I Visited The Topper Archaeological Site Yesterday

[MarkGelbart]

I visited the Topper archaeological site yesterday. It's near Allendale, South Carolina which is on the border of Georgia and South Carolina a few miles south of the Savannah River Site nuclear plant.

Although the land is owned by Clariant Corporation and there's a factory on the land, it's basically in the middle of nowhere. Most of SRS is second growth wilderness from farmland abandoned over fifty years ago and the area is just packed with deer and turkey. The Topper site is in deep woods at the end of a long dirt road that leads to an oxbow lake.

Topper has a chert outcropping that 13,000 years ago was a major Clovis Indian home base. I saw chert strewn all over the place. It's probably not even necessary to dig pits to find artifacts. On the surface along an eroded path I saw lots of what looked like debitage and possibly even a pre-form though I'm certainly no diagnostic expert. I mentioned this to some of the people working on the dig, and they didn't seem interested in these because the possible artifacts didn't come from stratified sediment. That's how rich this site is.

Topper is well-known as a possible pre-Clovis site. They let me go into one of the deep trenches and I saw a cobble that certainly looked like it had been flaked by human hands. This was in a level dated to almost 50,000 years, the limits of radiocarbon dating. I took a picture of it, but on their website they seem to be a little fussy about photos taken there and I haven't had a chance to ask for permission to use it yet.

Of course, many scientists think the possible pre-Clovis artifacts could have been formed through natural processes. I'm sure this is true, and I'm skeptical humans could have made it to North America that early, but still some of these artifacts are hard to explain as natural. They sure look manmade.

I talked to a graduate student screen sifting sediment from a Clovis pit. He told me they find some woodland era artifacts, some archaic Indian artifacts, but at the Clovis level there's just an astounding number of artifacts. There's lots of flakes showing the Indians work making arrowheads. He said they're just as happy to find those as completed arrowheads. Once in a while they find other stuff too--arrowheads made from volcanic rock from North Carolina, quartz arrowheads, and charcoal.

The site manager was a nice guy and told me I could return any time I wanted.

It was a thrill to actually visit an archaeological dig after reading about them for so many years.

[tracer]

good report. thanks for posting it. it's fascinating to consider all that was going on before people started writing it down...

[cat shark]

That is really cool they let you visit that site. Thanks for posting the story.