End of the Line

I doubt there's an archaeologist out there who hasn't had the experience of finding something inconveniently large, interesting, or important on the last day of a field project. Sometimes we race to uncover and record it, other times we build it into the next stage of research proposals, and yet others it becomes part of the Future Research section of our reports. Right now, this spring's Last Day Odd Thing is serving, to me, as a metaphor for the archaeological and historical research process.

I had originally planned to open a 2m x 2m unit to test a magnetic anomaly that showed up in the results of last autumn's gradiometer survey. We weren't going to have time for that – the ground was really hard and excavation was moving steadily but slowly – so I decided to use the metal detector to check the anomaly location for a big, ferrous object (this convergence had occurred in a previous unit). There was indeed a strong signal from the metal detector right in the location of the anomaly – and I started a shovel-test to open a small window into the spot. The first thing I found was a robust, wrought iron hook… connected to a thick iron ring… connected to a strand of wire rope… I followed the cable for a few looping feet as it snaked next to the hook… and then it dove deeper into the ground for an indeterminate distance… which is when I decided that shovel tests can only really be *so* large before they turn into full-blown excavation units, which should be screened, mapped, etc… so I took several photos and covered the thing back up again in its place.

So, what is it? My best guess is the obvious – that it's part of an apparatus for pulling or dragging something. This isn't particularly surprising. There's even an 1891 receipt in the Kaweah Cooperative Colony Records in the Bancroft Library for 1000' of steel rope, purchased from John A. Roebling's Sons Co., of San Francisco. And what's on the other end of the cable? I don't know. This is the part that makes me reflect on the processes of research and discovery in every stage of historical archaeology. There are a lot of leads out there. Ideally, we want to follow all of them to their fullest extent, uncovering the threads and finding out what's tied to the end. But we always have to decide where to focus our attention… do we follow a single thread to the exclusion of everything around it and then backtrack to pick up the other ones we passed along the way? Do we follow many threads, simultaneously, methodically, an inch at a time?