Sifting through the caked, red soil at a dig site near the southSaluda River, researchers have unearthed pieces of ancient historythey hope will provide a glimpse of early life in the Upstate.

The archaeologists and volunteers returned this month for the firsttime since August to the site in Pickens County that is a restingplace for American Indian artifacts, a spot that has been occupiedoff and on for the last 10,000 years.

“It’s important to understand how people lived in the past,” saidChris Clement, who works at the location, which is near theGreenville-Pickens line. “Hopefully we can apply lessons learnedthrough that to the present and to the future.”

Searching the soil beneath this present-day farm, the researchershave discovered almost a time capsule of relics from past cultures,from pottery that dates back as many as 4,000 years to about 30 or 40feet of a log fort built by Indians 600 to 700 years ago.

Farther down, workers last year unearthed a cluster of rocks thatdate back 10,000 years, said Clement, principal investigator with theSouth Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, a part ofthe University of South Carolina.

People have lived in South Carolina for at least 12,000 years, hesaid, but the 10,000-year-old cluster has the oldest confirmed andculturally associated date in the state.

“It’s clearly something that people put there,” he said. “As of rightnow that’s the earliest that particular site was occupied.”

Now they are hoping to go back even further in time.

“We want to see if there are any levels that are actually older thanthe 10,000-year one we got,” said Terry Ferguson, who is also at thedig and is program coordinator for the department of geology atWofford College.

Ferguson, Clement and others will be there for about six to eightweeks. To preserve the site’s integrity, they are close-lipped aboutits exact location.

It’s one of two sites that sit across from each other, the other inGreenville County, that are a venture of the Upstate South CarolinaArchaeological Research Group.

The Greenville location isn’t being excavated now, but work has beendone at both spots sporadically since 2004, said Ferguson, who helpedform the Upstate archaeological group in 2003.

“They have given us information about what we call culturechronology, or essentially a history of the cultures of the area,” hesaid.

Ferguson said that at the Greenville site they found a 600- to 700-year-old council house, about 40 feet in diameter, for Indian groupswho were ancestral to the Cherokee in the area.

“About every foot we go back about 1,000 years,” Ferguson said,describing how the different levels tell different stories.

Clement said they’ve also found artifacts like tools and pottery. Onesuch item ó a piece of Stallings Island pottery that is typicallyfound along the Savannah River ó was found on the surface a few yearsago.

“It’s the first pottery that was made in the Americas, certainlyNorth America,” Clement said. “It’s pretty significant stuff.”

They are trying to find more because the piece they found was on thesurface, which means it was moved from where it was deposited.“Finding it way up there on the Pickens-Greenville line was unusual,”he said.

For Jesse Robertson, who owns the land where the Greenville site is,it’s interesting to see the history come to life. He said his brotherowns the land on the Pickens side.

“We’ve been surface collecting for years,” Robertson said, describingthe many arrowheads and tools they’ve found. “It’s amazing to see howlong people have lived in the area.”