnetometer survey.

Tim Horsley of the University of Michigan conducted the magnetometer survey in 2009, which identified several village-size palisade patterns north and south of a previously identified late prehistoric village palisade that is about 330 feet in diameter. Wall and his crew exposed linear palisade features by digging small trenches where the anomalies were found. Further ground-truthing of the magnetometer data is planned for 2011.

On another part of the site, the researchers exposed a portion of a Susquehannock house pattern dating to about a.d. 1600. They also found a linear trench feature nearby that could represent another structure or a section of a palisade surrounding the Susquehannock settlement.