Journals 11/5/07

Week 7 at the FBC

Today, our last day at the FBC, was marked by chilly weather and an early sunset. We took advantage of the last remaining light by first drawing top-plans and sections of each trench. I worked on trench C2 with Maia, and I think we ended up accurately depicting the final state of the trench. Working with the plumbob and numerous rulers and measuring tapes can be kind of difficult, but teamwork and patience prevailed. Finally, as the light began to fade and the wind began to bite, we began backfilling our trenches with all the dirt that we dug out of them over the last 2 months. This work was difficult, as the soil was heavily saturated with water from last week's storms. This work took longer than expected, but ultimately I left the FBC looking very close to how it looked on the first day I arrived, before laying shovel or spade to the ground. Goodbye FBC!

Dan

This week was our last meeting at the FBC, and we collected the last of the data from each trench including a closing photograph, soil samples, a top plan, and a section of two of the trench walls. Maddie and I measured and drew a top plan and two sections for trench D4. The stratigraphy in D4 is actually very complex, and measuring and drawing the plans took quite a bit of time. When we finished we joined everyone else in filling in the trenches. We filled the trenches bucket by bucket and thanks to the end of daylight savings time, it was dark by the time we finished. Next week we'll be meeting in the lab to start analyzing artifacts.

Veronica

Today was the last day of our excavation adventures at the First Baptist Church. We took profiles of the trenches and closed them by back filling them with the dirt that we removed which was quite possibly the most difficult part of the entire excavation for me, but everyone got a great workout today!

We're finished......It was kind of sad. We moved so quickly. I feel as though we could have dug further. For some people this was a first time excavation so people we excited to have that experience now. We're not through yet htough. We still have the artifacts to clean in the lab which is what I am most excited about because that is one part of archaeology that I do not have as experience.

Stephanie

Well, this week was our last day in the field. I must admit, it was bittersweet. It seems like we had only just begun digging! It's crazy how quickly time passes. Anyway, I started out working in trench D1, attempting to draw a top plan of the trench. I must admit, it was a little confusing at first trying to figure out exactly how to make the necessary measurements with a level measuring tape and correctly eyeing where certain features were. What we had previously learned in section definitely applied here; just as we had practiced, we needed to clip a measuring tape to a level line and use this as our reference point for making measurements in the trench. By the time we had made and measured a few points of where the quadrants were, it was already time for my 2 pm class. I have to tell you, I was definitely happy that this was the last time I had to walk up the hill twice in one day!

When I came back from class, I was put with Cindy and Whit working on taking soil samples in trench D2. We had to take at least one soil sample from every stratigraphic unit, usually more if the unit was more than 10 cm in depth. Also, the soil samples had to be taken at the same distance from a set corner of the trench every time, to keep things more consistent. The samples were then put into labeled plastic bags, and the location of where the samples were taken were marked on the section that had been drawn for that trench. The three of us working as a team turned out to be pretty effective, so Kate made us the soil sample team for all of the trenches. I feel pretty lucky, and also pretty guilty, considering we got out of having to backfill most of the trenches!

As we neared the end of taking the soil samples from every trench, it got pretty dark outside because of Daylight Savings Time. By the time we were at the last trench, we could barely see anything! After we were done with taking soil samples, Cindy, Whit and I joined the rest of the class in finishing filling up the last two trenches. I can't believe how lucky we were getting to do the soil samples; even backfilling for the last 15 minutes of class was hard work! Plus, it was pretty cold outside and after being outside for awhile, my gloves weren't helping much anymore.

Now that we are done working in the field, I am looking forward to seeing what lab will be like (I'm sure not getting dirty will also be a nice change too!). My topic for my final paper is brick (how exciting!) but I am hoping that the brick found from the trenches can reveal something interesting about the history of church and maybe about how it was built. Well, next time I will update with some of my findings on the bricks of the FBC site!

Scott

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!

Tyler

Field Day #7: We Came, We Dug, We Backfilled... (take that, Caesar!)

The sun fell behind the towers of modern Providence and the aged churchyard fell into deep shadows, setting a sober, pensive atmosphere for our backfilling. Like brazen figures we looked as we shoveled, hauled, dumpped and sighed in the the golden-red twilight - a living Greek freize. And then darkness decended, and only my shovel's hollow scrapings against the cold earth remained to guide my motions as I toiled. Shoveling lugubriously, listening astutely in the dark...the sounds of a city and my work intermingled, the sources unseen, hidden, almost unreal...it seemed an eerily fitting culmination for two months struggling to internalize the echoes and reverberations of an unseen past...

Indeed, the day's work was surreal: after so meticulously measuring out the trenches, systematically opening a window to the past, pain-stakingly recording the final sections and top-views of trenches D1 and D3 with Chelsea today, to unceremoniously and haphazardly heave dirt back into these windows - and to seaver what had become that intimate connection to the past that contributed to my present and that I had grown to realize was a part of me - seemed an absurd labor.

Still, as sureal and sobering as it was, I must also admit how was pleasently cathartic it was to hack out a sample of the mysterious features we had pedestaled in D3 after so carefully and awkwardly digging around them for so long. Take that, you white-pebble permeated, spongy structured, persistenty puzzling buggers!

So that's that: a tub of bags, filled with an awkward amalgam, a mysterious melange (alas, how assiduously and ardously alliterative I am on this autumn afternoon!) of glass and charcoal, brick and corroded metal - this is the puzzling product of two months digging.

We opened a tunnel to the past and it spoke to us - it offered up these curious relics. Now to interpret their hidden message, to find the source - the human heart - that we hear so clearly in these fragments of the past! Though the sun set on yesterday's people that created these things, let the new light of a new day redeem their meaning for us archaeologists. Let the laboratory analysis begin!

But first, I'm going to turn out the light and rest after a taxing battle with D3's cryptic columns!

Tyler

Maia

Monday was our last day in the field! As chance would have it, it happened that I worked on the same trench I started with C2. First, we took final measurements of the trench and its depth. I drew the top plan and profile of the west wall. Luckily, the strata were fairly distinct which made it easier to draw them. This was pretty fun since I actually got to apply what we learned in section to real life practice. After taking a final picture of the site, I then went to help the other students backfill the trenches. Mostly I just did a lot of shoveling (I certainly got a pretty good week's worth of a workout). Backfilling was a strange experience in that all the hard, careful work was completely destroyed in one afternoon! It made me further realize the need to be really precise in recording information. Archaeology is essentially a destructive process, even though we are recovering information. This next week we will be working in the lab and I'll get to work on the glass pieces for my final project. I'm definitely looking forward to doing research on this!

Nicole

All good things must come to an end, and so ends our time excavating at the FBC site. Quite a bittersweet ending- it is getting too cold, the sun gone too soon, and the soil layers nearly sterile. Today we worked on cross sections of the trenchs, taking final measurements, and filling in the holes. Hands numb and noses running, we quickly made it through taking the measurements and cross sections. I am excited to see the final soil images- it is hard for me to comprehend the final product when all I see is lines and dots on graph paper. I will never forget the iced over gazes everyone had during this part of the day!

Then came the manual labor- remaniscent of some landscaping duties in my past- we carried dirt, dumped dirt, compacted dirt like machines. It was sad yet satisfying because even though digging is over, we now get to move on and explore and analyze the fruits of our labor. I cannot wait to get to cleaning!

Maddy

This week, our last on the dig, I spent much of the time creating plans of trench D4, a rather tricky trench. Especially as the sun went down, starting around 3:30 pm, it was exceedingly difficult to tell what were different layers and what were just shadows. This seems to be a constant trend in archaeology, whereby the ambient circumstances intrude into the investigation to the point of total uncertainty. There were sections that were too faint and too vague to measure precisely- more like smudges that had a faintly perceptible trend line. And there were rocks protruding slightly from the baulks, maybe enough to count but maybe not. The different soil types seemed more like different admixtures of the same soil elements, faintly distinguished from each other. But in the waning November light we did our best on two vertical views and a top plan. I enjoyed the process of creating the plan on graph paper, as a way of attempting to plot chaos onto order, but the outcome, especially for the top plan, was a little bit disappointing. There seemed to be no way within the plan parameters to express what the trench really looked like from above: It was not jsut a bunch of protruding rocks and points, but a precipitously sloping wall with many concave areas concealed from the "Bird's Eye View" that I was supposed to have of the trench. At any rate, it was a useful concluding activity, both for posterity, and to sum up the progress since I had last dug on that trench. Once we had finished our plans, the soil sampling crew came in to take tests, and than we all set to backfilling. It was an arduous and conflicting job for me, burying what was not yet completely finished. What is more is that I felt very strange burying those tarps in the trenches. It is a shame that pollution is the only way for us to mark our territory in this business. It does not seem to me that archaeology is above concerns about the environment, since we are seeing the effects of a thoughtless approach to living in a space, in everything that we dig up, especially from the Industrial and Post-Industrial eras. It is a shame to use the same tactics to mark the sites for posterity, except that this is even deliberate.

Whit

Posted 12 November 2007: Today was the last day of field work! I'm definitely happy to be moving on to the lab, but I'm sad to say goodbye to the digging component of this class. That being said, today was one of the most difficult days. First, we had to draw sections and top plans of all the trenches. I was assigned to D2 with Cindy. Ronnie and Cindy had actually already completed the top plan for this trench the previous week, so Cindy and I only had to draw the section. We drew sections for the south and east walls. I was excited to apply what we had learned in section.

After drawing the section for D2, Cindy and I, along with Stephanie began taking soil samples of all the trenches. I actually really enjoyed reading the sections and taking soil samples from each one. The different soil colors in the bags all next to each other were beautiful! By this time, the sun had already begun to set, and were getting really cold. We had to finish taking soil samples in total darkness, which, as you can imagine was extremely difficult.

The last work of the day involved backfill! I was not looking forward to this part of digging at all, and it was even worse than I thought it would be! At least it's over with, and we didn't make too much of a mess of the FBC's yard.

I'm a little worried about the final project. I'm excited about my topic -- faunal remains, so I'll just try to have fun with it. Again, I'm a little sad to stop digging, but I can't wait to get into lab to examine some of our finds!

Chelsea

This Monday was our LAST DAY at the FBC. I spent the first two hours or so drawing top plans and sections plans for Trench D1 and D3 (I think? I can never remember the names of any of the trenches other than D1), and the remaining two and half hours shoveling tons of dirt and hauling way too heavy buckets and stomping around in half-filled trenches. One of the things about back-filling the trenches that felt very strange to me (and too many of my classmates as well) was the practices of putting the tarps we'd been using to cover the trenches in the bottoms of the trenches before we began to fill them with dirt. I understand the concept of leaving mark that they were archaelogical sites, but it still strikes me as very weird and kind of wrong to be burying large sheets of plastic in the ground. It feels almost irreverent, as if we're using the front yard fo the First Baptist Church to begin a landfill. Another thing in relation to the tarps that I found pretty hilarious was Doug's insistence on taking a permanent marker and writing "Doug was here" on the tarp before he threw it in the trench. For some reason it struck me as very funny way of expressing your desire for an affirmation of your own existence....by writing on a tarp that you do indeed exist and burying it in the ground where chances are no one will ever dig it up again.

Backfilling the trenches was a LOT of work and I'm really glad that we had the entire class there to work on it otherwise I think I would have burned out pretty early on. I wish I was stronger and could carry big buckets of dirt without wincing, but just because I wish it doesn't mean I'm actually that good at it. One thing I think would be really helpful if this class continues on in years to come would be to create seperate dirt piles by every trench. It seems to me that it would be so much easier to go and grab the sifter and carry it to your trench 2-3 times in an afternoon then it was to fill ALL the dirt from ALL the trenchs back into the holes from three piles. I personally would be willing to do the little bit of extra work as the course progressed rather than the HUGE-O-MOUNGAS task of back-filling at the end. I'm making a big deal out of it, it really wasn't all that bad, but it would make more sense to have piles right next to the holes.

Oh yeah, and it was dark when we got out of class and I almost got lost and kidnapped and abducted by aliens during my lonely walk back to my little ol' freshman dorm. The end of todays entry comes now: The End!

Cindy

This was the last day digging, except we weren't actually digging, so I guess it's more accurate to say that it was the last day outside. Whit and I did sections of D2, which took a while to set up, but once we got into a rhythm it went more quickly. Then we went over and did sections of D1, and started to take soil samples of D2. This was kind of difficult since the top of the trench was not necessarily the line used to measure from when the sections were drawn, so it was often hard to plot exactly where we were getting the soil samples from. Stephanie came and helped us, and we ended up taking soil samples of all the trenches. D4 was by far the most difficult, since each side had about 10 different layers that we had to get samples of. Because of the daylight savings (but backwards) it started to get dark just after 4, and by the time we were taking samples of C2, it was pretty much so dark that we were either guessing or just taking samples based on measurements. Meanwhile the rest of the team was doing backfill. We finished soil sampling in time to help with the last few trenches, which was harder physically, but was welcome, since it was so cold sitting around and drawing. It took a little longer than normal to clean up, and we ran out of dirt to fill up the trenches with towards the end, so we had to truck it over from another spill pile, but we finished around 5:35.

Class Journals
Home