
Michelle Rathgaber, ARAS-Parkin Research Station
Artifact of the Month - March 2020
This piece of daub is fairly small, only measuring about 2cm x 1.5cm, but what it preserves is remarkable (Figure 1). There is a fingerprint of the person who applied this piece of daub impressed on its surface. Although we will never know exactly who that person was, seeing a fingerprint is a great reminder that archeology helps us to learn about the people who made and used the things that we excavate, not just the things themselves.

This piece of daub was excavated at the Richard’s Bridge site (3CT11/22) during the Summer Training Program in 2015 by members of the Arkansas Archeological Society. In fact, because we keep extensive records during excavation, I can tell you that Dan Sharp and Sam Mater excavated it from 10–20cm below the ground surface in a context that was mixed due to plowing. This means that we cannot precisely tie this piece of daub to a particular building, but it was definitely from this village. We also cannot give it a precise date, but we know that the site generally dates to the Mississippi period.
So what is daub? Daub is made from silt, clay, grasses, sticks, and water mixed together to form a thick, sticky clay-like substance that was used to cover house walls at Mississippian sites in northeast Arkansas (in this case, the Richard’s Bridge site) (Figure 2). Houses were built by putting posts into the ground and then splitting cane and running it between the posts to form walls. We can see evidence of the posts archeologically through post molds discovered in carefully excavated contexts. We often don’t see the actual wood used for the posts, or any of the other building materials, because it decays in the wet soils of the Delta region. So how do we know the cane and posts were there? We look at the daub (Figure 3). Daub was pressed onto the walls to seal them against wind and drafts. This means that impressions of the wall posts and split cane are left on the side of the daub that was pressed against them.

