Gaston Site, Roanoke River, NC

4/2020: Stanley South, my mentor in historical archaeology, at work at the Gaston Site, Roanoke River, northeastern NC.  Stan wrote his master’s thesis at UNC-Chapel Hill on this prehistoric project. Archaeologist Lewis Binford helped Stan in the field and ended up writing his dissertation at University of Michigan on another aspect of the project—Nottoway and Meherrin Colono-Indian Ware.

Stanley South (age 26) Digging at the Gaston Site, Roanoke River, northeastern North Carolina, 1955.

Video:  A Bit of Archaeological History A few days ago, I shared a Face Book photo (above) of archaeologist Stanley South posted by the Research Laboratories of Anthropology, UNC.  In my excitement of finding and sharing this fine photo of Stan, I missed the significance of the link at the bottom of the page that leads to an early 1960s video of a filming of UNC’s project on the Roanoke River.  Mostly a PR piece for the partnership between archaeologists and a power company, the video, narrated by University of Texas archaeologist E. Mott Davis, contains these features of archaeological history:       Joffre Coe at the RLA facility in Person Hall in his office and laboratory.      Coe at his desk looking at ceramic illustrations from Stanley South’s MA thesis on the Roanoke project, a tome that was combined with results from the Hardaway and Doerschuk sites to create the cultural sequence presented in Coe’s 1964 Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont.·      Images of excavation techniques on the Roanoke River project. ·      Footage of my graduate school friends J. Jefferson Reid and Ralph Bunn drawing and taking notes on a profile.  After an MA degree at Chapel Hill, Reid went on to become a noted Southwestern archaeologist where he was director of the well-known Grasshopper Pueblo Field School.·      The film also shows women involved in the heavy fieldwork of shoveling and hand sifting.  At the time, most women in archaeology were relegated to laboratory work.  (When I arrived at the University of South Carolina, the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology had a “no women in the field policy.”  Thankfully, in 1972 archaeologist George Teague ignored that policy and single-handedly changed the archaeological culture at South Carolina.) You can view the video at   http://ancientnc.web.unc.edu/galleries/video_gallery/gaston-reservoir/   Thanks to the Research Laboratories of Anthropology, UNC for digitally sharing this video and other archaeological gems.