Ok, so "deflated" and "blow out" are more like descriptors of a process that
affects archaeology deposits. Let me interpret them from my perspective.
Both involve movement of the soil matrix away from the people-made artifacts
(or, more importantly, activity locations), thus resulting in a repose on the
surviving landform:
Deflated. One interpretation would be a bowl or cup-shaped hole in the
harder natural earth that is filled with the midden refuse, then the top is
affected by wind or rain or mammals moving the soil down (deflation) exposing and
causing the top artifacts to scatter out beyond the steep wall of the
depression (bowl or cup-shaped hole, the contents of which retain their original
deposition).
Blow out. Another interpretation would be a wind or hydraulic water
transport impact on a midden (could even be horizontal) that erodes the earth above,
within, and beneath the midden, causing the artifacts to fall down, away or
into a heap. In a blow out, everything loses its original deposition
arrangement. I once skindived off La Jolla, California and found a blowout in between
two reefs that contained beer cans, dive weights, bottle glass, coins, and my
high school ring (lost during an earlier Winter dive) that fell from another
location. I have also seen blowouts in between sand dunes out in the
California desert that also concentrated things from higher locations on the dunes.
Behavioral Patterning Within The Landscape. But no, what I wrote about last
week had to do with massive erosive processes that strip away all the soft
soil in a landform (mesa top, former shoreline, site of a flash flood, etc.) in
which seemingly random objects can be seen when walking through the
landscape. But, when mapped on a sheet of paper and examined by standing back (at
what might scale at 1,000 feet above), patterns of kitchen bottle dumps, camping
areas, repair locations, butchering areas, and the like can be discerned. My
point here is that surveyors should not dismiss what appear to be random
distributions from their eyeball perspective.
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.
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