Tag: Formation Processes

Any archaeologist who has excavated has encountered traces of burrowing animals, usually in the form of filled burrows visible as differences in the color or consistency of the sediment. While working in California during the latter half of the 1970s, I became curious about how all that burrowing may have affected the archaeological record. No one I asked seemed to know much about the critters or the nature of their impacts on the sites we were investigating. Burrowing rodents are quite common in California, and pocket gophers or ground squirrels were actively burrowing in virtually every site at which I worked. At the same time, I was taking classes in geology at San Jose State University and beginning to explore the interfaces between geology and archaeology, an area that would shortly come to be called geoarchaeology. I was mostly working on using soil chemistry to identify the uses or functions of different areas in archaeological sites and deposits. However, I took a course on soil ecology and learned that there was quite a bit known about the habits of animals that live in the soil including burrowing mammals.

 Instructions for Running the Pocket Gopher Disturbance Simulation

This program simulates the effects that burrowing by pocket gophers have on the vertical distribution of artifacts and sediments and the disruption of sedimentary structures (stratification) within archaeological deposits. It relies on a model of pocket gopher disturbance I developed intermittently between 1981 and 1986. Details of this model are presented in an article I published in the journal Geoarchaeology (vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 185-208) in 1992 titled Effects of Pocket Gopher Burrowing on Archaeological Deposits: A Simulation Approach. Click here to read about the history of my development of the model.