Woodland Park II

 

Eric didn’t have to twist my arm to get me to walk that old road bed back through the trees, and as we walked, I began to recognize more and more of the landscape that had been so familiar to me so many years ago.  We passed a metal equipment shed that I couldn’t quite place, but then I began to talk as we walked, “Now there was an old house up there on that rise…and there should be pond out here to the right, and there would’ve been a field in front of it…”  My breath caught in my throat, for there it was, the pond, all choked around its edge with blackberry brambles and tall grasses.  And the field, yes, it was still there, only it was now edged with old bleachers, and looked as if it had been used (or unused, in this case) a long time ago as a practice field. 

As we walked into the openness of the field, I reoriented myself as to where our units were placed (fine units with straight walls and floors scraped so clean that you could easily photograph any features or post molds) and where our tents would have been set up by the pond, all the while, my eyes scanned the ground for evidence of fire cracked rock or debitage that should’ve been exposed over the years through natural erosion.  Although my eyes strained at every grass-free spot I saw, there was nothing that would indicate an excavation had ever taken place there.  And I was not about to dig anywhere to see what lay just beneath the surface.  I am a former contract archaeologist and that would be unethical, not to mention highly illegal in the state of Alabama.

Making our way around edge of the field, we saw the remnants of a small shed in the embrace of some saplings and some unidentifiable scrap metal. Not much else.  At that point we headed back towards a ditch that ran along the side of the equipment shed.  “I can’t believe there is nothing laying on top…no debitage, no nothing.  I just wish there was something…” And then I saw it sitting on top of a small mound of dirt, a small roughly knapped triangle.  “Got a bird point,” I said.  “We are probably the first people to hold this since its owner dropped it thousands of years ago…” Eric was incredulous, had to touch it to make sure it was real. We kept walking and looking.  Tiny bits of sand and grit tempered plain pottery, bits of sparkly quartz, some chert debris, a small slice of green stone.  Nothing that anyone else would’ve ever noticed, but something to an eye that was once trained to see such.  We were giddy.  I felt vindicated…why I needed that assurance, I’ll never know.  Eric rightly chalked it up to some form of existential validation.  We all need that sometimes.  Now, who to turn these things over to...

As the sun began its descent, we walked the old chert road back to the softball fields where our friends were warming up on the cyclocross course.   Strange to see so much of the modern world in such close proximity to the ancient.  I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed my old crew chief’s number to see if he and his wife Angie (a former archaeology crew mate) would like to join us for the evening (they live nearby).  He said they would love to, but they were in Mobile on a college visit for their daughter Jesse.  Could I believe she was old enough to be going to college?  No, I couldn’t.  Jessie was probably conceived on one of our last excavations as a crew together, the Dry Branch dig.  She shouldn’t be old enough for college.  Then Chris asked me if I had taken Eric back to the old dig site, and had we seen the blue hole…

Bird Point

 

 

( Upper L, in a circle) Quartz, green stone, bird point, debris, pottery.

 

And now for some photos from the 1991 dig:

Woodland Park Excavation 1991

The Pond

The Blue Hole

The Old Homestead.

Woodland Park Part I

Back in 1991, as a Jacksonville State University student, I helped excavate a Woodland Indian site near Anniston.  The area was doomed for modern recreation, to be turned into a sports complex.  It was only my second excavation, my first being the excavation of the old Davis Farm (now almost completely obscured by the boom of the Oxford area near I-20).  I was still learning what debitage and debris meant when it came to lithics, what naturally occurring tempers would have been used in ceramics of that area (sand, grit), and how to tell a mound from a regular old hill (I still struggle with that some times). 

For two full weeks that May, I spent Monday through Friday from eight in the morning till four in the late afternoon digging, sorting, and processing at that site which was located back through the woods in a field by a pond (the pond by which I camped for the first time in my life, waking up to the sound of my crew chief Chris Hill frying up his breakfast). There was an old two-story house with a barn close by, and a hauntingly beautiful blue hole within walking distance.  Two mischievous ponies with the names Timmy and Al (aka Evil) lived on the property and they made a point to behave sometimes in ways that would result in their being run off.

It was my first experience of digging a site that I knew was marked to fall under the bulldozer of progress.  Our field school represented the last chance to preserve the cultural artifacts that were left there upwards of three thousand years ago by prehistoric Native Americans.  In the end, the process of backfilling our meticulously excavated units was a painful closure.  We had removed as much as we could.  When we left at the end of June, I thought I’d never see the place again.  And I maybe wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for Bamacross.

Last weekend, Mellow Mushroom Racing hosted a two-day cyclocross race in Anniston.  It was part of the Bamacross series…and it was held at Woodland Park Softball Complex.  So, after going to my nephew’s skating party at Merry Go Round Skate (which is another story entirely, and involves me roller skating again for the first time in about thirty years), I headed over to Anniston.

Taking the old way that I used to drive back when I was a fledgling shovel bum, I was struck by how little had changed on those curvy county roads.  I could almost swear that the same skinny country boys were still driving the same late-model muscle cars just as fast as they did in the 90s, and the same old trailer park was still filled with the same washed out old trailers.  But the park…when I got to the entrance of Woodland Park, it was entirely different than it was when I last laid eyes on it.  Gone was the farm gate that I had to open, drive through, and then close to get onto the farm.  Gone was the chert drive that I had to drive real slow on lest I stirred up so much dust I couldn’t see where I was going nor from where I came.  In their place were beautifully landscaped grounds with a nicely paved road.   But, as Eric pointed out to me while I pouted, if I looked back behind the far left field, I could still see an old road bed that cut back into the trees…