Monday, September 17, 2007
Today we began our excavations on the grounds of the First Baptist Church of America. I was assigned to trench D3 on the western side of the church and near Thomas Street. Things were already under way once i arrived, so i just jumped right in and got dirty, literally. Archaeology is dirty and dusty, in case you weren't aware. But that's part of the fun of it! In how many other disciplines do you get to play in the dirt? Granted, you have to be aware of what you're doing while you're digging. Accurate and careful excavation methodology is essential to effective archaeological practice - otherwise you really are just playing in the dirt. Without proper recording of the process, the recovered materials and data are good for not much more than decorating your mantle piece.
So, you can imagine the way my trench-team and i felt when we realized we had gotten a little too zealous and gone a little too far. We had removed all of the sod from the top of our 1m square trench and started excavating the dirt in 10cm levels, sifting it through 1/4" mesh when our buckets were full. Unfortunately we were digging with the idea that we were supposed to dig down 10cm from the top of the ground. If the trench were on a perfectly level trench that would've been right, but the FBC is on the side of College Hill. This meant that 10cm down from the surface was10cm down at the NE corner of the trench, but about 30cm down from level when measured at the SW corner.
Luckily, the first centimeters of the site don't have much information in them and are mostly homogeneous. At the end of the first stratigraphic unit (SU1, the first 10cm down) our first "feature" began to appear! in the NE quadrant of the trench we discovered a nearly perfectly square clump of lighter colored soil about 1-1/2" on each side with odd white gravel mixed in with it, like the white pieces that come in potting soil, but hard. The surprising thing was how perfectly square the feature was and how clean the corners were. It's still unclear what it is, but our first thought was that it is a post hole. Then, while still reveling in the minor excitement of finding something other than pebbles we found two more similar "features" in SU2. And these ones are larger even, at least 2" on a side. Things are looking up in trench D3 as we look forward to week 2!
Monday, September 24, 2007
This was our second day of excavations. This time I was again at trench D3, though with Mark as my partner. We concentrated on finishing up SU2 and honing our troweling skills once we had reached the 20cm depth to get it consistently level across the whole trench. You can somewhat see in this picture the degree to which we progressed at the end of SU2:
Good enough to sleep on, according to one of my fellow excavators, who will remain nameless.
SU3, at least as much of it as we got through, proved to be a rewarding arbitrary level, if those can reasonably be given such characteristics. I personally found multiple artifacts: some terracotta chips, a sherd of porcelain with some blue painting on it, a rusty and corroded nail, and some glass fragments. The porcelain was the most exciting of them all, because that one is instantly recognizable as evidence of some cultural occupation at the site and human presence. Those things don't just grow on trees!
Furthermore, while we continued to remove dirt around the mystery "features," another one began to appear. Unlike the other three, this one does not fall on a rough diagonal line, but instead is off on its own in the SE quadrant of the trench. They may be mysterious, but they are undeniably present.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Click on the above image to activate an interactive VR panorama of the site. Once activated, you can look around by clicking and dragging. Also, press Shift key to zoom in, Ctrl key to zoom out.
Or, click here for a more cinematic experience.
NB: This does not seem to work in Internet Explorer for me, only Firefox. I'm not so skilled with html and webpage writing, etc. so I don't know when/if that will get fixed. You can however view the VR panorama on Vimeo by clicking on the link that says "FBC Panorama - 10_1_07wide.mov" below.
FBC Panorama - 10_1_07wide.mov (or right click the following link to download file: FBC Panorama - 10_1_07wide.mov)
FBC Panorama - 10_1_07thm.mov (or right click the following link to download file: FBC Panorama - 10_1_07wide.mov)
Monday, October 9, 2007
Columbus Day Holiday - No Fieldwork
Monday, October 15, 2007
Today we returned to fieldwork after a break because of the Columbus Day holiday. This week the period was divided into two parts. For the first half, I worked at digging in Trench D2 with Veronica. After about an hour digging there, we walked over to the grounds of the John Nicholas Brown Center at the Nightingale-Brown House, about a ten minute walk south on Benefit street from the FBC. There we continued the Near-earth geophysical survey that the other half of the class had started.
Digging in D2 was mostly uneventful as we worked in SU's 6 & 7. The soil has mostly shifted over to clay from top-soil fill. We found a couple of pieces of glass and brick, but that was about it, other than the many grubs which populate this trench. I find it rather curious that each of the three trenches i have so far worked in, though not that far from each other, all have their differences. D2 is full of grubs, C2 is home to a family of yellow jackets and in the ground are lots of centipedes/millipedes, while D3 was rather light such creepy-crawlies.
At the JNBC, four of us worked in a group on the survey, under the guidance of Tommy Urban. For half of the time there i walked lines (or transects as they're called in the technical lingo) every half-meter across the lawn with the GEM II. This piece of equipment (invented by a Brown Grad-student) measures the electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility of anything in the ground. It sounds complicated, but using it is actually very simple. All I had to do was hold the equipment, which looks like a wooden board with a box on it, and walk at a relaxed pace, pushing a button at the beginning and end of each line in order to start and stop the data collection. There was unique requirement for working with it though: I had to search my wardrobe and put together a metal-free outfit, since any metallic objects on our bodies could interfere with the GEM II. It doesn't sound so difficult, but it's not something I'm used to taking into account. Eventually the battery had to be re-charged, and after that my job was to position the tapes across the lawn that we followed when walking the equipment.
I wish i could say what we found with the survey work, but the data has to be loaded on the computer and analyzed, filtered, and compiled first, which is Tommy's job. It would be very cool (in a very technical way) if the survey revealed something in the ground other than modern infrastructure.
Appendix
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Today was "Community Dig Day," an arrangement with the Church so that interested members can come out and see what we're doing, and if they're interested they're free to actually help with the excavation work. Kate put Stephanie and me at Trench D2, where we worked at leveling out SU7 and 6. Although we didn't work for quite as long as we do on Mondays, we came across a full share of objects.
Stephanie and I both found a "pottery cluster" in SU7, her's in the north half, mine in the south section. These consisted of a bunch of broken ceramic pieces all bunched together. The cluster I excavated - after taking measurements of its N-S, E-W and depth coordinates - consisted of more than 30 pieces of a thin white pottery, ranging in size from a dried pepper flake, to as big as my thumb. The really fascinating thing about the cluster was that the pieces were all piled on top of each other in an extended shape like a finger, not in a round clump. It will be really interesting once we get back in the lab to see what we can make of these finds. Maybe we can even re-construct the shape of the original object.
Monday, October 29, 2007
This week was the final week of excavation work at the FBC - no more digging after this! It's a little sad as the weeks have gone by pretty quickly, but I guess it's a sign of the progress we've made. It was the last day, but nonetheless I got placed in a trench that I had yet to work in. Dan was just finishing-up taking out the last of a deposit and leveling the trench when I arrived at D4. After finishing filling-out the information on the SU forms for those SU's, we took a closing photo. This records visually the state of the trench work and stratigraphy after each level is completed. It also serves at the same time as the opening photo for the next level(s).
Since it was the last day, we wanted to reach a point where we could say that the soil coming out of the ground was no longer culturally valuable. Getting to so-called "sterile" soil would be a definitive cap on the excavation, and coincide nicely with the end of digging. With this in mind, and as instructed by Kate, we quartered the trench into 50cm x 50cm quadrants, and focused on excavating only two of them. Having to remove less area meant that we could excavate to a greater depth than if we had had to continue working on the whole 1m x 1m extent of the trench.
The first few buckets contained some artifacts - broken glass, rusted nails, clumps of a dark stone, charcoal - but things shifted over to just dirt and rocks pretty quickly. Dan removed quite a few large rocks from his quadrant, and seemed to be straddling the edge of where sand had been filled into the ground underneath the asphalt path. In my quadrant, the NE one, I worked through some very hard clay deposits and lots, and lots, and lots, of rocks. The contents of D4 were surprisingly (and frustratingly) very different from the other trenches that I had worked in previously. The clay and rocks made digging much more strenuous and a bit slower, but eventually both Dan and made it down to sand, which along with the lack of artifacts pretty-well signified that we had reached soil that was "untouched."
Monday, November 5, 2007
Last week was the last day of digging, and today was officially the last day in the field. Today's order of business was making drawings of the final states of each trench, taking samples of the soil from each stratigraphic layer, and then finally filling the trenches back up with the soil we had taken out over the past weeks. Always keeping me on my toes, Kate had me work in trench C1 this week, with Veronica and Nicole.
We started with the task of making a Top-plan, which is similar to a floor plan, or any other kind of plan, in that it records horizontal boundaries and information. For the plan as well as the other drawings we completed, I was the draughtsman, while Nicole and Veronica took the measurements and relayed them. After a false-start, we managed to get it done. The top-plan shows the dimensions of the trench at the surface, the boundaries of each quadrant within it (like Dan and I had done last week in D4, here too the trench had been quartered so as to reach a lower level), as well as the final depths reached in the center of each of those columns.
Next we had to make stratigraphic profiles, aka. standing sections, for the north- and south-facing walls of the trench. We did these two instead of only one or all four walls because they contained between the two all of the SUs within the trench. Sections entail a little bit of subjective judgment in that you have to decide where the interfaces are between layers. Sometimes this is really obvious, but it can be a little hard to tell, especially when there's not much light. But we established a consensus, and from there the process is pretty systematic. By the last drawing, we had it down pat.
Then the fun began! Well, the manual labor. Filling the trenches was a big team effort, with lots of buckets of dirt going here and there, and lots of stomping, jumping, and tamping the dirt (mostly where I applied myself). With six trenches, the back-filling took a while, and it was well past sunset by the time we finished, but finish we did! No more holes in the lawn, no more mystery objects, just six squares of sod-less dirt to mark the project.
From here on out, we'll be working indoors at the lab, going through the data and putting together a final report. Look for updates on the work!
Posted at Oct 02/2007 03:49PM:
kate: Scott this is amazing - Well done!