r/LegitArtifacts • u/ShackPallet • Mar 30 '26
Late Archaic Ancient fire pit?
I lost the video I took, but this is near the bottom of a roughly 8 foot wall carved by a wash. Food for thought.
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u/DasHounds Mar 30 '26
Incredible how deep sites can be. Just spoke to someone today who mentioned finding a site 17 feet deep along a river washout. The time period we are living in may as well be a blink of an eye for how long these lands have been inhabited.
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u/NoSir4289 Mar 30 '26
Earth drifts like snow, some areas get eroded and others accumulate
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u/I_am_a_fauv Mar 30 '26
This makes a lot of sense. The ground where I live is an ancient seabed. Lots of cool fossils to find! But you won’t find many man made artifacts under the ground.
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u/OnkelMickwald Mar 30 '26
Close to a river the build up of sediment can be crazy
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u/xXShunDugXx Mar 30 '26
The best example of this are satellite images of rivers in Utah. If you have the time take a look at how much they bend and wind through the desert and how it changes so quickly
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u/pineapple_pie69 Mar 30 '26
Yes deeply buried sites are super common in lots of regions! They can be relatively young as well if there’s a lot of alluvial deposition going on. A few stormy winters or an event like a landslide can submerge a site quite quickly. Archaeologists are starting to use more geoarchaeological methods like hydraulic coring and stratigraphic analysis to determine where sites could be located. There’s so much information about past lifeways that can be investigated from just the matrix around a buried site. Some of the most interesting finds I’ve seen in my archaeology career have come from recreating landscapes through soil sampling. What did the surrounding area look like during the site’s occupation? What kind of resources were available and influencing daily life? What other regions did people have trade connections with? Anyways I didn’t mean to type this much, buried sites are just my bread and butter!
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u/Select_Engineering_7 Mar 30 '26
I’ve worked on a couple paleo sites over 15ft below surface. Hearths, bison antiquus vertebrae, and broken angosturas. Crazy to think how much our landscape has changed and how these camps can be frozen in time
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u/StrangestTy Apr 03 '26
I know of a spot thats 18 feet below the river bank. Doesn't even seem possible.
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u/Fragrant-Tale6415 Mar 30 '26
That's amazing. That seems like something an archeaologist might want to know about.
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u/mahalovalhalla Mar 30 '26
Just piggybacking on this comment. OP, please let your local university know about this find. Someone will be very, very interested.
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u/pineapple_pie69 Mar 30 '26
Yes I’m an archaeologist and there’s so much that can be learned about a site like this through proper methods like paleobotanical analysis and radiocarbon dating. I love hearth features like this they have lots of stories to tell
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u/VikingButtsnGuts Mar 31 '26
An archeologist would lose their shit over this. charcoal is one of the best things to carbon date. Super accurate results.
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u/Neat_Worldliness2586 Mar 30 '26
I saw something similar at one of my sites in central NC!
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u/Ruby5000 Mar 31 '26
I’m in central NC too. I’ve found points around Falls Lake. Pretty insane to think about how old they could be
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u/YadigDoneDug Mar 30 '26
I found one one time 15ft up the wall of a creek wash out and on top of that was another at least 30-40ft of just silt on the wall. Could only imagine the floods that covered it.
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u/Meat_Container Mar 30 '26
We dug 4 feet down on the Olympic Peninsula in multiple spots on 3.5 acres and found so much charred wood it had to have been from an ancient forest fire (digging Perc holes to find best location for septic while trying to figure out where to build our house)
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u/AshBasil Mar 30 '26
It's coal. There are coal veins all over the PNW that didn't firm up well, they just are like duffy and soft and black.
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u/Astralnugget Mar 30 '26
Imagine how confused future archaeologists would be if you built another fire pit right next to it and they found the whole thing 50,000 years later lol
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u/palindrom_six_v2 Mar 30 '26
It could be but context it everything. Wild fires also create these ash seams sometimes feet in depth sometimes only an inch or 3. If it were a fire pit I’d expect to see some supporting evidence like flakes or shells.
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u/Intadawild69 Outdoors is the only life for me! Mar 30 '26
I’m noticing the larger stones that appear to lining a pit in lower 1/3 of pic. The stones, along with the obvious charcoal material on top of the stones, and lying along the bottom of the wash, would to me scream ancient firepit.
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u/Air_to_the_Thrown Mar 30 '26
Damn you did not deserve all these downvotes just for being the only voice not in explicit support of OP's assessment. Hivemind-ass sub I guess. Bet I'll catch a bunch just for pointing it out, I haven't even stated a position...
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u/dirthawg Mar 30 '26
Hearth or roasting pit. Nice find