Doug

9/17/07

As though an affirmation that its loftiest tenant condoned our digging up his front yard, our initial day at the First Baptist Church was graced with a perfect September afternoon. After only a few quadrangular misadventures, we laid out D3 squarely. Making short work of the first layer of sod and soil in SU1, we accidentally demonstrated our enthusiasm for the archaeological task at hand by over-digging the most downhill corner of the trench by 5cm. Our efforts, however, were not in vain; we unearthed a lighter-colored, inch-by-inch square feature in the dirt which looked like it might have been made by a fence post being hammered into the ground. All things considered, it was a successful day.

10/1/07

My slightly tardy arrival on the first of October was greeted by Kate’s asking “are there too many yellow jackets here for you to dig in this trench? I think there’s a hive.” Fortunately, I was able to work in trench D1 instead. D1, being located next to the stairs into the church and very close to the building, contained a large number of artifacts, and a particularly large number of rusty nails. Once we had found 83 of these nails in the same SU, it was suggested that this abundance could likely have been caused by a reshingling of the church roof. In addition, we found a great deal of broken glass and brick, part of a pipe stem, and a bead.

10/15/07

Today, we observed the metaphysics of archaeology through two distinct philosophies. I walked into the front yard of the Nightingale-Brown House with an insatiable appetite for learning the fine art of slowly walking in a straight line with a fifteen thousand dollar two-by-four. My first step on the dao of remote sensing consisted of moving the guide tape across a measured grid of the yard in half-meter increments. Next, while I patiently escorted it along its grassy path, the GEM demonstrated how truth is uncovered most clearly when sought at a constant, steady, and harmonious pace. My final awakening today at the Nightingale-Brown House came from heavy magnetometer meditation: an archaeologist cannot arrive at remote-sensing nirvana through individual forceful action (i.e. a trowel); rather, only by serving as a tranquil instrument of the natural Law (i.e. magnetism).

Having clearly failed to grasp the Zen of electro-conductivity, after a brief revitalizing detour (growing archaeologists get very hungry) I returned to the FBC to practice our usual, more materialistic, approach to finding truth. Like a child tearing through Christmas morning wrapping paper (but carefully sifting it afterwards), I eagerly dug out another SU of D1, finding more nails and glass.

Experiencing these methodologies today was enlightening, and has helped me recognize one characteristic aspect of my personality. Although I am interested to see the remote-sensing results, and while I enjoyed being outdoors on a nice day, I found the passive work involved with operating sophisticated electronics to be as exciting as watching paint dry. I must admit, I prefer the instant gratification of digging holes and getting dirty.

10/20/07

Having only narrowly avoided drowning the day before, I arrived at the FBC’s “Community Dig Day” fully expecting to find an ark run aground mid-slope on College Hill. After a weak attempt to convince Kate that the flood ate my paper, I was sent to wallow in the glorious mud of trench C2. To both my surprise and relief, the blue tarps had dammed out the torrent fairly effectively, and the cubit by cubit sized pit had not been completely inundated by the monsoon. That being said, however, the ground was a far cry from dry.

Given the previous day’s frog-pleasing conditions, the local community’s sparse attendance was understandable; presumably the myriad of curious spectators had either not yet returned from seeking higher ground, or had been moistly smitten by a wrathful God. There were, however, a few intrepid Deucalions populating the day’s event; one such Gilgamesh was the FBC’s historian, who regaled us with epic tales of recent church history. As we applied trowel to New England Ararat, he informed us that the crumbling stone wall on the east side of the property, parts of which date to the late eighteenth century, has been falling down since 2005 on account of traffic’s hitting the curb. I was surprised to hear how many potentially serious accidents there have been on site, even including a car which found a vertical parallel parking spot in the fifteen foot abyss at northeast corner of the building. Remarkably, with all these collisions, there has been only one fatality- that of a woman who fell over the wall having lost control of her horse.

In addition to easily-anticipated finds like glass, nails, and drowned earthworms, we extracted a curved iron object that had been half exposed the previous Monday. There was much debate as to its identification; initially it was suggested that it might be a gardening implement… given, however, the aforementioned steeplechase, I proposed it was a broken horseshoe. All things considered, “Community Dig Day’s” damp ground was worth its weight in extra credit. At least it wasn’t held in the pouring rains of the preceding day.

Doug
Field Team
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