HITTING AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL JACKPOT

Archaeologists excavate deeply buried Early Archaic occupations in a 8,500-square-foot block at the James Farnsley site. The block is covered by a large portable tent that allowed work to proceed year-round.

Hitting an Archaeological

Jackpot

Caesars’s plan to build an elaborate casino in Indiana has resulted in an elaborate archaeological project. Having invested years of work, archaeologists have already received a huge payoff, and there’s more to come.

BY MARIA BRADEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN FITZGERALD

Along the Ohio River in southern Indiana, amid the simple farmhouses and cabins, is a suggestion of ancient Rome. More than 2,000 years after Caesar, in a show of military force, crossed the Rubicon, Caesars, the gambling establishment, has crossed the Ohio, extending its empire to this unlikely place. And, as it turns out, what’s good for gambling is great for archaeology. As a 200,000square-foot white marble pavilion crowned with Roman urns and a statue of Julius Caesar is being constructed above ground, a wealth of artifacts from older cultures has been discovered below.

The archaeologists who surveyed the area where the pavilion is being built figured the initial assessment might take three weeks. But when artifacts started popping out of the ground during preliminary trenching, they realized they were onto something big.

“We knew then there was lots of work ahead,” says Russ Stafford, an Indiana State University anthropology professor who coordinated the excavation, which comprised four different sites.

Indeed, three years were spent on preliminary evaluation and site testing, then another three years were devoted to an intensive, year-round excavation. This effort, known as the Caesars Archaeological Project, has been called one of the most significant archaeological endeavors in the Midwest. The excavation phase was completed last fall and now archaeologists hope to spend four to five more years in the lab, analyzing artifacts and data.

“You look at Indiana and obviously you don’t see pyramids or Mesoamerican city-states and step pyramids,” says state archaeologist Rick Jones, “but look under the ground and you’ll see… a lot of these things are unique in the world.”

At one site, archaeologists unearthed a 10,000-plusyear-old workshop where tools were made that may have been one of Indiana’s first factories. They also found an Early Archaic dump loaded with stone debris and bits of charcoal. A huge number of artifacts were also found, along with ancient hearths and fire pits.

These findings have led archaeologists to conclude that Native Americans came back to this place along the river year after year, generation after generation, for more than 9,000 years.

“There’s really nothing like this,” says Stafford. “It was intensely occupied.”

Archaeologists had a rare opportunity to excavate undisturbed areas and to recover layer upon layer of artifacts in their original context, which presented clear evidence of successive occupations. Their oldest discoveries, which include a hearth and several tools, date back more than 11,000 years.

“There are not many places you can go in the eastern United States where you can get a sequence like that,” Stafford says.

(Above) The Caesars pavilion now covers stratified prehistoric occupations, some of which were buried nearly 10 feet below the surface.

(Left) Construction of a 500-room hotel proceeds as archaeologists continue work at the James Farnsley site.

A Challenging Excavation

These discoveries came to light because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers required a preliminary archaeological assessment as part of the permitting process for riverboat docking facilities on the Ohio. The dock was the first phase of what was to become Caesars Indiana, a 234-acre gambling and entertainment complex near Louisville, Kentucky. When archaeologists arrived in 1995, the fertile

Project director Russ Stafford looks on as a track hoe removes overburden from the lower Early Archaic occupations, some of which were buried more than 16 feet below the surface.

floodplain looked much the way it probably did hundreds of years ago, bordered by the broad river on one side and rocky bluffs covered with hickory and oak trees on the other. Most of the land was undeveloped and in pasture. In recent years the land was used to graze horses; before that it was farmed.

It’s not unusual for farmers on the floodplain to plow up occasional artifacts, but when the archaeologists dug more than 100 trenches at the site of the proposed docking facility and elsewhere on the property, they were stunned by the sheer quantity of what turned up. Needing a crew large enough to handle the work, Stafford posted job openings on the Internet and hired more than 80 archaeologists from all over the country.

After test excavations of two-by-twometer blocks were conducted, the four sites, totaling about 44 acres, were declared eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Major excavation began in 1998.

The casino’s developers were champing at the bit to move ahead with their project, creating a sense of urgency. Staying just ahead of the bulldozers, the archaeologists worked year-round, missing only one or two weeks in three years. Huge white vinyl tents, almost large enough to cover a football field, were used to shelter workers and protect the site. They were leased at a monthly cost of about $15,000 each. But archaeologists still had to contend with Mother Nature. There were tense moments during severe thunderstorms when strong winds buffeted the tents and lightning crackled overhead. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed the steamy banks of the Ohio during Indiana’s hot, humid summers. Winters were brutal; archaeologists and field technicians bundled up and huddled around propane heaters, and they layered the ground with insulation to keep it from freezing solid.

“We took some lessons from firefighters,” says Stafford, “and developed a system to drain pumps and hoses each day to prevent freeze-ups.”

Things weren’t much easier in early spring, when the ground turned muddy and the river swelled due to rains and melted snow. In 1999, the Ohio rose over its banks and flooded one of the excavations. Equipment floated away.

Union problems, OSHA inspections, and government regulations caused administrative headaches and shut down the project more than once.

“Just about anything that could have happened did,” says Stafford.

As quickly as the archaeologists completed excavations on each of the sites, the construction workers moved in, backfilled, paved, and began building portions of the casino complex. At times, only a few yards and a hastily erected fence separated the archaeologists from the construction workers.

(Above) The Caesars Archaeological Project consists of four sites. Each site has several different occupations at different depths, as shown above.

(Left) An archaeologist lays out solid soil cores extracted with a hydraulic probe. The soil will be examined in the laboratory to help determine the geological context of the buried Early Archaic occupations.

An Archaeological Layer Cake

Usually, the older the culture, the less information is available because evidence of one culture or time period gets mixed up with remains from subsequent cultures. Over the course of thousands of years there is plenty of “additional activity to mess it up,” says Richard Jefferies, a specialist in the Archaic period of the Ohio River Valley and chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Kentucky.

But this place is more like a layer cake than a stew, so archaeologists are able to distinguish among different occupations and their time periods. Jefferies explains that hunter-gatherers camped on the Ohio River bottomland, which was periodically flooded. The river deposited soil and sediment over the remains of their camps, a cyclical occurrence that continued for generations. These alluvial deposits—like icing on a layer cake—buffered different occupations, such as the Thebes and Kirk and Early and Middle Woodland people, from each other, preserving the integrity of all.

Archaeologists excavated vast areas during the Caesars project—one area covered more than 43,000 square feet, another 8,700—and they recovered substantial amounts of material in context along with charcoal to date it.

Various stone points and a drill recovered from the Kirk occupation at the James Farnsley site.

“Since we opened up large areas, we can look at community patterns—how [a particular] occupation was organized compared to earlier and later [occupations],” Stafford says. “Some excavations cover as much land, but they rarely go so deep. We had the opportunity to do lots of excavation in deeply buried areas. That’s the reason we’ve learned so much.”

At one of the sites, known as James Farnsley, more than 15,000 artifacts, including 1,000 points from the Early Archaic period, were recovered. A hearth and a couple of points were found more than 18 feet below the surface.

“That’s just unheard of,” says Stafford. “This was a busy place.”

By comparison, a typical Kirk-site excavation might yield only a dozen points, and 50 to 100 points would be plentiful.

“We’ve found incredible stuff here,” says JoAnne Young, an archaeologist who worked on the project for three years. “It’s fun. You find something new every day.”

Besides tools, points, and flakes, the archaeologists found fire-cracked rocks, red stains in the soil, and bits of charcoal that indicated fires had been built there thousands of years ago. The buried charcoal helped them radiocarbon date the Kirk occupation to approximately 7500 B.C.

Little is known about the prehistoric peoples who roamed the Southeast and Midwest hunting and gathering food during the early Archaic period, roughly 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. There weren’t many people, and they are believed to have lived in small groups. It is difficult to find their sites, many of which are buried in river floodplains. One of the excavation’s most puzzling and exciting discoveries was a prehistoric dump. The dump and the quantity of Kirk tools and points found there raise important questions about the peoples of the Archaic period, who are generally thought to have been nomadic. How does one account for all the material left at the site if people were moving around? Why didn’t they take their tools with them?

Stafford speculates it may have been a place where several bands congregated regularly for trade and ceremonies before moving on, but he adds the evidence has to be thoroughly studied before these questions can be answered.

Why did these people come back time and again for thousands of years? For one thing, they knew it was rich in natural resources.

“Cultural groups in general are very aware of their environment,” says Jones. “If people are making a living and trying to survive, they know the environment pretty well.”

Raw materials such as chert, a flint-like stone used for making tools, were in plentiful supply in the surrounding hills. Because they were near the river, a major transportation route, prehistoric people would have found it easy to obtain the prized Wyandotte chert, which was easier to fashion into tools, from river bluffs downstream. The river also provided abundant food and water for hunter-gatherers. Small game and deer lived in the heavily treed hills, and nuts and berries would have been easy to collect. Later, as Native Americans began to practice agriculture, they may have come to the area and stayed because the fertile floodplain was a good place to raise crops.

Indiana’s First Factory?

One of the excavation’s more remarkable discoveries has been dubbed the Thebes workshop. Dating back to the Early Archaic period, it may have been one of Indiana’s first factories, a place where people roughed out tools from different kinds of chert. Field workers found flakes

Field technicians Greg Marsh and JoAnne Young excavate in the lower Early Archaic zone at the James Farnsley site.

with multiple scars, blocks of chert, and roughed-out tools, but no scrapers, adzes, or other finished tools—suggesting that hunters took the rough tools and refined them later at different places as they needed them.

“It’s sort of a Swiss Army knife idea,” says Steve Mocas, supervisor of the Thebes workshop excavation and a member of the Indiana State University team. “[The rough tool] can be made into anything you want it to be.”

Thebes people, like the Kirk people of roughly the same era, are thought to have been wide ranging nomads, and their stone tools have been plowed up by farmers in the Midwest before. But this is the first Thebes “workshop” to have been excavated and only the fourth Thebes site of any kind to have been excavated in the Midwest.

“It’s incomparable,” Mocas says.

Out of the Trenches, Into the Lab

As the gambling resort nears completion, there’s little evidence of the extensive archaeological work. The sevendeck riverboat casino is in operation, and the large pavilion looms on the site where Woodland period dwellings were discovered. Despite having to tolerate lengthy delays, reconfigure the project layout, pay more than $15 million for the archaeological excavation and subsequent lab work, and abide by environmental restrictions, the developers, for the most part, maintained a cordial relationship with the archaeologists.

“They might be costing me a lot of money,” says Caesars Indiana project director Dennis Beaudrie, “but they’re doing their job.”

Developers have talked of setting up a small museum in the pavilion that would depict the excavation, or of putting up a commemorative plaque in the hotel. Another five sites on Caesars’s property totaling about 30 acres were identified during archaeologists’ preliminary trenching. These sites will be preserved and protected. They were never excavated because Caesars did not plan to build on them.

The excavation done, stacks of Rubbermaid cartons containing individually bagged and precisely labeled artifacts have been moved to Indiana State University, along with more than 50 thick loose-leaf notebooks of field notes. Artifacts in hand, the archaeologists will begin digging for the story, hoping the laboratory analysis will answer the many questions raised by their discoveries. Awaiting study are more than 1,000 points in colors ranging from red to white and gray to glossy black, as well as tools once used for cutting, piercing, scraping, and drilling.

“The payoff will be the analysis and published reports,” Stafford says. “With this,” he adds, holding out his hands to indicate the abundance of artifacts and field notes, “we should be able to put together a pretty good story. ”

MARIA BRADEN is a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky. Her article “Trafficking in Treasures” appeared in the Winter 19992000 issue of American Archaeology.