Podcast 141: Archaeological Field School at Kisatchie National Forest

The Preservation Technology Podcast Episode 141

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Erlend Johnson, from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab, and Matt Helmer, Forest Archaeologist for Kisatchie National Forest, about archaeological explorations at Kisatchie National Forest.

The Preservation Technology Podcast is a series about the people and projects that bring innovation to preservation. Read articles based on episodes, listen, or subscribe. This podcast is produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).

Archaeological Sites in Kisatchie National Forest

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst:  Hi, my name is Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst and I'm here with: 

Erlend Johnson: Erlend Johnson, I'm the project director of this project for the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab. 

Matt Helmer: And I'm Matt Helmer, I'm the Forest Archaeologist for Kisatchie National Forest and an affiliate professor with Louisiana State University. 

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Thank you all for letting us come and visit the field school today. I guess you could start off by telling us a little bit about this site and why there's a field school happening here. 

Erlend Johnson:  OK, so there are a couple of sites that we're at right now. They were first identified about 20 years ago in 2003, by a phase one survey by Pan American Associates. They did a number of shovel tests, and this site was considered to be especially relevant because they were coming up with a large area and large densities of artifacts. They were finding as many as 500 flakes in a 50 by 50 centimeter unit, and they were finding a variety of points. There's a possible base of a Clovis, there's San Patrice points, and there are a number of earlier points as well. So, there's a whole spectrum of remains all the way from the historic period to possibly Paleoindian, and there are three large concentrations. This was deemed by the Forest Service to be one of the more relevant sites to study. That’s why we came here and why we decided to do a field school here. I don't know if Matt has any other things to add to that.

Archaeology after Hurricanes

Student workers and Tad Britt at the Kisatchie Field School Site in Deridder, Louisiana.

NPS, NCPTT

Matt Helmer: This particular site that we're working on was part of a large hurricane relief project that we initiated after hurricanes Laura and Delta significantly impacted western Louisiana, almost flattening the entire district here. The upturned trees were everywhere, and this district has thousands of archaeological sites, and the archaeological sites were particularly hard hit as trees fall down and basically the root balls pull up archaeological material to the surface and rip archaeological contexts out. We basically put together a relief request in association with all of our other resource areas for the Forest Service, like salvage timber and all of our other resources. We put some of the money that we received from Congress towards both archaeological salvage that we're doing here as well as doing archaeological testing on some of our impacted sites to see if they're eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or not.

This site immediately, as Erlend mentioned, stood out to us because it's about 100 acres in size, combined. It’s broken up into two sides, but it's really one very large site. We’re on the Drakes Creek drainage here, it basically follows a big floodplain. We're on a high point just above that, just a few miles from the Whiskey Chitto River. It's a very important location that would have been a great place to set up a camp or possibly have a village site. We have the entire sequence of occupation, as Erlend mentioned, of the peopling of the Americas, potentially from 13,000 years ago and the Ice Age, all the way through up to the present day. That’s why we chose this particular site. In addition to the hurricane damage here, there is a significant amount of looting. It's illegal to excavate on public lands. This particular site was heavily looted because of, I assume, the materials that the looters were finding. In fact, we convicted a looter on this site a couple of years ago. Combined between the storm damage and the looting, we really thought we've got to get some information and some salvage out of this archaeological site and get some attention towards it for preservation before it's completely lost.

Why Post Molds are still Exciting!

Erlend Johnson: What we did today was we brought one last unit down to the level where the post molds were. We trowel cleaned everything, we sprayed it down, we took some pictures, we did a drawing, and what we're starting to do now is we're starting to excavate below the level of the post molds. We're going to move our way back and we're going to bisect see their shapes and all that. We're also just curious to see how much further down this goes. At least from what we're seeing here, this is Late Archaic possibly, maybe Woodlands. Even in one of the shovel tests close to here, there was a scraper that looked to be maybe Early Archaic or older. In phase one, in this area, they came up with a San Patrice point, which is Paleoindian to Early Archaic. They came up with another Paleoindian to Early Archaic point as well. I can't remember that off the top of my head. There might be some old stuff further down. That's what we're waiting to see.

Matt Helmer: Post molds doesn't sound very exciting, but in this part of Louisiana, we're very far from the Red River Valley, the Mississippi River Valley, where you typically have larger, more permanent village-type settlements. Most of, if not all the archaeological digs that have happened in this part of western Louisiana, have not come up with evidence of more permanent occupation. It all looks like small, ephemeral campsites where people are just coming through (short-term campsites) and then they leave. We don't have a lot of evidence for intensive occupation. One of the significances of a post mold is that shows us that there was at least some sort of permanent structure here that would lend us to believe that this could have been a more permanent, a hamlet, a village site, something like that. This would be the first of its kind that far out of the Mississippi River Valley or the Red River Valley. So that's what we're really trying to better understand, here is the intensity of occupation as well as the time depth. You know the chronology of occupation, too.

Opportunities for Students

Student workers sifting through soil in Kisatchie National Forest, Deridder, Louisiana.

NPS, NCPTT

Erlend Johnson: So, at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, we've given students a lot of opportunities to work with NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) and do phase one shovel testing. A number of the people that are working here with us now have participated in that sort of research. There have been other field schools in the past. A couple of years ago, there was a field school with the Coushatta (Tribe of Louisiana). This is a pretty unique opportunity to do large horizontal excavations. They’ve taken part and learned all the different steps from setting out units, to screening, identifying material, to how to dig with a shovel, how to trowel clean. As we've gone along, we've integrated them into work, and they've gotten opportunities to try their hand at different things. This is a great opportunity for people to learn more about Louisiana archaeology, one of the few. Evergreen (Field School), of course, is another very different sort of opportunity that's going on right now for that.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Will there be opportunities like this in the future? 

Matt Helmer: We've excavated with this project less than 1% of this site. I would foresee whether for an academic investigation, or Forest Service work down the line, potentially. We are moving to a second phase of this particular project with the agreement that we have with UL Lafayette, and we're going to be moving to another area that was heavily impacted by the hurricane on the east side of our forest. Where there's potentially new mound sites that are undiscovered as well as a series of Course Creek village sites. Yeah, there is certainly more to be done here as sometimes you go home with more questions than answers, but I certainly hope that this will ignite a renewed interest in this area. Typically, we're doing Section 106 compliance. We’re doing surveys to identify sites and avoid them. We're not really investing in actually studying the sites that that we manage and steward. One of the great things about this project for me has been to see the positive reception that we've received from Forest Service leadership and others that they really see, “Oh, wow. You guys aren't just out there digging for little pieces of flakes.” You know, they don't really understand what we do, so this has been a great opportunity, not only to train students in the next generation of Louisiana archaeologists, but for us to show all of the other folks that work in the Forest Service that this is the significance of the resources that we manage. These are folks that we work with every day—in silviculture, fire, biology, botany—for them to better understand what we do [is rewarding]. Hopefully in the future, there will be more support for projects like this from Land Management agencies.

Keeping Up with the Project

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: How can we keep up with the progress of this project? 

Matt Helmer: Well, after this UL Lafayette is going to do a laboratory portion of their field school. Students will also have an opportunity to see the full circle from the excavation portion of the project and the design, all the way through to the laboratory analysis. Dr. Rees (of UL Public Archaeology Lab) and Dr. Johnson will both be putting together a technical report based on this work. Fortunately, the Society for American Archaeology is meeting in New Orleans this April, which is timely for us. We hope to be able to have students present posters. We'll have talks and presentations as you know, it's still going to be pretty preliminary. It takes a long time for us to get from excavation, to analysis, to write up, to really make sense of what we're looking at here. That would be the big the next big event, an SAA poster session potentially, or working into the LAS (Louisiana Archaeological Society) session that we talked about, and then after the technical report, we'll look into publications that we can publish based on this work, potentially including a book. We've got a lot of ideas in the works. One of the things that I'd like to do is increase what we call interpretation. So [this would be] something along some of our hiking trails on this district or recreation sites where we can put some of the information out here for the public. This is all public land, and a lot of people are really interested in the archaeology of this area. We hope to be able to put some informational panels and things like that out on some of our trails so that people know the history of the place that they're coming to recreate in.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Awesome. Thank you all for talking with me. And I wish you all luck with the rest of the work here. 

Matt Helmer: Yeah. Thank you.

Erlend Johnson: Thank you. 

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Can't wait to hear more. 

Read other Preservation Technology Podcast articles or learn more about the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.