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Archaeology of College Hill 2006
Archaeology of College Hill 2007
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
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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]
This was our first time back in the field after we had Columbus Day off last week. The day was gorgeous and sunny, but the light is getting weaker and it’s starting to feel like fall. Most of us were bundled up against the chilly wind, although Tommy Urban, our geo-physical surveyor was happy in shorts and a T-shirt.
Instead of our typical digging, this week we split into groups of 6 and also did a geophysical survey of the property at the Nightingale-Brown House. The purpose of geo-physical survey is to detect archaeological features beneath the ground without excavating them. It’s a similar principle to using a metal detector at the beach to find treasure. It helps us narrow down where we might want to dig in future, and depending on the methods used various pictures of the subsurface can be generated. Under the guidance of Tommy Urban from the environmental geophysics group we used magnetometry and electro-magnetic induction, methods that measure magnetic fields and the potential electrical conductivity of materials, to get a sense of what might be buried beneath the lawn. Stephanie walked lines with the GEM, the electro-magnetic induction unit, and Mark spent some time with the magnetometerwalking lines. To get a better sense of what a geo-physical survey in archaeology looks like check out our video log footage of Cindy suiting up, or Dan and Cindy walking lines! We won’t have the results for a couple of weeks, because the data reduction involved is rather laborious, but we can’t wait to see what we turned up! Thanks to Tommy for coming out to help us and to Steve Lubar and Ron Potvin of the John Nicholas Brown Centeror volunteering the Nightingale-Brown house and pulling out earlier plans of the property! We had a great time.
Back at the FBC we worked in D1, D2 and D4. Veronica spent some time in D2, as did Maia, who is seen here showing off some of her brick finds. In D1 Stephanie and Mark turned up Special Find #1, a piece of bone, probably a distal humorous of a dog according to our resident archaeozoologist Lisa Anderson. Also a white and blue piece of glazed pottery with modeled palmettes came from D1. Maddy and Dan worked in D4 and things proceed as established there, with much building debris and burnt patches coming to light. Krysta Ryzewski had a look at the slag from week 4 and thinks it might be asphalt melted together with burnt rocks. We won’t find out until we crack it open in the lab though! Thanks Krysta!