OLD SITE, NEW INFORMATION

Old Site,

In 1939 and 1940, WPA workers excavated a large mound within Annis Village. The mound was built in three stages; the top of the initial stage is being cleared of overlying soil. The men worked around numerous pillars that are evidence of a subsequent stage of construction.

Annis Village, a Mississippian site in western Kentucky, was first excavated more than 60 years ago. Archaeologists believe the current excavation of this site will inform them about the social structure of small, isolated sites like Annis. This excavation is also highlighting the differences between archaeological methodology and technology then and now.

New Information

Archaeologists Scott Hammerstedt (left) and George Milner undertook excavations in 2002 and 2003 to build on the WPA archaeologists’ earlier work. Hammerstedt and Milner think the WPA did excellent work at Annis Village.

By Nancy S. Grant

Awide band of wild vegetation forms a buffer between the freshly planted, perfect rows of modern farm fields and the curving banks of Kentucky’s Green River. The water, a rich chocolate brown from unusually heavy rains in late spring, flows high. Sunlight filtering through the soaring treetops forms dapples of shade and sun. In a small clearing crisscrossed with gridlines and an expanding network of excavation units in the clayey soil, Penn State faculty and students work during a field school.

Working in the sticky heat in rural Butler County, they dig quietly and steadily in seclusion at the Mississippian site of Annis Village.

During the Late Prehistoric Period, this site, which was removed from the larger population centers of that time, was a thriving settlement, a Mississippian village consisting of an earthen platform mound, a small sand mound, palisades, and more than a dozen structures. The settlements of the Mississippian period scattered across the southern Midwest and Southeast shared many similarities, but were politically autonomous and economically self-sufficient.

Archaeologists’ knowledge of the social order of Mississippians is to a large extent defined by the investigations conducted at large ceremonial sites such as Cahokia, Etowah, and Moundville. Comparatively little is known about the societies of the many smaller mound sites such as Annis.

This imbalance of knowledge prompted Penn State archaeologist George Milner, graduate students Scott Hammerstedt and Thomas Nielsen, and their crew of field school students to excavate Annis Village.

“Annis Village is an unusual site because it is a mound center which is, as far as we know, very distant from any other such mound center,” Milner says. “The relationship between Annis and surrounding smaller sites, such as isolated houses, is not complicated by overlapping and unrelated occupations. A great deal of work has been conducted in the Green River area for a long time, starting in the early 20th century with Clarence B. Moore, who dug at several mound sites.” He adds, “We’re reasonably sure that if other Mississippian mound sites existed nearby they’d have been detected by now.”

Another important consideration in choosing the site was the work that had been done here over 60 years ago by the Work Projects Administration (WPA) during the Depression. Milner notes that most WPA workers were untrained, and that they used less sophisticated methodology and technology than today’s. For example, radiocarbon dating was not available then. As a result, the WPA work done throughout the country has sometimes been dismissed by contemporary archaeologists.

But he adds that the WPA archaeology projects in Kentucky, under the leadership of William S. Webb and, at Annis, Ralph Brown, were of high quality. A professor of physics at the University of Kentucky, Webb also had a keen interest in anthropology. In 1931 Webb cofounded the Webb Museum of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

“The major interest of archaeologists back in the 1930s was getting the basic outline, a time and space framework of what happened when and where, and they were good at that,” Milner says. “They were very good at identifying the types of stone tools, pottery, and houses that were used.”

Brown, in particular, excelled in mapmaking, keeping page after page of drawings and detailed grids, taking blackand-white photos, and documenting the work at every stage of progress. “The voluminous records Brown kept and his careful attention to preserving the artifacts make the Annis

Village an outstanding choice for us to reinvestigate today,” Milner adds.

THE WPA WORKED AT ANNIS VILLAGE DURING THE FALL and winter of 1939-40. Brown and his crew mapped and excavated the site (showing the locations of 16 structures in the village and three additional structures in the mound), and recovered about 65,000 artifacts including pottery and other items. This collection is housed at the Webb Museum of Anthropology.

Based on the analysis of ceramics found at the site, it was thought that the village’s principal occupation occurred sometime between approximately A.D. 1100 and1400. The big mound was rebuilt over a period of time with three successive construction episodes consisting of ever-larger earthen platforms. Some of the village houses had been rebuilt over a period of time, as shown by repaired walls. And at least three sequential palisades enclosed the site. “The physical arrangement of the palisades and structures indicate a fortified village,” Milner says. “These structures indicate that the people who lived here made an investment of time and effort to build and maintain their houses, and this points to continued, long-term occupation of the site.” Other findings, such as one-and-a-half-inch-long maize cobs and some storage pits, indicate that the people of Annis Village were agriculturists who lived at the site year-round for several consecutive years, he adds.

“The Mississippian period in general in this area of Kentucky is poorly understood,” Hammerstedt points out. Milner adds, “The nearest other Mississippian period sites are actually quite distant from Annis Village, places such as Angel Mound in southern Indiana, Kincaid in southern Illinois, and Cahokia in East St. Louis. Although there are many similarities among those sites, there were also many differences, and Annis Village is much smaller than those sites.”

They note that Annis Village differs from more heavily populated Mississippian sites, some of which were built and rebuilt over long periods of time. Nothing from a later time period was ever superimposed over Annis Village. “Because of its distance from other centers,” Hammerstedt says,

“Annis Village is a nice snapshot in time and there’s unlikely to be as much confusion as at other sites.

“The WPA workers did not excavate the entire site, leaving much intact that we can dig now to improve our

Much of an excavator’s time is spent taking meticulous notes, as is done here by Pete Wisniewski, another of the field school students. understanding,” Hammerstedt says. In order to find the unexcavated portion of this site, Milner’s crew, armed with the WPA’s map of Annis, had to find the excavated area. In 2002 Milner, Hammerstedt, and a small volunteer crew first visited the site with the objective of identifying at least one place where the WPA dug. After two and a half weeks of searching that included digging test holes along the rusty, vine-encrusted remnants of a fence, they succeeded in finding a pit dug by the Mississippians. “We knew the WPA excavated this pit up to the fence line, but left the other half of the pit intact,” Hammerstedt explains. “We were able to find the exact line they used to bisect the feature.” Milner picks up the story from there. “That gave us one fixed point, but theoretically their entire grid could spin

The WPA crew excavated the large mound in its entirety. A worker in the right of the picture is holding a stadia rod, which was used to measure depth. Though most of the workers were untrained, they did a good job of exposing large areas.

around it like a record on a spindle. We knew, more or less, their angle of north within their grid system, and had a general notion of the alignment of their grid. As we worked last year we discovered a few other partially excavated features we could more or less identify on the original maps.”

Later, Hammerstedt spent many weeks feeding data from those original maps into a computer to create a digital map of the site. “This year we established a grid system that seemed to work best with what we’d found last year,” Milner says as he points to the WPA-excavated pit’s location in the left section of the map.

The students learn how to measure and map using the same centuries-old surveying techniques available to the WPA workers (using a transit which relies on simple optics), then repeated the process using a modern laser transit. In order to fully understand the principles of surveying, students this summer were taught to use both kinds of instruments when laying out a grid system for excavation.

“We spent a lot of effort on work that was specifically designed to reconcile the larger WPA dig with the smaller area where we are digging this season,” Milner says. “The WPA workers were really good at opening up large expanses of ground, excavating structures, and collecting large things. But we have finer controls on our excavations and use techniques that were developed since those guys finished. Because of the large-scale work the WPA did, we are able to put our smaller excavations into the context of the overall village already mapped. If we didn’t have their work to refer to, we’d just be digging in a small area without knowing how it fits in with a larger village.”

Recognizing old features is just part of this year’s field school; the students must learn to differentiate soil types and colors, and to distinguish damage by animals and tree roots from evidence of human activities as they dig in previously unexplored parts of the site. The students have learned to recognize patterns of soil color and texture in freshly exposed earth. Comparing a trowelful of soil from the site to the samples in a Munsell soil chart—another tool invented long after the WPA excavation—allows for a precise identification of color, texture, and other properties, which helps researchers determine if the soil has been affected by human or natural causes. As Milner observes, edges of old pits that were once sharp and easy to distinguish visually are now partly obscured after a long period of disturbances by insects and other animals, as well as plant roots (he likens it to looking at an Impressionist painting).

THE WPA MAPS INDICATED TWO PALISADES, THE OUTERMOST lying farthest from the river, the inner palisade closer to the banks. Milner and his crew determined that the inner palisade extended all the way to the present riverbank, where centuries of erosion have

Living With Archaeology

Doris (she prefers her last name not be used) remembers when WPA project supervisor Ralph Brown came to live with her family in the fall of 1939. “At that time there were only gravel and dirt roads in all of Butler County,” Doris recalls,“and the nearest hotel was 30 miles away,so Mr. Brown paid room and board to my parents so he could be near the site. The other workers hired for the WPA project were local men who lived with their own families. “I was eight years old,an only child who'd already skipped a grade or two in school,fairly impish,and very curious. Ralph Brown was fascinating. I remember his personality and his persona—that

Doris holds a picture of herself as a girl with her grandparents. In 2004, Doris’s family will have owned the farm for 100 years.

was more meaningful to me than what he was doing. “I went down to the dig area occasionally,” she says. “I remember seeing the men down in the excavations with little brushes,carefully removing bits of soil from whatever they'd uncovered. I became fascinated with the pottery shards. Although there really was no place for Mr. Brown to work,I do remember that sometimes he'd bring pottery shards into the house and he'd attempt to reconstruct small objects they'd found. They didn't find much whole material,just bits and pieces, although I do remember seeing a skeleton or two in place as they unearthed them.” Doris left home to enroll in college; the farm remained in her father's care until she began inheriting parts of the land in the mid-1970s. “Someone in our extended family has lived here throughout 100 years,” Doris notes. “My husband and I consider land as a resource,not a commodity. “As an adult,I am much more interested in archaeology now that my perspective has broadened,” Doris says. “My husband and I are delighted that people who know how to properly excavate and evaluate the site are working on it now.” —Nancy S. Grant

Thomas Nielsen, a Penn State graduate student from Denmark, excavates with a trowel. A screen used to capture small artifacts can be seen in the background. Clay human figurines were among the many artifacts found during the WPA excavation. These faces, part of larger artifacts, came from both the mound and village.

long since destroyed its original termination point. The most important find of the season is a deep trench, which they believe to be the base of a third palisade line that is even closer to the river.

“The WPA workers found such a short segment of this feature elsewhere they didn’t know what it was,” Milner says. “We believe it was the earliest palisade because it was covered by an enlargement of the mound. The second palisade was, in turn, abandoned and covered by a few houses when the outermost, and last, wall was built.

“We’ve found remains of charcoal from the posts of the newly found innermost palisade that we can use to date its construction,” he continues. “We’ve also found material we can send to the lab from the second palisade, the one the WPA knew about. With carbon dating from these major features we can begin to nail down the dates of site occupation.”

Thinking of the Depression-era focus on excavating, Hammerstedt says, “Today it’s almost impossible to correctly pursue archaeology without having a multidisciplinary approach, bringing in people with different areas of expertise and having a research team who can handle all this stuff.” In addition to selecting the best samples for radiocarbon dating, he’ll send plant material to a paleoethnobotanist and animal bones to a faunal specialist.

Hammerstedt expects to have the results from these analyses in less than a year. The plant and bone analysis should reveal information about the diet of the villagers; he and Milner are particularly curious to see if there are any variations in diet among high and low status households. Milner adds, “We are also actively analyzing the earlier material from the WPA dig simultaneously with our new finds. This tandem approach is yet another distinctive feature of our work at this site.”

He and Hammerstedt expect to return next season, when they might conduct a systematic survey both farther upstream and downstream from Annis Village. If evidence of other villages is found, that information could be studied so as to give archaeologists a better picture of Mississippian life in the region.

“We excavate artifacts and animal bones, carbonized plants, and remnants of houses, but we’re not really interested in those things simply as objects,” Milner says, explaining some of the changes in archaeology between the WPA’s era and now. “What we’re really interested in today is what those things can tell us about how humans actually lived in the past. Taking the next step, we’re asking the question ‘How did their societies change over time?’”

As different as archaeology then and now might be, Milner, an admirer of the WPA’s work, is happy to take the time and effort to integrate his dig with theirs. There were few field schools back then. The WPA workers learned their techniques on the fly and often under difficult circumstances. “It was really tough compared to what we have today,” he observes. “If you look at things from the perspective of what they were interested in, they did a good job.”

NANCY S. GRANT is a freelance writer and a columnist for Kentucky Living magazine.

For more information about the Annis Village excavation,visit the Web site www.anthro.psu.edu/fieldschool.html