A Near Death Experience?
4/25/2020 My first summer (1969) at Town Creek Indian Mound in North Carolina was an exciting beginning of responsibility for me as an archaeologist. We had completed the UNC Cherokee Project the year before; and my mentor, Dr. Joffre Coe, had promoted me from crew member, to field director, with an unexpected new responsibility: Before our crew arrived, another grad student, Richard Smith, and I needed to build an unusual cantilevered photo tower that would allow us to photograph the entirety of a ten-foot square with no shadow from the tower in the photo. Following plans Coe drew on a napkin in a Chapel Hill coffee shop and using no power tools, we built the structure in a little over a week. At the top, we fashioned a kind of wooden saddle-seat for the photographer, and Richard and I were quite pleased with the finished tower. Yet, I had another idea for improvement: I would mount a tripod head to the seat to hold the heavy, and expensive, Graflex camera steady while in use. *
Removing the legs of our tripod, I attached the head to a piece of plywood that I mounted at the front of the tower seat. The cross-grooved staff that allowed the camera to be raised and lowered stuck down a foot-and-a-half or so below the seat. Attaching the plywood to the seat with four medium-sized finishing nails, the only fasteners handy, I then climbed to the top of the tower with the camera, mounted it, and turned it down to view and photograph a newly excavated and cleaned square. Only then, did I remember that I hadn’t brought the film pack that had to be inserted into the back of the camera. Carefully, I raised the camera so it sat straight and tightened on top of the tripod head, then I began, rather too quickly, climbing down the ladder. The tower shook, and midway down I heard the camera and tripod break away from the tower.
I stopped abruptly. My future at Town Creek ran through my mind: It was short.
But–there was no crash, nothing. Looking out, there was no smashed camera in the middle of the square. Lifting my eyes, I saw something miraculous. On top of the back-dirt pile beyond the square, the undamaged camera sat upright. I felt the flood of overwhelming relief that comes when we realize catastrophe has been avoided.
Apparently, during my descent, the tower had shaken much more at the top than one would imagine, and the motion and weight of the camera had ripped out the nails and sent the whole apparatus flying. During the fall, the entire thing had obviously done a complete forward flip and landed quietly with the staff of the tripod head stuck straight up in the back dirt pile, camera on top. **
The next day I was down to the hardware store to buy screws.
Several years later, my family and I visited the Coes in their Chapel Hill home. When we arrived, Joffre was waiting on the porch with his arms spread wide for a hug, and we had a lovely afternoon visit with him and his wife Sally. As we reminisced about archaeology and archaeological sites, including Town Creek, I confessed about nearly smashing the Graflex. His response was no more than one of his classic wry grins and a twinkle in his eye.
* A Graflex is the kind of camera often seen being used by news reporters in old films. They were large 4 X 6 inch format cameras weighing, I suppose, about 3-4 pounds.
**While digging our first square, I had made the mistake of having the back-dirt placed on top of the next square to be excavated. Had I not made this mistake, the camera would have been smashed.
Below text from a FaceBook post that led FB readers to this post. I’ve added this text because it includes some information not in “A Near Death Experience?”:
Summer, 1968, Professor Joffre Coe asked me to direct summer fieldwork at Town Creek Indian Mound State Historic Site, North Carolina. For me this was affirmation that I was going to become an archaeologist. Archaeologists I knew and respected—Roy Dickens, Bennie Keel, Stanley South—as well as Coe had directed fieldwork at Town Creek, and now I would join that group. However, Coe explained to me in a Chapel Hill coffee shop that before beginning work I would have to build a photo tower; and on a napkin he began to draw a most unusual looking cantilevered structure. The aim he said, was to take a mosaic photograph of features in a ten-foot square without the shadow of the tower in the photo. In WW II, Coe had been an aerial photography interpreter for the U.S. Army Air Corps, and for years he had been working on a plan to create a mosaic of the features in the entire palisaded area of Town Creek. My grad school friend, Jeff Reid—who wrote his Master’s thesis on Town Creek pottery—said Coe was essentially trying to create an “x-ray” of the entire site.
For two weeks prior to field work, fellow grad student, Richard Smith, and I built the tower from Coe’s napkin plans.
I have written an account of mounting the camera on the top of this tower entitled, “A Near Death Experience?” It is posted at LelandFerguson.com.