The East End

On Saturday a few of us went out to Tula, a village on the east end of Tutuila, to relocate a prehistoric stone tool production site. The spot is important to us because it shows how people acquired and flaked basalt cobbles to created adzes, which are chisel-like tools for cutting wood. The tools were produced in differnt sizes and shapes across the island for about 3, 000 years and were used to make houses, boats, bowls...everything basically. Understanding how folks organized this prehistoric tehnology gives us a little peak into prehistoric social networks, kinship relations and resource control...intersting stuff for nerds that like to look at dead folks' stuff.





Anyway, on the other side of things, the trip is going well...weather has been good and we're all still alive with a smile. The east end was hit especially hard by the Tsunami, the damage is widespread, but no one died in the village fortunately. It's hard on the mind coming into a flattened village that I'd grown to love over the years. Strangely enough, the warning to run into the hills came to Tula from thier family in Tenessee of all things...about six minutes after the earthquake and five minutes before the first of three 5m tall waves inundated the village.

Tomorrow I'll be going to 'Aoa to survey the stream for a buried cultural activity surface. From there we'll bump to the side of it and begin the 5 1x1 meter test units that I'm under contract to complete. The upper sediment layers are most likely from slumping downslope so any artifacts are probably in secondary contexts. But! the lowest stuff is likely in original depositional contexts, with minimal movement since people discarded the items (pottery and stone tools) about 2,700 years ago. That activity surface is about 1 meter below the ground...wish us luck!