Ben Jones' Field Blog

Monday, September 13: It was amazing to get out in the field for the first time! After looking at magnetic imaging maps of the area, and hearing about previous years' discoveries, we decided that we wanted to focus on the previous year's unit seven, and attempt to uncover a fountain shown in pictures of the house from the 40s, and the front door of the old Hale-Ives house. The Historical Society would also like us to see if we can find where the old drains lay under the lawn, but we're leaving that for later, when we get a go-ahead from the managers to dig up an industrial-looking hole we found. For today, one group broke off to unbackfill unit 7, while the rest of us used the shape of the ground and the magnetometry map to guess at where the fountain and door might be located. We staked out 2m x 2m squares in these areas, where we will begin excavations next week. I feel that each will present a unique challenge. While the fountain may be easy to identify, we have a very large chunk of the yard in which to search for it, and may not find it on the first test pits. Though we are starting with a general idea of where the front door might be, it will probably be hard to see how close we are unless we come down right on top of it. I forsee a lot of moving of plots, unless we get very lucky. The exterior of the JBH presents a beautiful backdrop to our excavations. It's very nice to get outside for this, and working in the field feels almost meditative. Great first day!

Monday, September 20: Today I and my group at Unit 10 (the HIH group) began our excavation work in earnest. After taking pictures and marking the elevation of the four corners of our plot by pulling out a string from the highest corner with a level attached and measuring from the straight string down to the ground, we laid out a tarp and sifter and began digging. We had to first trowel a channel into the ground a foot's width inside the edge of our plot, so as not to run outside the plot with our shovels. Then we began to skim off the top 4cm of dirt with our shovels. The resulting dirt pile was very difficult to sieve, due in large part to the sheet of moss which overlaid our entire plot. Fortunately, we got all the moss off through the day's excavations, so we won't have to deal with that again. Next: roots! Sifting through the dirt revealed mostly relics of our own time, including pieces of glass (probably from beer bottles) and bits of plastic. We did make a small pile of interesting rocks and seeds we found, which, if it doesn't come in handy later, is at least fun to look at. We were particularly excited about the finding of a severely tarnished (almost to the point of unreadability) dime from the year 1982. Though the dime may have been deposited any time since then, it at least helps date our 2cm layer. I believe the excavation will make faster progress in future, now that we don't have a pile of moss to contend with.

It's always Monday, September 27: Today we took a tour of the RI Historical Society library and the John Brown House museum. I am certainly glad of the resources available at the library, though I must confess the filing system made my head spin a little. I think I will be asking for help finding things frequently when I work on my project. The JBH museum was wonderful. We started things off on the right foot with the root that ate Roger Williams, which was fascinating and more than a little hilarious. The house itself was beautiful, though throughout the tour, I found myself agreeing much more with Marsden Perry's aesthetic than with the Browns'. Granted, he did have more technology to work with, but the example of the original whitewashed flooring gave me a bit of a turn. Also, I wish my building had that bathroom. The tour guides were extraordinarily helpful and interesting, and assured us that the house is not normally so dusty. Until they pointed it out, I actually hadn't noticed; the rooms were far too captivating. I was interested by John Brown's interest in George Washington, which seemed somewhat overbearing. I don't usually consider that Washington must have been almost as much of a legend while he was alive as he is today. All in all, a very interesting trip, which gave us a solid context in which to consider our excavations, and perhaps some research project ideas...

October 4: Today we resumed work on our unit. I admit I was skeptical at first of what we were going to find. We weren't that deep, but were only finding more and more black dirt. The recent rain didn't help matters, making it difficult to tell whether the previously loose sandy soil had changed in composition as we dug, or if it was simply wet. However, a promising new context soon presented itself in the form of an emerging layer of orangey clay-like soil. We began turning up shards of pottery, both porcelain and simple white glazed wares, similar to those we saw in the kitchen on our tour of the JBH. We were ecstatic to find the first pieces of evidence from the period we are seeking. We also turned up several fragments of what appears to be terra cotta, though we are unsure of whether these are human-made or simply a feature of the clay-filled soil. A particularly exciting find was a triangular piece of stone; too precise to have been a natural formation. Prof. Ryzewski tells us that it appears to be a chinking stone, used to fill in gaps between larger stones in a wall or similar structure. This is extremely encouraging, as it suggests the presence of architecture in our plot. We may yet find the front of the HIH! We ended the day by scraping off a great deal of what remained of the black dirt layer, preparing to start a new context when re return in two weeks. If the weather stays as nice as it has, our clay layer should be undisturbed. I can't believe we have to wait so long to find out what is under this new layer.

October 18: We spent the first part of today clearing the rest of the black dirt off our new layer. Once we had exposed a relatively consistent surface of the mottled orange and brown (what Prof. Ryzewski termed "calico cat") soil, we did a video entry and photographed the site, recording it as a new context. This new context quickly yielded some impressive (at least to us) finds. The digging teams quickly turned up a bent, rusted, pre-1900 nail, and shortly thereafter, a piece of a ceramic pipe. The pipe fragment was a particularly exciting find, as it contained a bit of the foot and the maker's mark, making it an extraordinarily diagnostic artifact. Digging deeper, we started running into patches of stones grouped together, surrounded by nails and mortar fragments. Could we be descending onto an architectural feature? Digging with trowels so as not to disturb a possible wall, we also began uncovering pockets of strange, bright orange soil, which turned out to be the disintegrated remains of bricks. We left some of these pockets exposed but undisturbed, in the hope that they would dry and be able to be extracted. However, the examples we have found so far have been so powdery that I doubt we will be able to unearth an intact shard from any of the orange pockets.

October 25: We continued to shovel shave down through the calico cat layer, eventually finding a patches of an emerging black soil. Could this be a new context? We found many rusty nails in the current layer, as well as several strips of iron surrounded by nails at the very edge of the pit, which appear to be a hinge of some kind. We also found a large wishbone-like piece of metal, which has been interpreted to be either a bootscraper, sign bracket, fireplace hook or something of the like. Definitely domestic architecture. We also found a vast quantity of brick and several pieces of interesting pottery, including some yellow ware, which we hadn't seen in our pit before. We continued digging through section, quitting only as it grew dark. Because of this, we made very good progress, though I believe we will have to continue our fast pace if we are to reach any architectural features this semester.

November 1: We had a fantastic day of digging, assisted by Allison's father! After a site check-in, we quickly set to work and began uncovering massive quantities of nails, as well as other shaped iron pieces, larger than any we had found before. We continued digging around our new context, which took the form of a cluster of stones with attached mortar in the Northwest quadrant of our unit. These stones fit together enough to look architectural, and are surrounded by bricks and large chunks of iron. We made several striking finds today. One very interesting piece of pottery was uncovered, unlike anything we had seen before. It had blue, white, and black stripes, and was of a very shiny glaze type we had not encountered before. We also found an intact glass bottle with the stopper (a cork with a screw attached) still in it! The glass label preserved on the side identifies it as a perfume bottle. We are also starting to hit a large number of pieces of smelt, which we had found a few of, but not positively identified, earlier. From what I have seen, I have my doubts that a significant architectural feature extends under the stones that we have labeled context 73, or that if there is one that we will reach it this season, but I hope that we will be able to positively identify what we have found as a specific type of domestic architecture.

November 8: This was unfortunately our last week of digging. To finish up, we decided to bring the NW corner, context 73, down to the level of the surrounding context 68, which Laura and Allison had dug out over the weekend. Descending through the stone, mortar, and brick rubble of context 73, we removed the chunks of masonry and separated them into piles. We found many pieces of iron and glass among the rubble, but nothing underneath, showing that this was not, in fact, an architectural feature. The prevailing guess at the moment is that it is the remains of a window that was dumped here when the HIH was torn down. This fact was supported after the day's digging in the lab when, while cleaning the pieces of metal, we found that one of them was a wheel for a window pulley. Several others looks like they could be window joints, and the abundance of glass further reinforces the idea that a window was used for fill or simply tumbled into context 73 when the house was demolished. After getting context 73 down to the level of context 68, we went to work with the root cutters and cleaned up the site for a final picture. Bringing our artifacts back to the lab, we began the cleaning process. Pottery was the most enjoyable, as we could use water, which meant it went fast and produced the most impressive results. We all got a little sick of cleaning iron, but the window pieces made these efforts worthwhile, in my opinion. I am looking forward to cleaning some of our more exciting finds next week!

November 15: We spent today completing our documentation and closing our unit. We took Munsell samples and depths that we didn't have already, and marked on the wall of the unit the split between contexts. We were not able to mark context 73, as it never appeared in the wall, so this task was very simple. We then drew a diagram of the contexts in the North wall to scale. We also took pictures of the four walls of the unit. We then began to backfill the unit. We first threw a coin from this year into the hole, to provide a date for future archaeologists. We then laid a tarp over the unit and topped it with the bricks and stones we had removed from context 73, so that if the unit is ever re-excavated, the team will have some idea of the kind of large masonry bits we found, but could not take back to the lab. We then began to shovel dirt back into the hole. After a while, the teams from the other units came to help us, and we formed a bucket chain to move the dirt from the pile to the unit. We then did the same thing for Unit 10. Next week we will come out and backfill Unit 11. We did not work in the lab today.

November 22: We started class with everyone backfilling Unit 11, the last open unit. It required two tarps to cover the contours of this complex double unit. We piled the large heap of rocks they had accumulated into the whole, and made quick work of the dirt pile. When we were done, we carried all the equipment back to the shed, and headed to the lab. At the lab, we finalized our choices for object biographies, and set to work cleaning the remainder of our finds. This went rather slowly, as we had a large accumulation of nails and bricks that could not be washed. Hand scraping each nail with the wire brush was incredibly time consuming, and took up most of the day. However, we completed the task, and our large pile of nails looks slightly less grimy than before. We also opened the perfume bottle to discover a distinct scent still inside! We have resealed it and are going to investigate further when we have more time. All our objects are now cleaned and sorted, and we can get to work in earnest on our analyses next week!