This is a blog about the goings-on at the Lycoming College archaeological field school in 2014. It's part of a class called "Introduction to American Field Archaeology." As part of this class, we go out and excavate American archaeological sites to get practical field experience in how archaeology and cultural research management are done in this country. During this season, we actually focused on 2 different sites.
The first one is the site of the first Evangelical Church and printing house in the United States. It is in New Berlin, Pennsylvania on the corner of Plum St. and Water St. Dr. John Piper, Dean Emeritus of Lycoming College, is part of the Evangelical Church Historical Society and asked our class to come out and find the foundations of the original church. The historical society is planning a landscaping project to turn the site into a historical park which would damage the evidence. We were asked to find the corners of the church so that markers could be placed on them. This was not a full-scale excavation, but a project where we dug various test pits at regular intervals to try and locate specific walls and features. I'll be talking more about that later when I go through the daily work at the site.
The second site is the one we spent more time working on. It's known as the Glunk site (it's official site number is 36LY0345). It has both historic and prehistoric artifacts, although we are more concerned with the prehistoric ones in this case. It is likely an outlying area of Otstonwakin, a very large and important Native American settlement that sat on the intersection of Loyalsock Creek and the Susquehanna River. The Susquehannock culture (hence the name of the river) was the primary group that inhabited the site. We are excavating on Paul Glunk's land (hence the site name). The site is run by North Central Chapter 8, a Pennsylvania archaeological society (you can check out their blog here: http://pennarchaeology.blogspot.com/). We are doing a full-on excavation there with squares, stratigraphy, and all that good stuff.
So, yeah... I'm going to be talking about going to those sites and archaeologizing (that's definitely a legitimate word, I made it up at least a week ago and made sure all of its tenses are pronounceable).
The first one is the site of the first Evangelical Church and printing house in the United States. It is in New Berlin, Pennsylvania on the corner of Plum St. and Water St. Dr. John Piper, Dean Emeritus of Lycoming College, is part of the Evangelical Church Historical Society and asked our class to come out and find the foundations of the original church. The historical society is planning a landscaping project to turn the site into a historical park which would damage the evidence. We were asked to find the corners of the church so that markers could be placed on them. This was not a full-scale excavation, but a project where we dug various test pits at regular intervals to try and locate specific walls and features. I'll be talking more about that later when I go through the daily work at the site.
The second site is the one we spent more time working on. It's known as the Glunk site (it's official site number is 36LY0345). It has both historic and prehistoric artifacts, although we are more concerned with the prehistoric ones in this case. It is likely an outlying area of Otstonwakin, a very large and important Native American settlement that sat on the intersection of Loyalsock Creek and the Susquehanna River. The Susquehannock culture (hence the name of the river) was the primary group that inhabited the site. We are excavating on Paul Glunk's land (hence the site name). The site is run by North Central Chapter 8, a Pennsylvania archaeological society (you can check out their blog here: http://pennarchaeology.blogspot.com/). We are doing a full-on excavation there with squares, stratigraphy, and all that good stuff.
So, yeah... I'm going to be talking about going to those sites and archaeologizing (that's definitely a legitimate word, I made it up at least a week ago and made sure all of its tenses are pronounceable).
