Journals 10/22/07

Week 5 at the FBC

Today I spent the day in trench C1 alongside Veronica, digging through a great deal of yellow-colored dirt without finding much. Notable artifacts included a large piece of glass and quite a bit of brick. More importantly, Vernonica and I learned firsthand the importance of careful documentation through a mishap involving our interpretation of last week's SU sheet. The sheet gave us the impression that last week's group had finished SU4 and that we should start SU5. SU4, however, was a natural layer, and upon digging for a while we realized that SU4 had not in fact been finished because the soil looked very different in some parts of the trench than others. To rectify this situation, we called everything we had dug part of SU4, and we started two new layers, SU5 and SU6, which will both be excavated separately because of their drastically different soil types. SU5 is very yellow, and its texture is that of sand and clay mixed. SU6, on the other hand, is brown, and the soil is quite chunky. Solving this problem gave us a taste of the logistical nightmare that a dig can become if everything is not meticulously documented. Imaging doing a 100 square foot excavation with a 5 million dollar grant and realizing halfway that, oops, someone messed up the SU sheets for the soil and now the artifacts that have been discovered cannot be traced to the layer of sedimentation in which they were found. Such mistakes can be costly and catastrophic for a dig; luckily,Veronica and I caught this early on and fixed our mistake quickly.

Veronica

Today I worked in trench C1 again which hadn't been touched by anyone since the last time that Whit, Stephanie, and myself worked in it (see above). This trench seems to be filled with more pieces of brick than any other trench that I've worked at so perhaps that calls for some interretation once we get into the lab. We also found huge pieces of glass in one layer that we dug in. Then we continued another layer but did not find much. Since this trench is right next to the FBC building, I'm hypothesizing that most of the artifacts deep in the ground in this area is a result of construction on the building, but that, too can be investigated later.

Dan

This week I dug in trench D2, in the southwest corner of the site for the first time. It was so warm this week that it was borderline uncomfortable. Just before I arrived Cindy uncovered a fragment of the bowl of a clay pipe in D2. Trench D2 has gotten fairly deep (over 50cm) making it somewhat awkward to dig in. However, as we continued to dig we found a cluster of ceramic fragments in a roughly circular shape. The cluster may be a nearly complete, but shattered, saucer or cup. The soil composition quickly became sandy with pockets of dark soil. As we dug deeper an increasingly large number of brick fragments began to show up, and we eventually uncovered a number of bricks in the northeast corner that appeared to be organized in a quarter of a ring (the rest of the ring, if it exists, would be outside the area of the trench). We mapped the locations of the bricks before removing them. A fairly large number of clam shells and some small to medium sized chunks of charcoal were found at the same level as the bricks. It seems that the bricks may surround a hearth where food was prepared for a picnic or some other gathering.

Stephanie

This week, I started off working in D2 with Cindy. We worked on leveling out SU 7 (I believe) until it reached the level of SU 6, which is a strip on the eastern side of the trench. I was very lucky to find the majority of what is most likely a pipe bowl; I was very excited about the discovery! We did not call it a special find, but documented it and took pictures. There were no maker's marks on it that I could see, but I wonder if we will be able to learn anything else about the pipe bowl once we get into the lab.

When I came back after my 2 o'clock class, I worked on trench D4 with Maia. I must admit, I found it much easier to dig in this trench than in D2 because it was much shallower; D2 is much deeper so far and it often hurts your back to bend over while working. I find it easiest to lay on my stomach and dig when we start to get very deep down! (Needless to say, I also get very dirty). Anyway, the composition of the soil in D4 was also much more complicated; it appeared to be a kind of mish mash of all different types - clay, loose dirt, and plenty of rocks! Kate told us that most likely many of the rocks were a result of the trench's close proximity to the road, which makes sense. Not only would construction result in a lot of rocks in this area, but also simply the constant action and movement on Angell Street often kicks up rocks and other debris into the church yard. We continued to dig a new 10 centimeter arbitrary level in SU 6, leaving a darker charcoal-looking strip called SU 5 at the northern end of the trench. We only found one piece of pottery (it looked like it was glazed), but found several pieces of glass (mostly flat glass, like from windows), metal (especially nails) and bricks.

I really enjoyed talking to Maia, and it definitely made the time pass by more quickly. We also felt each other's pain when we carried our heavy buckets of dirt to the sifters!! It took us awhile to realize we should start sifting when our buckets were only about half full! It was a beautiful day, and hopefully next time it will be as well.

Tyler

First of all, let me say that I give kudos to anyone who can follow the bombastic ramblings of last week... I hope to keep my feet on the ground and my mind on the artifacts and evidence it contains for this week and evermore!

This said, I would like to explore (beyond the veil of the last entry's beguiling, bombastic tone!) the differences I have been pondering and developing between history - one of my fields of concentration here at Brown - and archaeology - what I am finding is a fundamentally different way to view the past as I become more gradually accustomed to the field. As I worked with Chelsea in the artifactual paradaise that is the D1 trench this week, pulling out a pipe stem, a bone fragment, and cashes of glass and corroded nails, I began to internalize the fact that human activities, like my own of the present on this very spot distributed and deposited the materials I am finding; moreover, I began to understand the limitations of both history and archaeology as lenses to examine the past. After all, it is not often that we consider the limitations on what we can know beyond our fascination with the inifinity of interaction that is the universe and the world in which we live.

Indeed, as an archaeologist, I am beginning to see the past as a painter's canvas, a story in an environment of four dimensions - that is, a continuous reinvention of a 3-D space (in the largest sense, the entire Earth's surface) through time by different people. We are all painters that project our ideas as new realities onto the earth's surface, the medium of the soil, that past painters reworked just as we rework. As I said in the last entry, we inherit a world that has been defined by that earlier reality that we never knew, but in our investigation of that canvas, that common ground through archaeology, that past reality becomes a tangible part of our existence as we bring its fragments up from the layers of time. And moreover, we create a past as an understanding of the evolution of this canvas. In this way, the world is a collective masterpiece on which successive generations react to earlier artists' strokes and methods. In archaeology, we are removing the layers of the ages one by one to see the tangible relics of how former artists reworked this same ground, this common canvas.

This, I think, is fundamentally different from the nature of the past as seen in the historical world. Indeed, history is a study not of the tangible products of culture but ideas made universally cognizant only through communicative tools - that is, writing and oral language that convey intangible ideas or try to recreate tangible past realities. The key is that historical documents do not preserve contexts of location and time as perfectly as do artifacts. Artifacts are, by their nature and their relationship to other materials, a multidimensional record of realities that together make the past. Archaeology must be studied in a specific location, where history, as related by moveable, mutable historical documents that represent only point ideas in time, do not preserve definitively the locational (environmental) aspects of their origin; think of it this way: reading the Declaration of Independence in Independence Hall or perusing the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls does not give me a greater understanding of the ideas they express than if I read them in New Pembroke #2 201 at Brown University, whereas archaeology must be conducted in the area that was once used by the . In sharing this ground, the activities of the people of the past become tangible to us in the present - the ground, that canvas, is an intersection of our collective story. Present and past, it might be said, necessarily become one...

I will stop short of saying that archaeology is a superior lens with which to view the past, for this is would neglect, I think, the function of ideas - communicated across time by the documents studied in history - in shaping what we call the past. Indeed, I would say that history informs archaeology (a concept that became clear as I pondered how to go about conducting the investigation I proposed in my mock CRM proposal project in respect to the background information about the site), as information that we uncover archaeologically becomes a part of the history as we record it (an ironic concept, don't you think? Can archaeology ever stand alone as a record of the past? Can history for that matter?

Perhaps it can be said that the past has a tangible and an intangible component, as a person is both corporeal and a world onto itself in his or her imagination, a multifaceted entity that is understood only through the combination of archaeological and historical paradigms or lenses...

Oh dear, all these lenses are making me cockeyed! Off to add my brushstrokes to the collective human masterpiece at our feet,

Tyler

Maia

On Monday I worked on D4 with Stephanie. This test pit is located on the north side of the church centered between North Main Street and Benefit and is situated close to the road. Unlike the soils of C2 and D2 (the two pits I dug previously), the composition of D4 was very rocky from building material debris. All we did not find much pottery (one glazed piece), we unearthed lots of brick pieces, nails and glass fragments. This is probably to be expected since the pit is located right next to the road where there has undoubtedly been a lot of construction. I also learned during the Community Dig Day this past weekend that there have been a number of accidents on Thomas Street. Apparently, a car crashed through the church’s north wall one time!

When we started digging the pit was not very deep. There were two SU layers, one was SU5 which was a strip of charcoal on the northern edge of the pit and the other was SU6 which was the rest of the pit. We left SU5 and continued to dig SU6. By the end of the day we were a few centimeters less than 50 cm, however, we were not able to finish the SU by the time we cleaned up. The soil in this area was mixed, some parts were compact and grayish in color, other parts had patches of sand. Although the finds themselves did not reveal as much, I’d be interested to know more about the strip of charcoal which we left alone. I wonder was this once part of a hearth? Or garbage dumps? In this week’s reading we read an article about pedology which showed the importance of the science of soil for archaeology not only for dating and stratigraphy, but also for learning more about the learning more about the nature of the various soil layers through chemical analysis. I am not sure if we will be doing soil samples this season, but it would be interesting to study what we can tell just from such a small sample.

Nicole

Today's dig was very short, as I had to leave class early, but very exciting. I worked on the Northwest part of the Lawn at D3, which was a huge change from the trench near the stairs. Not only were there drastically fewer artifacts per soil layer at this site, there were several pedestals throughout the trench which made it difficult to dig. The unknown soil/rock/roots that are contained within the pedestals are still a mystery to all of us, and I can only hope that in the next few weeks we will be able to investigate what they could potentially be! An old garden site? Posts for an old fence?

And, of course, my obsession with finding shiny beautiful things was fulfilled by stumbling upon an old coin, from 1894, at the southeast corner of the trench. Nearly all the text was worn off and the picture was faint, but 1894 was easily visible after dusting it off a bit. (If I were a gambler...) It would be easy to take this coin as a sign that more are to come, but I know I was lucky just to find one!

Maddy

I am disappointed that we are ending our dig so soon. It is highly unlikely that any of the trenches will reach the point required by American Archaeological standards, of two consecutive empty stratigraphic units, before we backfill them. This is of course the nature of the undergraduate semester system, in conjunction with the New England climate. It was just getting good! For all my enthusiasm, Whit and I dug this past week in trench C2, also known as the most boring trench Ever. Each SU yielded approximately 5 artifacts, none of which bore any particular relation to any other. Despite this, I think that beginning an excavation should ideally entail pursuing it until there is really nothing left, whether bedrock or just pure dirt. The reality is, of course, that the First Baptist Church is a site of moderate archaeological relevance, and that a full-fledged, no-holds-barred excavation is really not necessary. As such, I am looking forward to the next one and 1/2 days in the field, and especially to the subsequent laboratory analysis of our finds.

Chelsea

This week I spent once again in D1. I like that trench for a number of reasons. For one, we actually find things there, but also the angle of the land makes digging more interesting/comfortable. Or maybe I'm just emotionally attached to the silly trench. This week I dug with Tyler and we found a pipe stem as well as something that looked like some sort of animal bone but no one was really sure. The rest of the artifacts were normal for D1 (glass, metal etc). It was a beautiful day for digging and I ended up not getting as antsy as I usually do. Four and half hours actually passed relatively quickly this week. One exciting thing that happened this week in D1 was the transition from arbitrary SUs to natural ones. We ended up reached SU7 and SU8 which are horizontally on the same level but different soil types. We didn't get very far into delineating the differences between the two SUs before the day was over however.

Cindy

This week I was again in D2, first with Stephanie. Apparently during the community dig day, they had found a few clusters of porcelain sherds, and sure enough within about 20 minutes we found two more. The porcelain was extremely thin and flaky, and was consequently difficult to pick up. Stephanie also uncovered part of a pipe bowl, and later found another piece of it. Later, Dan joined me, and we dug down for a while through very sandy soil, which went quickly. We united SUs 6 and 7 into a single SU8. It was an unseasonably hot and sunny day and I'd forgotten to bring water. After a few hours, we had come across a number of bricks in the North end of the trench. There had also been two bricks which fell out of the baulk just before. So we uncovered the bricks, and then got to draw a top plan of them. There were 8 brick chunks, none of them whole. None of them had any markings on them either, but were just plain brick. After the top plan was finished, we dug some more, removing the brick. It took a very long time to count all of our finds, since in addition to the 8 large chunks, there were over 200 smaller pieces of brick, not to mention all the porcelain sherds, pieces of shell, metal, and charcoal.

Whit

I totally forgot to post my journal entry. It's a little late. Honestly, not much happened on this day of digging. I was assigned to C2 for the first time with Maddy. I have to say I absolutely hate this trench. We didn't find very much at all. We found a few interesting things, but mostly this trench seems to be empty. We thought we had dug past any colonial history, but then we found a piece of plastic, proving that we were still in the modern layer. I would think that this part of the church's lawn was probably disturbed during the construction of Benefit Street, so any artifacts that may have been in this part of the lawn were destroyed or buried, and all stratigraphy was likely ruined. It was still a beautiful day, and I was very happy to be outside! But I recommend that we stop digging in C2, and focus our attention on the test pits that yield more finds.

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