Olivia Petrocco's Field Blog

Sept. 13:

Our first meeting of The Archaeology of College Hill was mainly spent orienting ourselves with the procedures of the class and the basic layout of our home for the semester, front yard of the John Brown House. While one group started to reopen a unit from previous years (Unit 7), most of the class worked to layout new units, both square 2 meter by 2 meter plots. The first plot was on the southern end of the yard, in the area where a large fountain once stood. Our second plot is on the north side of the yard, near Charlesfield Street. The second plot is in the area of the Robert Ives house.

I'm looking forward to returning to our carefully laid plots next week to start digging!

Sept. 20:

Our second meeting at the John Brown house was an exciting start to the real excavation process. I joined the team that will focus on Unit 10, the most southern lot in the area where a fountain previously stood. Our excavation process started by taking preliminary photographic evidence of the unit's appearance, saving even the Bud Light Lime cap on the surface as historical evidence of the land's current use.

The actual digging process proved a little challenging, as the unit is riddled with a network of approx. half-centimeter diameter roots. They are everywhere! I can already sense that Unit 10 will become very familiar with the root saw by the end of our excavations. While we switched off working with the shovels, some of our group began to use the sifters to look through the removed soil for artifacts. Again, the root clusters make this a somewhat laborious task, but the reward of finding small pieces of human-made artifacts on our first day made it well worth it. The most notable artifact was not a beer cap but instead a small chip of blue painted earthenware. I can't wait to get back next week to find more things!

Sept. 27:

I was absent this week.

Oct. 4:

Our third true day of digging brought a lot of fun and some promising larger finds. As usual, our plot was absolutely littered with roots, so we set out to even out our context and level the territory. The sheer volume of roots in our territory never ceases to amaze. We were curious about a discoloration between two portions of the dirt, but it seems that the two soil types are different contexts but rather a different of dryness in one soil type.

I mainly worked the sifter for the second half of our session, and so I had the personal pleasure of shaking out a very distinct and intact rusty nail, along with what appears to be the bottom portion of a brick. Can't wait to check them out in the lab!

Oct. 18:

We set out today to get a lot of work done quickly, evening out our unit to become more level and taking up a lot of soil. We are watching our walls to make sure they do not collapse. In the process, we uncovered a new, more clay-like context.

This new context is full of many larger earthenware shards, now large enough so that we can see the overall pattern rather than just differentiations in color. Our team is hopeful that we will be able to put the shards back together to form a complete piece of ceramic. We are also finding lots of glass pieces, and the remains of old nails (now barely recognizable). I'm looking forward to really exploring this new context.

Oct. 25:

Today our unit faced a major obstacle when we uncovered a modern irrigation running through the southern portion of our plot. We have had to sacrifice the a portion of our excavations in order to preserve the functionality of the modern irrigation system. Though initially I was heartbroken to find the pipe, as I assumed it would mean that the area had been recently excavated in order to dig the trench for the pipe, and thus would mean that our context had no historical significance from within the context, Krysta saved the day by informing us that there is a modern method of laying the pipes that does not require digging but rather a pressurized system for pushing the tube through the dirt up the hill. Our context was not recently disturbed. However, after sectioning off the portion of the unit in which the pipe runs, we began to form a new wall off of the sectioned off portion and continued to dig in earnest.

We moved a lot of dirt and uncovered more of the same type of finds as we have been so far, like ceramic shards, rusted nails, brick pieces and charcoal. We also uncovered a tooth attached to a jaw bone, from what seems to be a pig or a horse. Although we are lacking in the high profile finds of Unit 11's tiles, we have turned up quite a high volume of artifacts. I am optimistic that we will be able to put together some interesting conclusions once we wash off and examine our finds.

Nov. 1:

Today we hit the ground running and dug like there was no tomorrow. This was made significantly more difficult as Max is busy during class working on his final project, but Cindy, Brandon and I still managed to get a lot of dirt out of the ground. We are uncovering lots of mortar in the context, but there are no emerging patterns that would suggest we are uncovering any structures. However, we continued to unearth more glass, ceramics, bricks, nails, and charcoal. We also found a large animal tooth. Our ceramic shards became more diverse this week, as we discovered patterns that were pink, both blue and green, green, and plain black. Also, we discovered a portion of a bottle neck, and a larger glass shard with the letters DYE.

Next week, we will dig like there is no tomorrow, and see how much we can get out of Unit 12 before we are forced to backfill. It is getting too cold.

Nov. 8:

This was a fateful week, as it was our last week as excavators of Unit 12. Next week we will backfill all of the hard work we have done and say goodbye to the field. Our last week started pretty miserably, as Max and I were the only two members of the unit there to open up the unit, which was considerably more difficult than usual as large pools of water had collected on top of the tarp that protects our plot from the elements. When Max and I tried to move the tarp without spilling water on our unit, we failed. The entire western half of the unit filled with water, which we had to bail out like a seaboat. It sat a bad mood for the day, as it became difficult to get dirt out of our unit as well as to sift it. The sifting process became so taxing that all four of our team were focused on sifting for a large portion of the day. In our last half hour, it became clear that there was more to be gained from trowelling than sifting, so all four of us took to troweling the unit. We hit glacial deposit while digging, and so at least we know that (except for Paleolithic inhabitants) we excavated all of the possible human remains from the unit.

After digging, we went back to the lab in the carriage house to wash and dry artifacts. The process begins by separating metals and mortar from other, washable objects. Bone is a special category, as it can be washed but must be handled with care lest it disintegrate. So, washable objects (pottery, class, stoneware, etc.) were toothbrush scrubbed in tubs of water and placed on (well-labeled) screens to dry. To stay organized, it is important to only wash artifacts from a single context at any given time. We will continue with washing next week, as there was not enough time to clean all of the artifacts.

Looking forward to cleaning off more artifacts next week! But not so much the backfilling.