A Site Visit to the Thunderbird Preserve with Kelley Berliner

Hey, Kelly Berliner here, Eastern Regional Director of the Archaeological Conservancy, and I'm here today to give you a little behind the scenes of what we spend a lot of our time doing once we acquire an archaeological site. So our primary mission is to acquire and manage this country's most important archaeological sites, and after acquired, management often consists of visiting the property, checking on it, making sure boundaries are posted, working with site stewards, and so on. So today we're out at the Thunderbird Archaeological Site. You can see I just parked up the lane here, and I'm getting ready to hike into the site, and this particular site is located in the Shenandoah region of northern Virginia. It's a prehistoric site that dates back to the Paleo-Indian period, so I'll make a couple of stops as we walk through the property here and just show you what I'm doing out here today. Okay, you can see behind me here that at this site we're dealing with a bit of mixed terrain, so we have a lot of areas that are wooded. The area I just came from was wooded, but there are also some areas that are open field, and so part of our management strategy for sites is that if when we acquire the property there are areas that have been historically farmed or mowed or currently cleared, we try to keep them that way, and that's because roots from trees can grow into the site, and they can grow into the stratigraphy or the different soil layers that we use for dating a and they can kind of mess things up a bit, and so if it's been cleared, we try to keep it clear. In some cases, we lease it to farmers. In other cases, like here, we work with a local neighbor who comes and mows this property for us. We pay him to mow, and he also acts as a site steward who helps us keep an eye on things. And, of course, for sections that are wooded, we keep them wooded, and we monitor them just to make sure that nobody is trespassing or disturbing the soil or doing any other activity that would harm the site. So part of maintaining the Conservancy's properties includes posting these properties against trespassing, as for the most part, these properties are not open to the public without permission or without somebody here to guide. There are some cases where we lease properties for hunting or farming or other purposes, but it really depends on the nature of the site and the property. So in order to make sure that our boundaries are clearly marked and that we don't have issues with people coming onto our property, or at least if they do, they've been warned that they're doing so illegally, we mark with no trespassing signs. Or in some states, we actually can use specific purple blazes. This is often used by hunters to mark property boundaries for hunting, but in many states, you know, it marks hunting boundaries, and it also marks property boundaries. And so those are some of the tools that we have just to make sure we're securing the perimeter in addition to coming out and just making sure that things look okay. Okay, we've hiked down now to the lower portion of the site, which is off to my right, and it's located along the south fork of the Shenandoah River, which you can see behind me. It's still a little chilly here, it's February, so we still have some snow on the opposite bank, but it's a nice warm day, so really can't complain. Now, the Thunderbird site is part of a series of sites that comprise the Thunderbird Archaeological District. So these are three different sites that date back to the Paleo-Indian period, so looking at 10,000 years ago, give or take. And what makes these sites so important is that they have deeply stratified deposits. So stratification are different soil layers that archaeologists use to date sites, and in this case, they're very distinct. And so we can see the transition from the Paleo-Indian period into the early Archaic, and so really, really significant. It's hard to find stratified sites that date back this old, especially here in the east, and so certainly a lot of research potential to understand what people were doing in this area in the Shenandoah Valley region. These were big game hunters, hunter-gatherers, and interestingly, at this site, we also have the early evidence of a structure in the region. So again, these are really hard to find, dating to this time period, to find the soil stains of those posts that used to be there, but of course have degraded over time. So just really, really exciting to have this site preserved for future research opportunities. So earlier on, I mentioned having a site steward for this property, and so as part of our management, we try to have at least one, if not multiple, site stewards for every preserve that we acquire and manage. And really, these are folks who are either neighbors, local archaeologists, other people interested in volunteering to help us be our eyes and ears on the ground. Of course, we can't be everywhere at once, and so it's really helpful to have somebody local in the area that can walk these properties or drive by and hike in a little bit and just make sure that nobody is out there mucking around, driving ATVs through, illegally hunting, or doing any other activity that just really isn't appropriate for these properties. And so it's incredibly important that we get these volunteers. We're so grateful to have them for all these different sites. It really alleviates a big burden on us to be able to have a lot of partners out here to help us make sure that these properties are managed effectively. So we're now on the other side of the river from the site, but one reason that people were settling in this area is because that there are very rich deposits of jasper, and so this jasper was perfect for working into tools. And we see a lot of these sites are part of the Flint Run complex, so a lot of quarry areas out here, and we find a lot of this material over at the Thunderbird site. So you'll probably notice that there's really not a whole lot to see out here today. Sites in the east, we often don't have any surface features or standing structures or anything that you might see in the southwest, but frankly, I like it that way. It's great. It means that there's no sign of disturbance out here. I don't see any artifacts on the surface. I don't see any signs of illegal digging or anything like that. So all in all, the preserve seems to be in pretty good shape, which is great. I can record that we were out here, work together some documentation, just saying that the site looks to be in good condition. I'll reach out to some of the neighbors and see if we can't get a couple additional site stewards and come back out in a little while and just make sure everything continues to look this way. And then hopefully sometime in the future, we'll have somebody interested in doing research out here. So thank you so much for joining us today. It's really great to be able to reach out and just show folks a little bit of the side of what we do in terms of managing these properties.