Up Close and Personal with Magic

When we arrived at the site on week seven, we were faced with a huge hole filled with water and what looked like chunks of elephant brain. We were all excited to see how much Group A, or Team Danger, had exposed and if we were going to be able to get Magic’s skull out that week. Team Danger had done a good job uncovering most of the skull, a few vertebrae and the beginning of what looks like a scapula.

After bailing the water out, we all got down to digging to try to reach the bottom of the elephant skull and uncover more of the rest of the elephant skeleton. After a few hours of digging flat on our stomach, with most of our faces bright red from keeping our heads upside down into the pit, we realized our arms weren’t long enough anymore and we had to get into the pit to get work done. So those who could fit squeezed in next to the skull and continued digging.

At this time, it had started raining, some of us (I’m thinking of Ashley here, who, for some reason, always seems to have it worse than all of us - remember field walking through the meters tall reeds?) were knee deep in a mix of mud, clay and rotting elephant flesh and had smelled so much of the methane coming from the decaying elephant that we couldn’t distinguish one reeking odor from the rest. Don’t get me wrong; we would not have traded it for anything else! We quickly realized, however, that to be able to work on the rest of the skeleton, we either had to get the skull out or expand the area excavation for logistical reasons and practical excavation (Glassow, 2005). The strategy of exposure of a burial, according to Glassow, is similar to the exposure of any object or cluster but differs in the way that the “knowledge of the human skeleton often guides” where we will expand next. In this case, knowledge of the elephant skeleton shows that expansion should continue to the North and the East of the elephant skull.

Because of lack of time, we continued digging down into the pit and started recording data with the total station. The total station “allows the three-dimensional position of an object to be recorded in one quick operation” (Glassow 2005). Each exposed vertebrae, the lower mandible, and the skull were recorded into the total station. This sort of area does not require the use of a grid because, according to Glassow, when the objects of interest are “relatively large and easy to discern during excavation” their point providence can be recorded once they are exposed. I think it is safe to say that elephant bones fit in the ‘relatively large’ category.

The last half hour of our afternoon was spent trying to get pieces of the skeleton out of the pit to bring back to the lab. The skull was too heavy and big to get out but Thomas and Elise were able, after carefully rotating it every way possible, to get the lower mandible out. Next step? The vertebras. This required the skull to be lifted lightly in order to dislodge them. Not an easy task considering the size and weight of it but a successful one.

Lastly, I just wanted to include a picture of what we uncovered of Magic in relation to the size of an average African elephant (the dimensions are not accurate). Knowing that Magic died at 30 years old, and that African male elephants in captivity mature faster than others…let’s hope it stays warm until December!

Glassow, M.A. 2005. Excavation. In: Maschner, H.D.G., Chippindale, C. (Eds.), Handbook of Archaeological Methods. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, pp. 133-75.

" Magic (Majeska, Majestica), an African Bush elephant at Hemmingford Parc Safari ." Elephants Encyclopedia - facts and information about elephants since 1995. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2011.

"African Elephant Loxodonta africana - Appearance/Morphology: Measurement and Weight (Literature Reports)." Wildpro Disclaimer. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2011..

Digging down through the layers: Stratigraphy at Parc Safari

Week Three for Team Danger was pretty exciting. After locating Magic's remains in a test pit during our second excavation, we arrived at the field eager to see exactly what Group B had been able to uncover. We were not disappointed.

After several minutes of bailing foul smelling water out of the elephant pit, we went to work on the task of freeing the skull from the ground. Our first goal of the day was to locate the midpoint of the cranium. After about an hour without success, we started being concerned if we would be able to remove the skull the next week if we hadn't even hit the half way mark yet! Colin was eventually able to expose it, but time was running out.

While the midpoint debacle was unfolding, other team members were hard at work expanding the pit and getting as much dirt out of there as possible. Anna and Manu expanded the pit by approximately 50cm so we could uncover the mandible and tusks. Success! As the day was coming to an end, we knew we were not even close to getting the skull ready to be removed, but we had made a considerable amount of progress. By 4:15, most of the team hit a wall of lethargy. Snack time had been scarified because of excitement, and because of time constraints. If there is one lesson to be learned, it is to never skip snack time.

As we get deeper into the excavation (pun intended,) we're starting to learn more about other methodological aspects of archaeology. For one, we're looking more closely at stratigraphy. In methodology classes, the common example of stratigraphy is a cross-section of a million years of dirt. The illistrations always show stone tools, ritual artifacts, and several storage pits intruding very clearly into another strata. Our site has none of these exciting features, but stratigraphy can come in very handy. For example, a thick, heavy clay layer that appears to be uninterupted means that we will not find any graves below it. The largest and most common strata we have found is a mixed, dark soil. This can mean that the area has been disturbed from the process of opening and closing graves. The third layer is organic trash that was buried by the zoo. There appear to have been large and small deposits of this material, which are an instant indication that there has been human activity. However, we have learned that organic trash is not an automatic indication of a grave.

Layers are more than just an indication of activity, they can tell you a lot about an area - if you're willing to listen. Roskams talks about the kinds of relationships that strata can have. For one, they can relate to their immediate neighbor and indicate changes that happened when one layer ends and the next one starts. Secondly, what he calls the "true stratigraphic relationship," is the chronological order(Roskams, 155).This can show the history of what has occurred and more importantly in what order. The final kind of relationship, is how layers correlate. A layer my have been interrupted or two layers may almost be the exact same, but are not physically connected. Looking at these connections can be informative and crucial to understanding a site. However, as Roskams notes, it can be problematic to make correlations without 100% proof they are connected.

In our excavation, we're making connections between patches of organic waste or black soil we find in a persue of graves. The organic waste may have been depositied at different times, but it has the same meaning to us whenever we find it; people dug a hole and deposited it, which mean they may have buried an animal too. Moreover, the clay layer indicates to us that we can probably stop digging there. At the back of Magic's head, a uniform clay area is becoming more exposed on the side wall. Colin has noted this could indicated the extremity of grave, but it could also just be a large clay deposit marbled into the other kinds of soil.

Furthermore, when considering stratigraphy, we need to include or exclude certain factors. In human archaeology, there is sometimes an exclusion of any non-human finds (Roskams, 180). In our case, we are doing the opposite. Mountain Dew cans, two-by-fours, and pottery shards are tossed aside to excavate the fauna!

Lastly, Roskams, highlights the importance of the "grave complex". Why was the individual buried that why and why? As we continue the excavation, we will learn more about the orientation of Magic's body and other factors, but for now we do know that h/she was in a mass grave because we have found a small scapula near the skull. Why is it there? The plot thickens, and only more excavation will tell us the answers!

The Pits

As I, giddy with excitement, boarded the Archaeological Minivan of Science, I realized that I had no idea what to expect of actual fieldwork. I had extrapolated fantastic visions of spelunking inside the ribcage of Magic (the flesh-laden elephant corps circa 1980’s), but what was in store was more exciting than my wildest dreams.

We were there to dig pits.

When our car ride of Anth-jokes and squabbling over music concluded we went for a quick tour through the site, where I had my first real experience with an archaeological pit. Pushing through the tall grass, I came about 10 centimeters from stepping in Magic’s excavation pit from last year; now flooded with stagnant dead-elephant water.

Regardless of the humor that stems from a digging up a dead elephant, archaeological pits deserve a second thought. The reason for their existence is to allow archaeologists to catch a glimpse of a different time. Whether it’s a Neanderthal burial, or a field of dead zoo-animals, the basic principal remains the same: Digging up the past also destroys it, so you’d better get as much information out as possible. This thought is perturbing to me, since it’s too easy to imagine myself blowing the most important find of a site.

Fortunately, in reality things are almost never that glum. When we got to dig our test pits (TPs) we were quickly instructed in all of the proper archaeological methods. Recording the local of an artifact when you find it, and not (albeit hard to resist) immediately yanking it out of the ground to clutch feverously, is just one of many methods we learned.

TPs are simple shovel-dug holes in the ground that allow you to see under the soil you’re standing on, yet they are more complicated than something so simple should ever be. White and King (2007:113) say that “[TPs] are small, square to round excavations generally measuring 40 to 50 cm (1.3 to 1.6 ft) across, with maximum depth depending on local geomorphology and the likely depth of cultural deposits”. Getting down to a depth where “cultural deposits” are likely seemed easy, until “local geomorphology” got in the way. It was often in the form of giant rocks that screeched loudly when hit with your shovel, and got stuck in the mud when you tried to remove them. Occasionally “local geomorphology” took the shape of thick roots that crisscrossed your TP, which made digging much more arduous than originally expected. Just being able to dig down a meter can be physically challenging, as it forced some of us to lie down and continue to dig while at 90º. The most challenging problem I encountered was a tightly buried burlap sack I found at about half the desired depth of my TP. This sack, although technically part of the “cultural deposits”, was immovable and ended up completely thwarting the path of my shovel. No matter how hard I tried it was impossible to puncture, or even dig around this frustration.

As I sweated with annoyance at this sack, my brain began to freeze up. How could a “cultural deposit” in my pit be hindering my attempts at finding something important? In a flash, the futility of trying to understand archaeology strictly in terms of “local geomorphology” and “cultural deposits” dawned on me. You can’t just read a book and then traipse onto the field knowing exactly what to do. Archaeology isn’t astrophysics or theoretical mathematics, no; it’s real science. You have to be able to adapt your theories in a pinch, stay scientific in the most difficult situations, and be able to evaluate whether or not to continue to struggle with a burlap sack. I’m glad to have learned this early on so I can later squeeze as much information as possible out of instructional archaeology texts, and use that information as a frame, not as rule.

It’s amazing what you can learn from a pit.

Works Cited:

White, G. and T. King

2007. The Archaeological Survey Manual. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.