Maggie's Field Blog

November 3, 2008

Since daylight savings time ended over the weekend, we knew it would get dark early this week, leaving us with limited time to excavate. With that in mind, the unit 1 team trowelled away steadily at JBH31. Even though the soil was denser than that of JBH 24, our previous context, it was not difficult to dig. And with fewer roots and no crazy interlocking contexts, our unit was actually looking pretty level for the first time since we opened it. We uncoverd more brick and charcoal, a few modern artifacts (please let them be remnants pushed down from JBH 21 by errant tree roots!), some nails, and a few ceramic sherds. We also uncovered 3 pieces of what Alex deemed "interesting wood," pieces of wood with smooth sides and curvy shapes all very similar to each other. I suspect that they're just naturally occurring coincidences, but I'm willing to believe they might turn out to be pieces of something cultural.

Several visitors came by in search of the John Nicholas Brown House, which is apparently across Power Street from the JBH, and one of them paused to talk to us about what we were finding. He had studied archaeology as an undergrad, but didn't have any particular insights about our unit.

At the end of the day, our struggle to pull the tarp over our increasingly huge piles of back dirt drove home the fact that we'll be closing up our units next Monday. Even though it seems a shame to be done with unit 1 when we've only scratched the surface of its historical contents, I am excited to get into the lab. I want to look at the finds from unit 1 and the other units and to think about how to present our dig and findings to the public in an exhibition at the John Brown House.

October 27, 2008

At last, the end of the fill! Today's modern finds included a pen cap, an eraser, many more pieces of plastic and brick, and, towards the bottom of the context, a great quantity of charcoal. Perhaps this modern trash heap was someone's trash fire. JBH 24, the next arbitrary context in our expansive fill deposit, was going to be a 20 cm level, but before we got down that low, we came upon a pretty abrupt soil change. The new context, JBH 31 is much harder packed. It felt like we had cleared out a layer of fluff and finally hit the floor.

We just barely got to start shovel skimming through JBH 31, but the one bucket we did sift turned up the most exciting find I'd dared to hope for: no plastic! Maybe unit 1 has finally reached "the olden days," after all. Next week we'll try to excavate the context and keep our hopes up for finding historical material.

October 20, 2008

The Modern fill deposit continued in unit 1 this week. To speed things up, when we finished clearing JBH 18, we planned to dig in a 20 cm level, next. That will bring us down to 47 cm, which sounds pretty deep for our little one-square-meter unit.

As we progressed through the fill, the soil was still loose, and plenty of modern cultural material turned up in our sieve. The dense roots made excavation slow going, but we found a North American Van Lines luggage tag, more pieces of unidentified plastic, and a piece of a styrofoam Dunkin Donuts cup. Our unit is telling an epic tale of late twentieth-century donut history!

We also found a piece of painted wood similar to those we'd uncovered in previous weeks, but larger. Jacob identified it as part of the fence that currently surrounds the property. Maybe our big finds are waiting for Community Archaeology Day this weekend, so we can have something to show off to all of the Brown parents and other John Brown House visitors.

October 6, 2008

This week's class finally saw some tangible progress in our excavations of unit 1. We finished clearing contexts JBH 8 and 9 and progressed almost 10 cm into JBH 18. The soil was looser in this context, which made excavation easier and also suggested that we were digging through some sort of fill. The artifacts we found: a milk carton, a cigarette pack, a styrofoam cup, and a piece of plastic that looks like part of a squeeze bottle, had Krysta calling the deposit a "modern midden." Since the styrofoam cup had a "Mister Donut" logo on it, and with Ben's iPhone we were able to learn that the brand had been bought in 1990 by Dunkin Donuts, we suspected we were finding trash from the 1980s or earlier.

Finding and inspecting examples of modern material culture was on point with this week's readings: Lucas's claim that, in doing archaeology of the most recent past, we see more clearly what a face-to-face, possibly invasive encounter archaeology can be was born out for me. Finding artifacts and understanding so much about their cultural context so immediately made me see how much information there can be in an archaeological deposit, and what an ambitious and personal project it is to try to understand a particular piece of material culture in the way its original users did.

I look forward to more smooth progress on unit 1: intriguing as this week's modern midden deposit was, I'm holding out hope for clues to historic use of the John Brown House property.

September 29, 2008

Moira left our unit this week to open one of the two newer units, so Alex, Jacob, and I continued to struggle with our complicated stratigraphy. Noah, who dug with Krysta at the Green Farm property this summer, joined us for the day. The distinction between the JBH 8 context and the remnant of the formerly overlying JBH 9 was blurrier after the rains of the past week caused some of the two soils to run into each other. Despite all our difficulties, by the end of the class, we were near the bottom of JBH 8 and richer, if not in fabulous archaeologically significant finds, then in troweling, leveling, and record-keeping experience.

Finds included a handkerchief, several pieces of brick, and a crumbling bluish deposit that may be archaeological but may turn out to be merely a weathering rock. Next class should see us finishing JBH 8, taking down the remaining corner of JBH 9, and starting to excavate a new context.

September 22, 2008

Today was our first full day of digging as a class. The team that formed last week to start excavating unit #1 will stay with that unit for the next several weeks, so I dug with Moira, Jacob, and Alex again today. We hoped do dig a ten-centimeter arbitrary context until our pit was almost level, but after getting the floor down five or six centimeters, we started to notice a natural soil change.

Our unit got complicated quickly, once context JBH 8 started peeking out under JBH 5: we had to abandon our shovels and trowel away at the parts of the pit still overlain by JBH 5, watching to see if another context emerged while continuing to take line-level measurements so as to bring the JBH 5 part of the pit down to 10 cm. When we had cleared JBH 5 except for a small, oval area near the northeast corner where JBH 8 did not seem to appear, we started trowelling away at the new context, making a second attempt to level off the pit. Class was over before we got anything close to level, so next week our work should start with leveling JBH 8 down another ten centimeters.

Artifacts from unit #1 included a ceramic sherd, some blue glass, and a brick which is still embedded in the northern wall. The shovel test pit at N'0, W'35 uncovered more stones and a cache of oyster shells.

September 15, 2008

My second day of digging was less thrilling than my first, with nothing as exciting as last week's tiles turning up in the N0W30 test pit. I got some more practice shovel skimming and trowelling, and Alex, Jacob, Moira, and I laid out the first real excavation unit. Starting the unit mostly involved taking levels--the elevation differs by more than 10 cm in a 1m square.

The memorable part of class, this week, was our tour of the John Brown House. We saw models of how the house and grounds looked in the 18th century and learned about the political and business lives of the Brown brothers. Since I spent last year in museum education, I was particularly interested to hear Dan talk about how he presents various aspects of the house to particular audiences and about his hopes for our fieldwork to inform education at the John Brown House. I hope we get the chance to work more with the inside-the-museum team as the dig continues.

September 8, 2008

Our first day on site at the John Brown House, I arrived without a scrap of metal nor an idea of what to expect on my person. On arriving, we split into two groups and my group joined Tommy on adding to the geophysical survey of the site. He showed us the preliminary report on geophysical data taken at the site last spring, and explained that we were surveying along a different direction to get a better look at a feature that was unclear from the first survey. We each took turns walking transects with a magnetometer and with another machine that measured the conductivity of material underground. I also spent some time moving the tape measure that marked the transects across the field by a half meter after each classmate walked. It was quiet at the far end of the tape, and I had a moment to greet each person as they walked by in the heavy magnetometer fanny pack--it was tedious, but somehow also entertaining. I'm expecting that contrast to be a major theme of the class.

After the geophysical survey, we joined Krysta for a site orientation. She explained the grid system and some of the research she and Brad had done in preparation for the class. I learned that we were hoping to find evidence of a house that was on the northwest corner of the property when the Brown brothers first purchased it. The site orientation was quick and brought us right over to two shovel test pits, started by the other half of the class who had since gone on to geophysics. We dug with shovels in few-centimeter layers as thin and even as we could, sifted the soil, and evened the edges of the pit with our trowels. The other test pit was turning out nails in droves and I was getting disappointed with our measly one-nail pit when we started finding small white tiles, about 3cm on a side! Thrilling. Four of the tiles seemed to be arranged in a square and still mortared together. Class ended before we could investigate the tiles very far, so I hope next week finds us more information about them.

Throughout the class, I got a few bits of experience with archaeological record-keeping: I bagged artifacts and labeled the bags, and practiced describing a soil context with my test pit group. It startled me how different our rocky, dark soil was from the redder, softer soil in the other test pit, only five meters away.