FROM THE GROUND DOWN

ARCHEOLOGIST SNEAKS PEEKS AT CARDEN BOTTOMS

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

When Jami Lockhart is working, it might look like a TV crime scene investigator using ground-penetrating radar to scan for a body.

But his results never turn out quite like that, admitted the coordinator of computer services, GIS and archaeogeophysics at the Arkansas Archeological Survey. What Lockhart is more likely to find is a diff erence in how tightly dirt is compacted, perhaps indicating the floor of a long-vanished homestead, or the fire residue that indicates a hearth once warmed that home.

It’s a different kind of archeology, one that Lockhart came to from a different perspective. He has an undergraduate degree in urban and regional planning, a master’s degree in geography and a Ph.D. in environmental dynamics.

“I’ve always been interested in location,” he said.

The location Lockhart will discuss March 12 as part of Arkansas Archeology Month is Carden Bottoms, an alluvial flood plain in northeastern Yell County created by the Arkansas River and bounded by that river, Petit Jean Mountain and the Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge.

Lockhart’s work there started when George Sabo, an anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas, helped get a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study the location.

“The reason we know about it is that literally hundreds of vessels came off of this site in the 1920s and ’30s when local farmers found out those vessels were worth something in pretty hard times,” Lockhart explained.

M.R. Harrington, a pioneer in the field of archeology in Arkansas, visited there in the winter of 1924 and described a somewhat gruesome scene:

“Somehow the poor ‘renters’ - the tenant farmers - of the neighborhood had discovered the art of probing with a steel rod in the plowed fields for these unmarked graves, had learned that they frequently contained pottery, and had found that this pottery could be sold. A miniature gold-rush resulted, and before long nearly everyone in Carden Bottoms, from small boys of eight upward, had become a ‘pot-digger.’ As we approached the ridges, the little groups of diggers made a weird picture as they toiled in the mud, unmindful of drizzling rain and flurries of snow. Crops had been poor last year, money was scarce, and so they were (using) every moment of daylight. But it was sickening to an archeologist to see the skeletons chopped to pieces with hoes and dragged ruthlessly forth to be crushed under foot by the vandals - who were interested only in finding something to sell, caring nothing for the history of a vanished people.”

“We still didn’t know much about the people” when the current dig started about three years ago, Lockhart said. “That was our goal in this project.”

Lockhart’s work was finished before more traditional archeology started, he said. Using ground-penetrating radar and a variety of other sophisticated techniques, the team was able to make maps that told archeologists where to find a homestead “to within a couple of centimeters.” His work also helped define the “settlement pattern:” If a certain type of remote sensing signature proves to be a late prehistoric house, then there is a good chance that similar signatures are also houses, he explained.

Card en B o tto m s waslocated among several Native American populations, Lockhart said, and artifacts support interaction of those groups - Quapaw and Caddo, to name a couple - while also indicating that the people living there copied pottery and tools from those other cultures.

Artifacts such as an iron knife blade, glass beads and other trade items also indicate there might have beeninteraction with Europeans in the period known to archeologists as “Contact.”

“Have we found anything that says with certainty the French were there? No, but there are lots of indications.”

After the most recent dig in October, archeologists at the Arkansas Archeological Survey are still combing through what they brought back from Carden Bottoms. Science such as carbon datingof some artifacts will perhaps reveal when the community was abandoned, but Lockhart thinks it happened not long after that contact in the late 1600s.

Archeologists, on the other hand, are far from ready to abandon Carden Bottoms this time.

“It’s an extremely rich and important site,” Lockhart said. “We’ll be there for longterm research.”

Life, Pages 6 on 02/27/2013