“General Diggings”: Where Did Harvard Dig? Determining the Actual Layout of the Turpin Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the span of a few winter months in the mid-1880s, Harvard University conducted excavations on the property of Philip Turpin in Hamilton County, Ohio. Under the direction of Charles Metz, a local physician, a small team excavated areas throughout the terrace upon which a Late Woodland (ca. AD 400–1000) and Late Precontact (ca. AD 1000–1300) settlement, now known as the Turpin site, was located. Metz and his team excavated and recorded coarse information on dozens of refuse pits, hearths, houses, and ancestral burials. They made some cryptic notes about where features were located but made no site map and recorded no datum locations that they used to locate these features. This leaves us with the massive problem of hundreds of features with no provenience. We are attempting to solve this puzzle by working back-and-forth with excavation blocks we made based on the limited spatial data in the archived field notes with geophysical data and other results from our fieldwork at the site to try to best guess where Harvard excavated. Here, we detail the entire process we are following with initial findings about the actual layout of the Turpin site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38666.0