From the Unknown to the Known: Reexamination of a Small Prehistoric Site in Southeastern Virginia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Fort Eustis, a small military installation in southeastern Virginia, has over one hundred sites containing prehistoric components, most of which yielded no diagnostic artifacts when identified at the survey level. These sites were subsequently labeled as camps of indeterminate time period and assumed to have little research potential. Reinvestigation of one of these supposedly insignificant sites yielded a large quantity of debitage, along with ceramic sherds, concentrated within a very small area. This unexpectedly productive site lets us refine our understanding of what activities were undertaken in small temporary camps and of how the landscape was used during the Woodland period. The results of this excavation also demonstrate that the information potential of a site may not be exhausted by a few shovel test pits.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24607