Wet site archaeology, Barbara A. Purdy (Editor), 1988, Telford Press (Cald-Well, NJ), 338 pp., $39.50 (Paperbound)
✍ Scribed by John A. Gifford
- Book ID
- 102225922
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1991
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 224 KB
- Volume
- 6
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0883-6353
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Book Reviews
Wet Site Archaeology, Barbara A. Purdy (Editor), 1988, Telford Press (Caldwell, NJ), 338 pp., $39.50 (paperbound).
Wet sites, waterlogged sites, wetlands sites, drowned terrestrial sites, inundated sites, saturated sites: all of these are approximate synonyms for a category not generally distinguished from others until the past decade. This itself might a t first appear strange, because thousands of archaeological sites along lakes, rivers, and coasts are amphibious, with both dry and wet parts, but as the papers in this volume demonstrate, there is good reason for making the distinction.
This publication, the proceedings of the NEH-sponsored "International Conference on Wet Site Archaeology" (Gainesville, Florida, 12-14 December 1986) contains 20 chapters; almost all are revised versions of conference presentations. Half are survey or excavation reports about sites connected by their wetness and wealth oforganic artifacts, and the other half are either more general reviews or more specific treatments of some aspect of a particular site.
Florida is a fitting venue for such a conference, as it was at the famous Key Marco site in Collier County that F. H. Cushing, at the end of the 19th century, recovered some of the first New World examples of well-preserved prehistoric wood carvings from a "classic" wet site. (Cushing's work at Key Marco is summarized in the chapter by M. S. Gilliland.) Unfortunately this was long before the advent of polyethylene glycol (PEG) treatment and other special conservation procedures for waterlogged organic materials, so that most of these unique specimens disintegrated almost as soon as Cushing recovered them, much to his dismay.
Wet sites are distinguishable on the basis of their organic material preservation, which, as many of the reports in this volume demonstrate, often is far better than in average "dryland" sites where cultural materials are sporadically immersed in oxygenated interstitial water. An empirical distinction between wet site archaeology and underwater archaeology rests on whether artificial breathing apparatus (SCUBA) is needed for the project: no in the former case, yes in the latter (although hip boots and waders are recommended). By this criterion, though, several of the papers in the volume (those by Egolff, Ruppe, Garrison, and Stickel) fall more into the realm of underwater archaeology.
Although we now have the technical expertise to conserve most ofthe fragile materials that wet sites produce (as D. Grattan summarizes in his chapter) two major problems still hamper their investigation: the relatively high cost of excavating wet sites (due mainly to the large numbers of fragile objects that might be recovered-and then preserved-from a difficult working environment), and secondly, the fact that wet sites are a rapidly disappearing cultural resource. R. Daugherty, excavator of t,he well-known Ozette site, addresses the problems and responsibilities of wet site excavation in terms of adequate funding and long-term commitment to conservation and curation.
That substantially more detailed reconstruction of prehistoric cultural activities such as subsistence and trade, as well as paleoenvironments, can come from wet sites is