University of North Carolina Athletics
Softball Senior Gustavson Digs Archeology
October 17, 2001 | Softball
Oct. 17, 2001
You mean, I really have to dig?
"We have two kinds of shovels, a flat shovel and a round shovel. You can use whichever one you like best," said Dr. Stephen Davis, UNC professor and archeologist, as he held up the two different shovels. I suppose most people are familiar with shovels, but until that day I hadn't had a chance to develop any sort of relationship with shovels, flat or round. All I knew is that I usually tried to stay very far away from them. Shovels meant blisters, sweat, and of course, manual labor. I didn't think I liked round shovels or flat shovels.
There was a group of about sixteen of us crowded around Dr. Davis. We devoured his every instruction, eagerly awaiting the signal to start digging. We thought we were going to be archeologists, too. Maybe we had watched too many Indiana Jones movies and had somehow confused Hollywood archeologists and professional archeologists. We hoped to discover something big, something exciting, something that would shock the world of science. We were all enrolled in Anthropology 151, a six week summer class in which we traveled down I-40 to Hillsborough, over a bumpy dirt road and into the middle of a field on the banks of the Haw River. Conveniently, the site was also infested with poison ivy and ticks and was located next to a sewage treatment plant, which made things interesting when the wind blew the wrong way. The plan was to excavate the area where there was a Native American village in the fifteenth century.
So there we were, 8 o'clock in the morning in the middle of a field, dressed in our best archeologist clothes-cruddy t-shirts and shorts. Later, after sunburns, ticks, and poison ivy rashes, we realized that long pants, long shirts and wide-brimmed hats were more practical.
And then, we were off. Dr. Davis divided us into groups with a supervising T.A. and we begun being archeologists. We dug one 10-foot by 10-foot square after another. We uncovered various pits where the Indians discarded their trash and stains from where the posts had stood that were the foundations of their homes. We uncovered pieces of broken pottery, spear points and tools. But, best of all was the dead body.
They said we probably wouldn't find an Indian grave, but we all secretly hoped that in one of those pits would be human bones, and not just animal bones. And then one day, there were. Well, actually it didn't really happen like that. We uncovered a large circular stain on the floor of one of the 10 by 10 foot squares that resembled that of a pit from a grave. A group was assigned as the Grave Team, and they dug down about four feet before several large stones blocked their path. Behind the large stones lay a skeleton, curled in a fetal position. It was determined that the skeleton was that of a woman, about forty years old.
After the skeleton had been studied, a chief from the modern day Occaneechee Indian tribe came and performed a ritual to bless the body to insure that we had not disturbed his after life. He also blessed us. The chief lit some herbs to smolder and he wafted the smoke over the skeleton and our group of archeologists, all the while he mumbled words that only the ancestors could hear.
I may have been spending my days from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. digging relentlessly, suffering under the heat and humidity, unsuccessfully avoiding poison ivy and ticks, but I was shocked to realize I was having fun. As the weeks wound down, I realized that I was going to miss the dig. We had all become good friends by then-you can imagine the conversations when we had with nothing else to do but dig up an endless amount of dirt for six weeks. I even became somewhat of a shovel pro. I flipped the dirt from my shovel and into the wheelbarrow with great height and distance. I even mastered the 360-spin move, the blindfolded shovel toss, and the behind-the-back toss.
And you know what? It really doesn't matter which shovel you use, round or flat, but I still don't think I like either one. I've had enough digging for a while.
