2004 SCRAP Field School - Randolph, Jefferson and Berlin
by Laura Jefferson

There were bears. And there were scrapers. The 2004 field school was a rousing success.

Three sessions of two weeks each allowed us several changes of scene: salvage sifting at the Jefferson II site (27-CO-29), test pits at a new locus there, further exploration of the shores of Head Pond, and punctuated clear-cutting of the Potter Site (or so it seemed).

The base camp for all three sessions centered around Cold Brook Cabin, made available to us through the kindness of Coos County Democrat reporter Edith Tucker who persuaded here cousin, the owner, that renting to archaeologists would not be a bad thing. This 1922 camp in Randolph allowed us to enjoy the benefits of electricity, plumbing --supplemented by portapotties and a brook that provided supplementary bathing facilities, at least for Dylan Thornton (which may explain why his hair stood up), a full kitchen with a blender, and usually, phone service. Edith's husband Dan kept the grass short enough for us to see the fox and the hummingbirds from the porch. Meals were planned communally, and cooked and cleaned up by participants in the field school, most often without threats. We ate well.

The first week of the first session we continued an effort begun by SCRAP volunteers at the end of May: to wit - sifting piles of dirt each about the size of a dumptruck load left by some unanticipated work along a right-of-way through the Jefferson II site now owned by the Archaeological Conservancy. We had been slowed then by lumps of snow and ice, insulated by the layers of soil and sod. There were still frozen patches in late June. Otherwise, it was an ideal introduction to shifting and sifting dirt. People were able to learn to recognize flakes among the pebbles unimpeded by considerations of centimeters; but our delight in finding artifacts in our screens was tempered by the loss of their context.

The number of objects in one of the piles suggested an additional locus of cultural activity at the site, and test pits near the area of this pile confirmed it. Digging pits and recording levels soon put the ratio of time and effort to flakes revealed back somewhere more realistic.

The last morning of the week, we climbed Mt Jasper to visit the rhyolite vein where so many of the flakes originated. In the afternoon, the students learned how to wash and catalogue the finds. This also allowed the supervisors to recall how to instruct people and curate artifacts outside of the comforts of the Airport Road lab back in Concord.

Monday of the following week, students had a chance to help members of the US Forest service learn to recognize flakes exactly as they had, sifting dirt piles at Jefferson II. Adding eleven people to our crew allowed us to finish the pile we were working on.

The following day, we began the season's work at the Potter Site (27-CO-60) with a half-hour walk down to the beaver pond. Our happiness was significantly enhanced by Mr. Potter's thoughtfully hauling a huge amount of gear onto the site with his tractor. We started this site during the field school of 2003, when Jen Ort found a flake of Munsungun on the path everyone was walking toward somewhere theoretically more appropriate to ancient usage. When we first started digging here, there were fairly thick patches of undersized trees. We had begun to aerate them during Octoberfest of 2003, when we had found three channel flakes to strengthen our conclusion that Potter was a Paleoindian site. We re-established our grid from 2003 and extended it. This involved otherwise decent conservation-minded people going contra-Lorax with machetes and tape measures (the combat tape from Canada, made of braided steel wrapped in nylon and crimped every meter was particularly effective). Some trees were spared by the accident of growing centimeters off the line; others, only until Mr. Potter could arrive with his chainsaw. We hauled their bodies to the edge of the sandpit, hoping it would be more of an erosion barrier than a fire hazard. Suzanne Wall, a geologist from Lowell, Mass., joined us and wandered around the landforms surrounding the site and made us feel a bit better about the impenetrable stratigraphy. After the happy violence, we settled down to nostalgia for the good old productive days at Jefferson, as we found almost completely empty pits until Thursday.

It was not quite the last day of the first session, when Matt Krohn and and Dave Warren found a spurred endscraper, and then Gary Reis and Dylan Thornton found a midsection of a fluted point. The channel flakes and the spurred endscraper are diagnostic of a Paleoindian site, but fluted points arethe gold standard. Morale improved abruptly and on Friday we found another very small reworked fluted point. In the second session we finished our salvage work at Jefferson (it was now the 5th of July, and the ice was finally gone). Back at the Potter site, we extended the line west and cut down more trees. The weather, though not rainy and not really very warm, managed to become sultry and stultifying. Tom Mailhot and Linda Fuerderer were placed in a very small space, thickly surrounded by spindly trees. They felt oppressed, at least until they began finding flakes of Munsungun and the third fluted point of the field school. Their pit was finally declared finished some 110 cm below the surface, and they drew the profile with the help of a flashlight. Honest. Finding the point provided a good story for the party that night at the Tuckers' with the Potters, and a crew of trailworkers from the Randolph Mountain Club. The food was wonderful and no one looked askance at our needing to leave by dark to go to bed.

The following week, we were still trying to find the edges of the site. We decided to look around the area at the ridge of an esker. It provided a splendid outlook and on the lee side, some shelter, so we ran transects up the side of and along the top of the esker. The change in scenery was pleasant and the fresh air was very refreshing. No one actually fell off the very narrow (one to two meters wide) ridge. But from 20 centimeters down, the earth was full of melon-, mango-,and avocado-sized stones with no artifacts whatever. So we went back closer to the site.

We began to have misgivings about the grid, which were amply fulfilled as it turned out a dozen or so were somewhat misplaced. This was tempered by the fact that ALL of the fluted points were found in said misplaced pits. Management spent more time than we might have expected laying lines and cutting trees. We had tried to spare the forest before, but now sawdust came down like snow. Mr. Potter, possibly fearing that we would fill in the kettlehole, allowed us to build brush piles in the increasingly park-like (or bowling alley-ish) setting. You could see quite a long way down the lines on either side of the path. As the ground was cleared and the windfalls cut up, the diggers moved into the new grid like Pac-persons, munching up transects.

By the end of the second session, the bears whom the Potter family treasure were becoming used to people invading their feeding area every morning and afternoon. We waited for them to leave, which they did in their own time. The cub was particularly cuddly and cute, but we were still wary of omnivores that were much bigger than we were. Particularly the one Matt encountered about four meters from him on the last day of the fifth week.

The start of the third and last session meant that we took a few days off from the Potter Site to return to Head Pond, close to Mt. Jasper. After months of trying to locate the inheritors of the property where we had found so much Mt. Jasper rhyolite last year, Kurt Masters (local resident and long time SCRAP volunteer) had obtained their permission to continue digging. It was some comfort to find things again, though nothing was diagnostic. We were all impressed with the quartz crystal hammerstone, which sits warmly in the hand, and a big 12 cm unfinished rhyolite biface.

Returning to the Potter Site, we decided to sample a knoll near the site. Like the esker, it seemed to be a wonderful spot to settle or work in, and there was nothing there other than baby woodfrogs. We began to ponder a tribe of nomadic people with either compulsively neat tendencies or very effective sanctions against leaving any trace behind. We returned to plumbing the edges of our original area. The last day of Week 5 brought us a dozen Girl Scouts, under the guidance of Karl Roenke and Karen Mack from the US Forest Service. One of their pits proved fairly fertile, too, and we found more flakes (over 500) and finally an unusually large rhyolite scraper, some 8 cm across. A moose and her calf also appeared in the beaver pond but declined to pose for photographs.

The final week of the field school continued the run of good weather and a moderate level of finds. Deb Boisvert, long suffering wife of our project leader, joined us for several days, and Aaron Brondyke of the Trust for Public Lands. This private non-profit corporation was actively engaged in a campaign to acquire the parcel wherein the site lay for permanent conservation (This was achieved at the end of the summer). Dylan closed his run of luck by finding, in the farthest-flung test pit, a Munsungun scraper that looked more like a wood chisel than anything we had seen in archaeology (subsequent analysis agreed). Now the land surrounding and including the Potter Site has been preserved from development and no one is likely to assert that Paleoindian sites in New Hampshire are small, few, or far between. {content}