Nisbet & Old Town: Piecing Together Catawba History (2015)

Undergraduate: Helin Park

Faculty Advisor: Steve Davis
Department: Anthropology

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The Catawba Project is a body of research that the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at UNC-Chapel Hill has cultivated since 2001, under excavations led by Dr. Steve Davis and Dr. Brett Riggs. This research encompasses excavations taken place in seven archaeological sites, including Nisbet and Old Town, which were excavated by UNC's 2014 archaeological field school. The goal of the 2014 field school was to start excavation at the Nisbet site, which was discovered in 2006, and to revisit the Old Town site, which was discovered in 2003, and had been previously excavated by the 2003 and 2009 field schools. This poster is based on my participation in the 5-week archaeological field school in the summer of 2014 and documents the students' process of learning first-hand the archaeological methods used by researchers to piece together the history of a past community through the artifacts and their contexts. Students learned to orient themselves to the field sites using historical knowledge about the area and became familiar with the pre-existing archaeological work on the sites. This knowledge guided the students' learning of how to investigate a site archaeologically and the techniques involved in level and feature excavations, including: flotation sampling, features and soil identification, troweling for photography and mapping, screening to recover artifacts, and recording and analyzing the data. This learning process culminated in the incorporation of new data into the pre-existing body of work in the Catawba Project.