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Hi everyone! This is Ranger Cailey coming to you from my very own kitchen
because I'm staying at home right now like I hope you are too.
So, while we're all learning to adjust to this very strange new way of life
we're all living, we at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park thought that
we would try to bring a bit of our park into your home
by sharing some of our favorite park activities.
So today, we're gonna start with my favorite activity
peanut butter and jelly archaeology.
So, there are some pretty great perks to this activity.
Number one, you get to eat what you make at the end of it.
Number two, you get to put some really weird stuff
on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
And number three, you get to learn about one of the coolest fields in the world,
which is archaeology.
So before we get going
we should probably talk about what archaeology is.
So, if you want to take a minute,
pause the video and talk about what you think archaeology is,
and maybe drop it in the comments below
so we can see what you think.
So, archaeology is
when people leave things behind, they tend to get broken.
What we study is essentially people's trash.
So, we learn a lot from what people leave behind,
like the kind of art that they make,
the kind of food that they ate,
and even the sort of tools
that they used to create
everything in their lives, right.
So, today we're going to learn about
how archaeological sites are formed,
and these sites are formed through, really,
two major forces.
There are natural forces like erosion and flooding,
which we'll talk about a little bit more as we build our site.
And there are cultural forces too
which is where people leave things behind.
They build structures, and they break things,
and they have parties, so, today we are going to build
our very own archaeological site
out of peanut butter and jelly and a few other things.
So before we get started let's take a look
at the materials we'll need to build our site.
Most of these materials are things you can find in your pantry.
But, I know times are a little bit weird right now,
so if you're missing any of these materials,
just get creative and substitute them
with whatever you can think of.
So, the main things you're going to need,
first of all you're going to need two plates.
You're going to need one to put all of your materials on,
and one to build your sight on.
You'll need a knife.
Safety first, don't get any sharp knives, so let's use table knives
Probably a spoon might be helpful
to scoop out your peanut butter.
And, you're going to need a straw.
Now, I don't have a big enough straw
to do what we usually do,
so I'm going to use just a regular-sized straw.
We'll see how that works.
if you have a really big straw,
you can use that, instead of just a normal straw.
As far as the food materials go,
we're going to need a pretty good scoop of peanut butter.
A pretty good scoop of jelly.
And, again, your choice crunchy or smooth peanut butter,
strawberry or grape jelly.
We'll also need a handful of raisins,
some sprinkles and some crushed up M&M's or some kind of hard candy
You can substitute any of these things,
particularly if you have a peanut allergy,
please DON'T use peanut butter for this!
The last, and possibly most important thing we'll need,
are three slices of bread.
Can't make a sandwich without bread, right?
So let's go ahead and dive in.
To begin, we're going to start with using our imagination.
We're going to start with our first piece of bread,
and we're going to imagine that this piece of bread
represents a flood plain somewhere in southern Ohio.
Through time, a flood comes along,
as will happen on a flood plain.
And when it floods, it leaves behind a layer
of mud and dirt and rocks
which we'll represent with our peanut butter.
So go ahead and spread your peanut butter out on that first piece of bread.
Thousands of years go by, and a group of Archaic people
find this beautiful flood plain and decide
that this is a really good place to camp.
So they're going to set up camp,
and what do you do when you set up a camp?
You build a fire.
So we're going to represent our fire using our raisins and sprinkles.
You'll arrange your raisins in a circle,
and then use the sprinkles to represent the rocks and charcoal
that will be in the middle of that fire that gets left behind.
Over time, we have more erosion.
Pieces of rock and sediment get left behind,
and build up and up and up,
over top of this Archaic site.
We're gonna represent this with our second piece of bread.
So then another couple thousand years go by,
and another group of people, this time the Hopewell,
the people who built the sites that we protect,
find this site and they think this is a really good place
to build some structures and to do some pottery making.
The first thing they do is they build their structure.
To represent this, they built structures using posts
which leave holes in the ground,
which we call post holes.
So we're going to take our straw,
depending on what size of straw you have,
and we're going to make just little circles in the bread,
in the shape of some kind of structure.
Probably a rectangle or a square,
but you can get creative it's totally up to you.
We're going to represent our pieces of pottery
with broken up M&M's.
Like happens in our current times,
sometimes things get broken,
and you need to throw them away.
Well, the Hopewell don't have a trashcan like we do,
so they need somewhere else to dump their trash.
They're gonna dig just little trash pits
kind of away from their structures.
So just take your knife
and cut some holes into your bread,
and then use those holes to fill it up with the M&M's,
with the broken M&M's,
and that represents your broken pottery.
Some more time goes by,
and because we are still on a flood plain,
another flood comes through.
This time, it's going to be represented with jelly.
So you're gonna go ahead and spread that jelly
on to your site, and don't fret
if some of the stuff moves around
because, that tends to happen in real life.
That makes it hard to know exactly
where things are from when we're doing archaeology
because nature can move stuff around quite a bit.
Finally, after this big flooding event,
we have another few hundred years of erosion.
More rocks and sediment, and so on,
come and cover up the site,
cover up the flood, everything.
That final layer is going to be represented
with our third piece of bread.
The next thing we're going to have to do
we have our site, we have our sandwich,
everything is, as is.
Our top layer represents modern day.
Now, we're going to pretend to be archaeologists.
We're going to come through,
and we're going to do what's called core samples.
And then we're going to open up a test excavation unit,
which is a very fancy way to say
a perfectly square hole in the ground.
So first, you're going to take your straw,
and just anywhere on your bread
poke a hole all the way to the bottom of your site.
This represents coring, which we do with a big tool
that kind of looks like a shovel,
but with a big cylinder on the end.
You push it in the ground
and it brings up a sample of the ground below you
so you can see the different colors of soil,
and sometimes, artifacts get popped in there as well.
As you're doing this, take out your straw.
You're going to need to either blow out or,
somehow, get those pieces of ground,
or sandwich, out of the straw.
Then see what you can see.
Can you tell what layers are there?
Can you tell if there are any artifacts in it?
And if you do see artifacts, or you do see something
that looks interesting, we're going to open up
that area for an excavation.
So, you're going to take your knife and very carefully
cut a square around your core sample.
I know it's really tempting to just take
that whole chunk out.
Just, very carefully, we're going to excavate
layer by layer because that's what archaeologists do.
We do it very slowly and carefully,
so take each layer off
and as we do that, we're gonna see what we can find,
and see if there are any artifacts hiding below.
Whether you know it or not,
you just learned the law of stratigraphy.
Which is a really cool principle in archaeology
that teaches us how old things are
in an archaeological site.
We just made and excavated our own archeological site.
We saw evidence of people 2,000 years ago,
and then maybe five thousand years ago.
And we got all the way to the bottom
of this original flood plain.
So, in the real world,
this is kind of how archaeology works.
We know that the farther down you go
in an archaeological excavation,
the older things get.
So the very first thing that we found,
our little piece of Hopewell pottery,
is the youngest artifact that we found.
And we know that that little fire cracked rock we found
from that archaic campfire
is the oldest artifact we found.
So this is a really important part of archaeology
because it helps us know when things happened.
We can tell how old a site is
based on this law of stratigraphy
that you just learned through peanut butter and jelly.
So I hope you had a lot of fun and now
we get to, maybe everyones, favorite part
where you get to eat this really weird-looking sandwich
with a hole in it now.
So, enjoy your sandwich!
I hope you had fun doing this activity
and check back later
for more of these educational videos.
Stay safe and stay home if you can. Thanks!
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