Unearthing the Past: Local archaeologist details project, calls for help

Chris Judge is an instructor of archaeology and anthropology at USC Lancaster.By Frances Parrish
parrishf@mytjnow.com

Students now have an opportunity “to reach out and touch the past.” After all, archeaology is not just digging up bones. It’s also about solving the mystery of how people lived in the past.  

Just imagine unearthing a spoon that was a wedding gift to Elizabeth Kimbrough in the early 18th century or the scissors of a midwife in the floor of a cabin or a key or a coin with Lady Liberty on it or even the gravesite of descendents of the original Jamestown slaves.  

These are the mysteries that Chris Judge, co-director of Johannes Kolb Site and his team are unraveling.  

October is Archeology Month and to celebrate Chris Judge came to Winthrop University to speak about his archeological dig site.  

Judge represents the USC Lancaster faction of the dig site team that is working on the Johaness Kolb site. The Kolb site is located in the Great Pee Dee Heritage Preserve in Darlington County South Carolina. 

Fifteen years have been spent working on the site, but they only actually dig for two weeks out of the year.  The rest of the year is spent washing and sorting through their treasures and trying to reconstruct a life from each time period with their findings.  

Despite Judge’s passion for archeology now, he started out as an Economics major in college, and as he said, “I walked in the back door backwards.”  He soon switched to an Archeology major because according to his advisor he should decide what to major in based on what he wanted to be when he was ten years old, which was an archeologist.   

“I did not pick the Kolb site, but rather it picked me,” Judge said.  A man came to the South Carolina Natural Resource office and said that he found a site that could have some historical potential when he was logging the land.  The man had found pottery shards that after analyzed proved to be nearly 4,000 years old.  He did research on the site and when the team took the job, he funded it and has ever since.  

 The site has been occupied for roughly 13,000 years. In the years that Judge has worked on the site, the team has found nearly a quarter of a million artifacts. To begin with, Native Americans lived on the site, then the Germans in 1737. Then, a slave village was there in the 1830s, and then during the First World War, loggers lived on the land.   

“The most interesting things we have found on the site are giant storage pits,” Judge said.  The pits were found in a 4-meter square and were made of sand and had collapsed, but the layer of muscle shells to close off the pits had changed the pH in the soil preserving bones of animals. 

They were also used to store acorns and fish in the fall, and when they collapsed, they become garbage pits.  From this they are able to reconstruct a diet for each of the groups of people that lived on the site in the different time periods.  

They have concluded based on evidence that the diet of the people was mainly a wild diet like acorns, hickory nuts, persimmons and other seeds and some animals.  In this block, they also found lots of arrowheads and evidence of a daub house with post holes.   

“Our big goal is to interpret human culture in the Pee Dee area,” Judge said.  They have evidence of people on the land from the Ice Age to 1970. Because of how little they dig during the year, it will take 25 years to acquire a 17% sample of the site.  

One particular settler that the team was interested in was German immigrant, Johannes Kolb.  He immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1707 and lived there for 20 years. Their goal was to find Kolb’s house on the land.  They used topographical maps to determine where a house might sit, like on the high dry areas in the sandy soil near the pine trees.  Kolb had a land of grant of 600 acres in 1737.

“Nature is chaotic, so we plot a grid of ten meter squares across the site,” Judge said.  He also described the excavation process of digging certain sized blocks and sample blocks and dating artifacts.  

 One such dating method used in the sandy soils is called Optical Stimulating Luminesance (OSL) dating, because it is hard to find carbon modern charcoal in the soil. A tube is filled with sand and then cut in the middle, and a scientist can tell when the last time sunlight hit the sand, and read the decay.   However, it is a very expensive process, and the team is still trying to raise enough money to have it done even though they have pulled a sample.

In one four meter block, the team was mystified when they found gnawed bones away from the hearth of the fire, bones near the hearth and some bones charred by a fire.  Based on a study in 1978, by Lewis Binford, the caribou hunters had this same eating style.  They would roast their meat over the fire and throw their bones in the fire. Some bones missed the fire and some were thrown to their dogs away from the fire. 

The team has also found artifacts from the late woodland period, which was 800-1000 years ago. These include a reconstructed pot and turtle shell.  The shell was burnt, and it is speculated that it was used as a bowl for soup that the people put in the fire to heat up or to cook maygrass.  

A bow and arrow, which were introduced about 2,000 years ago, was also unearthed along with a stone gorget which showed status among people.  In the 10,000 year level they have found multiple tools like a scraper, a spear point and an abrader to work spear shafts.

Judge did not just discuss arrowheads and dirt, but also about the cultural history during the geologic ages.  During the Hanover, or the medieval warm period (536AD-1350AD), cultures began harvesting and cultivating grains. There is evidence that the world wide temperature change influenced the cultures to adapt and turn to cultivation because of the temperature warming.  

Around a thousand years ago in the Woodland period, people began to bury their dead under mounds. However, the Kolb site resisted the new way of life. 

In one ten meter square a flexed fetal male skeleton and a bundled female skeleton probably wrapped in deer skin and sitting on a couple pots were found.  The male was about 40-50 years old, and he was buried before rigor mortis had set in. They classified it as a historic burial.  

During that time period, children were buried in pots, so the team cat-scanned the pots to see if a third body could be found. However, they did not find a child.

The ostology was analyzed and the skeletons had certain features that were only associated with Asian and Native Americans, but the mitochondrial DNA was African.  

The team concluded that a slave from Jamestown and a Native American must have been the parents of the bodies and that the skeletons were brother and sister.  Judge believes this could be a big breakthrough with the project, but more testing needs to be done.

School groups come visit the site to learn about archeology.  “Archeology is mute,” Judge said. He believes these visits are helpful because people can really understand what is going on when they see the site and the artifacts. 

In addition to visiting the site, Judge asks for volunteers to help with the actual excavation. Students can volunteer for the next dig taking place March 5th – 16th in 2012. 

Anyone can come, age and experience do not matter. There is also a volunteer lab in Columbia and the metal artifacts go to Camden to stop the rusting process.  

For more information about volunteering, contact judge@sc.edu.  

For more information on the Johannes Kolb Site visit http://38da75.com.