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THE INDIAN CREEK EXCAVATIONS Irving Rouse in the Spring of 1969, Fred Olsen Invited Me to Antigua to Examine the Newly

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THE INDIAN CREEK EXCAVATIONS Irving Rouse in the Spring of 1969, Fred Olsen Invited Me to Antigua to Examine the Newly THE INDIAN CREEK EXCAVATIONS Irving Rouse In the spring of 1969, Fred Olsen invited me to Antigua to examine the newly- discovered Indian Creek site. It surpassed my expectations in size, depth, and because it appeared to offer the best possibility for reconstructing the local ceramic sequence-- a sequence I was interested in obtaining so as to fill a gap in our knowledge of Caribbean chronology between the Greater Antilles, where I had previously worked, and the south­ ern half of the Lesser Antilles, where the most recent chronological research has taken place. Accordingly, I welcomed Olsen' s proposal that I dig the site, but stipulated that I would first have to complete two projects already under way. While neither of these projects has yet been completed, Olsen persuaded me to proceed with the Indian Creek excavations during late May, June, and early July, 1973, in order to make the preliminary results available at the Fifth International Congress for the Study of the Pre-Columbian Cultures of the Lesser Antilles, which was to be held in Antigua in late July. It was understood that preparation of the final report on the excavations will have to wait until I have fulfilled my previous commitments. My interest in the local chronology led me to formulate a two-part program: (1) excavations under my direction at Indian Creek, in order to work out the ceramic part of the chronology; and (2) research by Dave Davis, a graduate student, in the more recently discovered non-ceramic sites, in an effort to reconstruct the preceramic part of the chronology (this volume, pp. 65-71). I am indebted to the National Science Foun­ dation of the U.S.A. for awarding me a grant in support of this program (No. GS-37970), and to the Antigua Archaeological Society for generously matching that grant. Halfway through the Indian Creek excavations, I became ill and was confined to the hospital for the rest of my stay in Antigua. Nevertheless, the excavations continued according to my plan under the direction of Olsen and of Dr. E. J. H. Boerstra, govern­ ment archeologist in Aruba, N. A. , who had come to observe the research. I am in­ debted to Olsen and his daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Kyburg, for processing the specimens as they came from the excavations, and to Boestra for supervising the excavations after I became sick and for making the trench profiles. The map of the site (Fig. 1) has been prepared by Davis with assistance from Boestra. Finally, I wish to thank Desmond Ni­ cholson for handling the logistics of the program so competently, and the government of Antigua for allowing us to use the former N. A. S.A. tracking station as a laboratory. The Site Indian Creek is situated in the southeastern corner of Antigua, between English Harbour and Marmora Bay. When Charles A. Hoffman, Jr. (1963) surveyed the island in I96I, he located traces of Indian occupation on the rocky shore at the mouth of the creek. The site under discussion here lies about a half mile up the creek, separated from the shore by an encircling ring of hills. Thus it differs from a common or late settlement pattern among the ceramic Indians in the Lesser Antilles, which is for the sites to be located on the shore, just back of a sandy beach. This was one of the site' s attractions; its settlement pattern resembles that of the earliest ceramic sites in the 166 ROUSE 167 Greater Antilles, such as Hacienda Grande in Puerto Rico (Alegría 1965:247-8), and as a result it seemed likely to yield the beginning of the ceramic sequence on Antigua, which had hitherto been unknown. The site lies on a gentle slope just west of Indian Creek. From the air, it has the appearance of an oval ring, colored grey against a dark background. On the ground, it can be seen that the grey color is due to a concentration of shell refuse in a series of middens extending around the periphery of an oval area measuring approximately 283 by 165 m. (Fig. 1). The refuse in the remainder of the oval area appears to be sparse and shallow, and one wonders whether part or all of it may have been carried there by the plow, to which the site has been subjected in recent years. At present, the middens are simply areas of greater concentration and depth of refuse. Originally, I counted six of them, but our excavations revealed that in one case I had been misled by a natural depression in the site. This depression (indicated in Fig. 1 by a ticked line) falsely seemed to form the uphill side of a midden, with its other side formed by the downward slope of the hill. The three valid middens on the uphill side of the site (Fig. 1, 1-2, 4) are con­ siderably smaller and shallower than the two on the downhill side (Fig. 1, 5-6). It was evident from two gullies eroded in the southernmost of the uphill middens (on either side of Excavation 1 in Fig. 1) that its height was only about 50 cm. A gully in the larger of the two downhill middens (just north of Excavation 6 in Fig. 1), revealed that midden to be about 2 m. high. Various people have collected artifacts from the gullies, and their finds indicate that the downhill middens are considerably richer than the uphill middens. The gentle slope on which the site is situated narrows to the south of the refuse deposit to a point where Indian Creek passes through a gap in the hills on its way to the sea. The slope broadens to the north, and it is here that Olsen found the possible ball court (not shown in Fig. 1) he discusses elsewhere in this volume (pp. 11-12). Plan of Excavation To achieve maximum results from an excavation, one must design it in terms of one' s objectives. For example, if I had intended to investigate the structures built by the Indian Creek inhabitants, I would have planned the kind of research Boestra car­ ried out in Aruba (this volume, pp. 13-20). I would have made two large excavations, one in the refuse area in order to recover traces of the Indian houses, hearths, storage pits, etc. , and the other in the area where Olsen has identified a ball court to search for further traces of such a structure. In each case, I would first have stripped off the topsoil that has been disturbed by plowing, and in the habitation area I would also have removed the underlying refuse, in order to lay bare the subsoil and search it for dis- colorations indicative of human activity. If, instead, my aim had been to obtain the best possible examples of the local artifacts, I would have concentrated on the two downhill middens, because they are the richest and because their depth offers greater possibili­ ties of preservation than in the shallower middens on the uphill side of the site. My aims, however, were chronological rather than descriptive. I intended to distinguish ceramic complexes, establish their sequence, and study the variations with­ in and among them. In order best to achieve these objectives, I chose to dig six rela- 168 THE INDIAN CREEK EXCAVATIONS tively small trenches, one in each midden (including the falsely identified midden on the west side of the site (Fig. 1, 3). Each trench was to be divided into four sections, 2 m. square, and each section was to be divided vertically into arbitrary 25-cm. levels. My excavation units therefore measured 2 m. on a side and 25 cm. deep, a size which ex­ perience has shown to be the most efficient for the purpose of distinguishing ceramic complexes and studying their variation. In any archeological or paleontological fieldwork, no matter what the objectives, one should be careful to design the excavations so that they test one' s assumptions about the deposition of the remains under study. My use of 25-cm. levels was based upon the assumption that the Indian Creek refuse had been deposited gradually and con­ tinuously, so that the depth of the remains beneath the surface is a function of the pass­ age of time. I chose to arrange the excavation units in linear trenches in order to test this assumption. I anticipated that the profiles of the trenches would reveal any irregu­ larities of deposition, whether these have resulted from erosion by natural agencies, from gaps in the occupation of a particular part of the site, or from disturbance of the deposit by burial or some other kind of cultural activity. The aim of chronological research is to work with undisturbed refuse, where the process of deposition has been continuous and regular. Any evidence of disturbance or irregularity of deposition in the walls of a trench indicate that its contents are not suitable for use in such research. This, of course, is one reason for digging a number of trenches in a site when studying its chronology. One can then select the trenches which show the most regular depsoition of refuse and which are therefore most suitable for chronological study. Another reason for digging multiple trenches is to test the possibility that the refuse in one part of a site may have been deposited at a different time than the refuse in another part of the site. In planning the excavations at Indian Creek, I was faced with a choice between two alternative hypotheses: 1. All five of the Indian Creek middens might have been deposited at the same time; for example, they might all have been occupied by contemporaneous households.
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