Bridget's Field Blog

Monday, September 14

Today was our first day in the field, a gorgeous warm sunny day, a relief after days of rain and cold. It was an auspicious start, as we spent little time in the classroom and instead went straight into practice. We took a brief tour of the site (which is beautiful: big shady old trees, old-fashioned brick house with white trim, sweeping gently-sloped lawn, even an ivy-covered trellis), including last year's trenches (called units). Last year, they began with a geophysical survey (more productive than the one done in the FAR training session, as the site is far from waterlogged), which gave them locations of notable features and spots of resistance. After comparison with documents (a tool which makes historical archaeology much easier and much more accurate than a great deal of ancient archaeology: you know mostly what you're looking for and where it should be), the northwest corner of the site looks to have remnants of the Ives homestead, a building that was torn down in the early 1920s. A series of units were dug on the presumed foundations and along an area of strong resistance running along Benefit Street which looked like a wall. Eventually, the foundations were determined to be too deep to make it worthwhile to excavate. However, the wall was (most likely) found: units 3, 5, and 4 show, respectively, sandy brown native soil, a markedly different stack of rocks with mortar remnants, and the edge of a rock stack. As these units are nearly parallel (units 3 and 5 were only a half-meter apart), this is probably not a natural feature. So we're going to dig more there this year, in units 6 and 7.

We're also going to dig up near the main building, where we think early outbuildings might have been. There are two additions that have been built onto the main house, so digging only a few meters from those is not as crazy as it seems at first glance. It's likely that certain outbuildings, like servants' quarters and a barn, may have been close to and behind the house. So units 8 and 9 are up there.

I was assigned to unit 6, and we began by digging up last year's backfill (backemptying?). There was a tarp laid over the bottom and walls of the trench, which made it much easier than I'd been anticipating, but as the tarp had been folded in backfilling and the edges of the old trench weren't perfectly clear, it was still a chore. The square is one meter by one meter (unit 6, which encompasses last year's unit 5, measures 2m x 2m), and perhaps half a meter deep. The floor is an unnatural arrangement of large stones, clearly made by human work. However, the uneven surface made clearing the tarp hard! After a significant amount of expanding the edges of the square and yanking on the tarp to see how it moved (to help us figure out where it was!), we finally cleared all the walls and most of the dirt in the middle, whereupon we pulled out the tarp and finished, finding ourselves with a clean floor and a rough-but-better-than-anticipated square trench, just in time for the end of class.

Monday, September 21

Like last week, today was almost unpleasantly warm in the sun, which is significantly better than cold/rainy. Our site, Unit 6, is in full sun, the only unit with no overhanging trees: today, I was immensely thankful for my sunglasses and shorts, but come October, the warmth of the sun will be very welcome, as will the physical exertion of digging and sieving. I've never sieved before, so I was surprised at how exhausting it was, and it didn't help that I'm too tall and it puts a strain on my back. Once fencing season really gets going, this may become a problem, but for now, it's a satisfying, productive exhaustion.

We started by outlining the unit with string (or, as Julie prefers, twine) around the four corner-stakes and picking a datum point for the unit: the highest corner of the unit. We found this by eyeballing to find the higher corners and then using a spirit level to measure the height of those two corners above another corner. To do this, we cut a piece of string longer than the diagonal of the unit, held one end at ground level at a higher corner (the SW corner), and then raised the other end (at the NE corner) until the string was level. We measured the distance of the string above the ground at that corner, and then repeated the process with the other high corner (the NW corner). For whichever corner the height was greater, the ground was, obviously, higher, and we're now using the SW corner as our datum.

Then we set about shovel-scraping the topsoil and sifting through what we dug. We were going to start with arbitrary levels of 10 cm, but a few centimeters down, Elise uncovered a yellowish soil, so starting next week, we're going to trowel down to that and create another context. Beyond that, it was largely awkward reaching with the shovels, attempting to level a sloped bit of land, and trying not to dump too much dirt from the edges into Unit 5, the uncovered bit from last year. We've found a few artifacts so far: pieces of glass, pieces of plastic, a shard or two of brick, and some pieces of a clay pipe, which TA Elise tells me are very common artifacts in New England. I hope to see larger remnants of pipe later this semester, but digging on a wall/foundation is not necessarily conducive to whole artifacts, as I found in Portugal!

Monday, September 28

Lots more digging today! The weather was beautiful, once again - we've had good luck with that so far, especially since Mondays have tended to be framed by rain. We got down to trowelling today, as we were opening a new context in the yellowish gravelly soil we found last week, so we wanted to be careful about how we approached that. As we continued digging, we expanded the new context area. It's beginning to look like a path that sweeps at a slight angle across Unit 5 (from last year). Of course, it's far too early to be making assumptions, but the high gravel content compared to the soft moist soil in the first context area seems to mark a clear distinction. This was reinforced when we found a brick on the separation line. Furthermore, Unit 7 appears to have a continuation of the same sort of gravelly area.

Trowelling went as trowelling does: hard on the knees, but easier on the back than shovel shaving. It's always frustrating to work to get the surface perfectly level and then realize that no, that's not actually the goal, and now you need to do that again but deeper! We've also begun having problems with tree roots, and it looks like this will continue. Ah, root cutters, my old friends. At least we won't have to deal with crumbly bedrock, as in Portugal: sweeping the surface of the unit clean at the end of the day went so easily! Not a great deal of interesting finds today, apart from the brick, which was left in context, and a few round red plastic beads (I'm hoping for a bracelet).

Monday, October 5

The weather continues to favor us with gorgeous warm sun after a weekend of rain, and I'm glad for as long as it lasts. We continued digging today, hoping to get through the old context (JBH46) and open a new one, which we successfully did by the end of class! We haven't taken levels yet, so we'll need to do that next class. We also started digging in last week's new context (JBH48), which continues to be full of gravel and larger rocks. Elise and I were on JBH46, sharing a dustpan when we were trowelling and occasionally reverting to shovel shaving to get through it more quickly. We found what looks like pieces of a measuring cup: clear glass with an etched vertical line and regular crosslines, marked by ascending numbers. It was very cool: the piece with the numbers was found second, soon after we'd said, "It'd be nice to get a piece with numbers on it to confirm!" Clearly I have superpowers. I shall use them carefully, but I will have to ask the Trench Gods for more artifacts.

After digging, we went on a too-brief tour of the John Brown House itself. It's a beautiful house, perhaps the first of its kind that I could actually picture walking into for a party in the 18th century. It was so warm and welcoming. I particularly liked the displayed china over the doorframes: John Brown sent the first merchant ships to China, and he was quite proud of that. He was also quite, perhaps overly, proud of his friendship with George Washington. He named THREE of his ships after him (and in quite unoriginal ways, too: the George Washington, the General Washington, and the President Washington), as well as a good amount of the things he built. It's really quite hilarious. But my favorite part (apart from, perhaps, the tree root that ate Roger Williams, but then I'm a little morbid) was the carriage, this beautiful high-set capsule on enormous wheels, painted a warm sage green. The lines of it are so elegantly structured and it's just so well-made that I covet it. I don't care if it would be ridiculous to drive it around now; I want to go EVERYWHERE in it. It's simply incredibly, breathtakingly beautiful.

Monday, October 19

I'm starting to get a little nervous that I'm going to accidentally delete everything on this page: the EDIT EVERYTHING AT ONCE aspect is a little unnerving. But! We, once again, had a beautiful day of sunshine after a weekend of freezing rain. It's a wonderful pattern. Today we were working on two separate contexts: JBH48 and JBH52. Elise and I were on the latter, which is a clayey mottled-yellow soil positively ridden with roots, which is quite frustrating. It takes up about half the available unit, from the edge of last year's Unit 5 all the way across. The rest is rubble fill, very gravelly (which makes sifting a pain) and with a lot more artifacts than Elise and I are getting. I did, however, find something very cool right on the edge of Unit 5: it's a broken block of white ceramic wound through with ropelike metal wires, which TA Elise says they found a lot of last year. It is, apparently, ceramic electrical insulation from the early 20th century. I'm very excited and weirdly proud: there's no reason for me to be proud of finding something that was there and that someone was going to find (it's impossible to miss), but still. We also managed to level out the edges of Unit 5 that were slightly raised as we tried to figure out the difference in contexts, so the unit floor is very regular and pretty now. We did somewhat collapse some of the edges of the old hole, which bothers me, but I suppose that was inevitable, since we were digging off the top.

We also had a flirtation with disaster: unit 9, up on the hill, was FULL of water, about 3 inches deep (Alex stuck his finger in to see). I started off the day by helping Julie bail. It was actually kind of fun and made me feel productive - there's a certain part of me that just finds manual labor deeply satisfying, and digging is one thing that pleases that part of me.

Monday, October 26

I'm running out of ways to say, "it rained all weekend but Monday was beautiful"; however, it continues to be true. The weekend's heavy rain, however, did mostly collapse the edge's of Unit 5, scattering dirt and gravel across the formerly-clean and pretty rock surface they'd uncovered last year. However, TA Elise worked at cleaning that up while the rest of us "troweled aggressively" to try to get to the same level before the end of digging: we've only got two more weeks! Elise and I continue to work at JBH52, which continues to be the same mottled yellow-brown soil riddled with plant roots. There were no particularly interesting finds for us today, other than a chunk of iron and a button. However, we can measure some achievement: we have successful dug underneath the massive root dividing our context in two! It's quite satisfactory.

The other two, however, reached a layer that was sufficiently non-gravelly enough that we could declare it a new context, JBH54. TA Elise says that last year they were much more careful about declaring new contexts and so they had a lot more than we do now, but it's a very gradual transition that we should be able to sort out using the sidewalls once we've finished. They did find something interesting today: a cobblestone in a chunk of concrete. It appears people backfilling then did the same thing we do now: giant chunk of rock? Just toss it in, no big deal. It's really interesting to see that sort of continuity in the way people think and act: this is what makes archaeology fun.

Monday, November 2

Today was the first day all semester that we didn't have beautiful weather: it was grey and cold and drizzly. It's also our last day of real digging: next week we photograph, map, and backfill. So, to make the most of today, we dug as fast as we could. When we got deep enough that we were clearly into the actual feature, as evidenced by stacks of large rocks and large patches of sandy mortar mixed into the soil, we opened a new context, JBH61. The finds came thick and fast this week: chunks of brick, sections of tile, rusted nails, hunks of mortar, even an iron architectural fixture with a loop, which was interesting. The amount of iron is striking to me, especially the large footpiece (it seems) that extends from the wall of the unit in a way that we couldn't remove it without enlarging the unit. It's a thin square of iron with, instead of corners, smaller squares projecting at 45-degree angles, so that there are 16 edges to the piece (presumably. We can only see about half of it). It's clearly intended to be shaped like that, not broken, and the architect who visited last week said that it was definitely an architectural feature, probably a base for something.

Ultimately, the unit is not nearly as pretty as it once was; the soil is too crumbly in JBH61, the rocks make it difficult to dig properly, and there are no really clear lines. Unit 7, which holds the possible continuation of the feature seen here, has a beautiful wall emerging from theirs, clean and distinct. Ours is no longer enough like a wall to make such a type of feature, and we had to dig too far down before we got to it to make it clean these last few weeks. But we got a good deal of interesting information out of that excavation, so the lack of a pretty feature is not such a problem.

Monday, November 9

For our last day in the field, we returned to bright warm weather that barely merited a sweatshirt, particularly shocking as we spent the last twenty minutes of class carting dirt in the dark. Krysta and TAs Alex and Elise were out at the site by 12:30, playing excavation fairy and finishing the bits of our trenches that we didn't get to last week. By the time I got there at 3, Unit 6 was fully excavated, down to the stones that clearly made up Feature 3, with distinct lines between contexts, straight walls, and clean surfaces. There's something beautiful and orderly about a completed trench. We took final photos of the plan as well as profiles of the four walls, and we mapped the south wall. I took the western half and Elise had the eastern half, and Alyssa and Alex measured. We started by leveling a string a few inches above the ground on that wall, lined up a measuring tape with that, and measured down to each layer in the stratigraphy, marking each point on graph paper. After a bit of confusion and remeasuring, we wound up with a pretty accurate plan of that wall. It was interesting to be on the drawing half, as I was the measurer in Portugal. I think I still prefer measuring, as the drawing is a bit fidgety and precise for my tastes and abilities, but I do think it worked out OK.

After that was done, it was backfilling time! We laid a tarp down across most of the bottom of the unit and started filling up the hole, starting with last year's backfill as we'd left that on a tarp only a few feet from the unit. Then we had to start carrying buckets from the sifting station. Fortunately, Unit 7 was helping us out as there weren't enough shovels for everyone, and by the time we were really getting into the carting, the upper half had finished and could come help as well. We were getting pretty close to finishing as it began to get genuinely dark, and it was only when the bucket-runners (I was on shovel duty) began going to Unit 7 that I realized they hadn't been able to backfill theirs yet. Fortunately, theirs was about half the size of ours and much more shallow, so it didn't take us nearly as long to fill. It started getting a little creepy/funny towards the end, when Alex and I were stomping down and redistributing dirt on a hole that was roughly the size and shape of a grave (albeit with mighty neat edges), while others hurried towards us with buckets full of dirt by the light of a car's headlights. It was kind of fun to feel so shifty, especially since I knew that we weren't actually burying a body but instead preserving knowledge. We finished by 5:20, the official end of class, but it was pitch dark and we were all exhausted. It's a little sad, knowing that we won't be digging there anymore. Furthermore, I forgot to pick up a vial of dirt for memory's sake, as I did in Portugal. I'll have to do that soon, while the backfill is still fresh!