Key Pages:
Archaeology of College Hill 2006
Archaeology of College Hill 2007
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
Search JIAAW:
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]
Today was a gorgeous day on site! The weather was sunny and clear and the temperature between 80 and 85. These are the types of days that an archaeologist lives for.
Digging continued in all the trenches. We lost a couple of members due to schedule conflicts, but Maia joined the team this week. Check out our team photo to get a better idea of who we are, or read our weekly log entries linked through our names on the field team page!
Digging was a little slower this week than last, partly because we all had to share the same screen (the other two were at the Haffenreffer Museum in Bristol for the afternoon) which caused a slight backup when sieving dirt. Overall people finished Su 2, putting the trenches at more or less 20-30 cms deep.
Even though the pits are still shallow some really interesting pieces came to light this week. Scott and Mark in D3 continue to puzzle over the three square features in the middle of it. They are roughly in a linear sequence, and appear to be the remains of rotten wood in post holes, but, as seen from the one we bisected they are scattered throughout with hard white pebbly things. If people have suggestions – please let us know! In D1 Chelsea pulled up a piece of glass with a colored swirl in it, reminiscent of a broken marble and also a pipe bowl. Whit and Stephanie in C1 had s piece of printed glass and the base of a clear octagonal bottle of some sort – one of the most exciting finds of the day! A really exotic piece was pulled up by Tyler and Maddy in D2. It’s a piece of very delicate porcelain with blue and red painting that seems to be the lattice part of a piece of perforated porcelain from a dish or ornament. Porcelain was also recovered from D3, and a black and white fragment of printed pottery or cheap porcelain was pulled from C2 by Maia and Nicole. Finally, Cindy and Dan made it into the 4th Su in trench D4 and were pulling up really large chunks of slag all day, which raises the possibility of smelting or refining nearby.
This week we also added the video camera to site, several clips from which can be seen in our videolog. Feel free to check out our short clips to get a better feel of what it’s like on site. This week Mark and Scott demonstrate soil sifting and Chelsea explains about record keeping in archaeology.
Finally, Noura Choudhury from the Brown Daily Herald came by to see the dig and get some information for a story she is writing about The Archaeology of College Hill. Look for it in the BDH on Friday!