Artifacts discovered

BY SUSAN GIBBS Record Reporter
Published: April 9, 2008

Stanardsville’s Patti Vogt says when she was as a kid, she never found anything special in the back of her parent’s house on Spotswood Trail, as she played on the banks of Swift Run Stream.

Vogt, now assistant to the County administrator and deputy clerk to Greene’s Board of Supervisors, recalls: “We played in the stream, built dams and played kids’ games, but we never dug around back there.”

These days a team of archaeologists is doing plenty of digging. The team—from gai consultants, a firm that provides consulting services in both prehistoric and historic archaeology – has made a big discovery in the back of what is still the home of Vogt’s parents, Ken and Shirley McDaniel.

“We’re finding multiple artifacts,” says Senior Archaeologist Terry Newell. “Several hundred are dated from 4,000 to 11,500 years BP.”(BP, in archaeologist talk, means “before present,” or years old.)

The archaeological dig stems from the construction of new pipeline in the area by Columbia Gas Transmission. It will carry natural gas from the Hardy Storage facility in West Virginia to markets in Charlottesville and points north.

The pipeline – known as the Hardy Transmission Project (the Project) – is to run along a little more than five miles in the County and will cross Long Run and Swift Run perennial streams on its way to its terminus at Greene’s Bickers Compressor Station.

Kelly Merritt, manager of communications and community relations for the Project, says, “We knew the site was there,” speaking of the location of artifacts on the McDaniel’s property.  He said the “original plan” was to “directionally drill on 2,800 feet of pipeline segment, in order to avoid disturbing the site and the Swift Run Stream.”

But last September, when the Project was drilling under the Stream, an active flow of a water and sodium bentonite was released into the stream. (The mixture is a common component of drilling mud used to curtail drilling fluid invasion.)

Plans to drill under the site were cancelled.

And “company officials determined that rerouting the new pipeline segment around the site was not feasible for safety reasons,” Merritt explains. “We then turned to our only alternative – to build the pipeline using traditional open cut technology.”

That change in plans required a detailed archaeological dig.

That’s when several hundred artifacts were found.

In fact, the archaeological team has found more than 12,000 artifacts to date in the McDaniel back yard. Based on those, Newell says: “We’ve discovered another culture, which is of a hunter-gatherer period.”

A hunter-gatherer society consists of people who, for the most part, pluck edible plants and animals from the wild. They forage and hunt without farming or domesticating animals.

Hunting and gathering is thought to have been the only means by which human beings survived for more than two million years.

The artifacts found in the McDaniel back yard include: arrowheads; stone tools; fragments of what was “probably … some sort of vessel; quartz points; and, 10 anomalies … that are possible cultural features and not artifacts themselves,” Newell says.

As with most archaeological projects, Newell and his team have had to follow strict procedures. They began with a survey, combing the area for features or artifacts visible on the surface.

Once the survey was done, excavation began.

Excavation techniques require that the precise horizontal – and sometimes vertical—locations of objects, their features and their relationship to nearby objects be recorded for the analysis. The analysis will allow scientists to deduce what artifacts and features were likely used together and which may be from different time periods.

That’s why Newell’s team is removing the soil in layers of five centimeters—or two inches.

“We’re removing the (first layer of soil) using trowels,” Newell says. “We’re getting arrowheads (there).”

Once an area is exposed, it is usually hand-cleaned with trowels or hoes to ensure that all features are apparent. When that has been done on the McDaniel property, “we’ll photograph it and record its location,” Newell explains.

And then all components of all the artifacts – even the chips and flakes—will be sent to gai consultants for analysis where “it could take months to analyze everything,” according to Newell.

When the analysis is complete, “We will make the information we learn from the study available to Native American groups and anyone who is interested,” Merritt says.

And the McDaniels can lay claim to the artifacts.

But for now, says Vogt, “My dad wants to know why (the archaeologists) can’t just dig the whole (site) up at once and be done with it.”

She adds lightly, “All my mom really knows about what’s going on is that (the archaeologists) are digging up her yard.”