Valerie Bondura

Week 1 (Sept. 12, 2011):

This was the first meeting of the ARCH1900 class for the Fall 2011 dig season at the John Brown House. It was immediately apparent that this course is not like a traditional class (in a good way). We all met at the Joukowsky Institute to review the aims of the course and get to know one another. Our professor, Jessica, made it clear from the beginning that this was a hands-on project that would be almost entirely organized by us, the students. This means that more than in a lecture or seminar course, we are truly a team, planning, working, and reflecting together.

We first had a brief lecture on the history of the John Brown House, then we reviewed a wide variety of maps of the property, from maps produced by fire insurance companies in the 19th and 20th centuries to maps produced by previous excavators. With this information in mind, we headed down to the property itself. At the site, we walked around and looked at the areas that had been excavated (and then backfilled) by groups of students in previous years. We learned what these other students had found at which areas and by combining this information with our maps of the property, we decided where we would be excavating this year. We are a small group and therefore chose 3 separate units, 2m x 2m in size, in different areas of the site.

The first new unit we decided upon, Unit 14, is the one I chose to work on. It is located between previously excavated Units 2 and 10. It is on the corner of the property near the intersection of Charlesfield St. and Benefit St. Archived maps of the property showed us that there used to be a structure somewhere in this area, the Hale-Ives House. Both previously excavated units in the area unearthed some materials but neither managed to find one of the walls of the demolished house. The insurance maps we have available to us are quite old and therefore there are some discrepancies between maps of different years, but all place one wall somewhere between Units 2 and 10. Our new unit, Unit 14, is almost directly halfway between the two but angled in a direction the others aren't. This is because we also used geophysical maps done by previous groups to inform the placement of Unit 14. These geophysical maps showed areas of potentially dense, non-soil material beneath the surface northwest of the (invisible) straight line that runs from Unit 2 to Unit 10. Hopefully we've chosen well and will, in fact, uncover part of the Hale-Ives House this year! Today all we were able to do was measure out our unit and outline it with twine anchored by four nails in each corner of our 2m x 2m square but next time, we're all ready to get started digging, which I'm very excited about.

Week 2 (Sept. 19, 2011):

Today we didn't work directly with the excavation part of our project (i.e. we didn't get our hands dirty) but rather we were given the opportunity to learn more about the John Brown House, its inhabitants, and its historical context.

As a group, we went on a guided tour of the house which both began and ended with historical contextualization of the periods we are focused on. In the beginning, we learned a little about the city of Providence in the 1780s, the decade in which the J.B. House was constructed. There were about 4,000 people living in the city at the time, which is hard to imagine looking at the city now. Even harder to imagine was how the city must have looked. At the time of its construction, the J.B. House sat at one of the highest points in the city and had a direct, unobstructed view down to the Narragansett Bay and the harbor that John Brown's merchant ships would have been entering and leaving from on a regular basis. Today, the harbor is no longer really the central focus of the city, which seems to have shifted to the downtown area, which is located in the "valley" between College Hill and Federal Hill. During the entire tour, I was trying to imagine how the house was experienced by John Brown and his family, which included forcing myself to re-orient the city to face the harbor rather than down the hill. The main door of the house faced the direction of the harbor rather than opening up onto Benefit St (the door on this side faces "down the hill" and therefore seems like the more natural front door for someone like me living in modern day Providence), so important guests, including George Washington, would have entered and exited in the presence of extraordinary views of the harbor so central to the Brown family's success. In this way, both the sheer size/opulence of the house and its orientation would have reinforced John Brown's economic importance in the area.

Besides looking for traces of the original family's experience in the home, there was the constant issue of renovations and changes done by later residents that would have affected their lived experiences. Marsden Perry, who owned the house in the early 1900s, was perhaps one of its most illustrious residents, described as "the Monopoly man" by our tour guide both for his great wealth and his appearance. Our group was most impressed with the state-of-the-art bathroom that Perry installed connected to John Brown's former bedroom, which had a "rib-cage" shower (so water sprayed out all around you rather than just from a single spout above your head), an inlaid bathtub, a heated marble sink, and beautiful paintings done on the tiles on the walls. We all noted just how impressive this all must have been in the year 1900 considering that most of us had never even seen a modern bathroom that nice!

I'm happy to now have metaphorical "faces" to put to the property and the work that we are doing. I think that when it comes to the actual in-the-trenches excavation part of archaeology, it is easy to forget the human side of what you are looking for. It was nice to be reminded that what we are hoping to uncover is not just material but also lived experiences that have been obscured by time or, in some cases, completely forgotten. "Forgotten" seems to be one of the characteristics of the Hale-Ives House, whose location we are hoping to prove through the excavations in my unit this year. There was only a brief mention of it on the tour and not much is really known of when exactly it was built or what exactly it looked like, which makes it all the more difficult to try to understand what it was like for the Hale-Ives family to live there. John Brown was certainly a proud man who enjoyed his prominence in local and national society, but there are other parts of the property besides just his house that warrant investigation (sorry J.B., it can't always be all about you). It is clear that we are dealing with is a property that has many stories to tell, from dinner parties with the first president of the United States to controversial weddings to the lavishness of a quintessential Gilded Age gentleman and everything in between. Hopefully this year we will manage to weave more of the Hale-Ives' own stories into this greater narrative.

Week 3 (Sept. 26th, 2011):

Today, we finally broke ground on Unit 13 (as we have been renamed)! But before we picked up any shovels, we spent about 1 1/2 hours assisting with Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) being done on and around our unit. GPR involves measuring out a grid and then pulling a GPR machine, which is a relatively small box that is pulled by a handle like a wagon while the operator holds a handheld computer that shows readings from the GPR in real time. The machine is pulled at regular intervals in straight lines across the prescribed grid. GPR is more accurate at detecting anomalies beneath the surface of the earth than the magnetromony that had been used at the site in earlier years. The whole process took much longer than I expected. We moved lengthwise with the GPR at 25 cm intervals and it seemed to take forever to get just a few meters of the site mapped. I couldn't believe that at some sites, they use 10 cm intervals with GPR surveys, imagine how long that would take! Even though it took so long, I am looking forward to seeing the results of the survey because it should be able to show us that we're digging in the right place (or that we're not, but I'm trying to be optimistic!).

We had to wait to start digging until the GPR was far enough away from our unit, because both the metal nails that demarcate our unit and the metal of the shovels would have thrown off the GPR readings. But finally, with about 45 minutes left, we started digging. We started by carving out the edges of the unit and shaving off about 5 cm of topsoil. I think it was much, MUCH harder than any of us expected it to be. Getting through the first layer of dirt means removing all the grass covering our unit and for some reason, the roots of that grass were extremely tough to cut through! In the end, we only got about 1/3 of the unit's topsoil cleared. The soil we did manage to remove we put in buckets, and then we sifted the soil in these buckets to make sure they did not contain items of archaeological interest. We did come across one small item which seemed to be an anomaly, but we are as of yet unsure as to whether it is actually a potsherd or a just a nicely coloured rock. I look forward to clearing more of our area out next time and I can't wait to see what we'll find in the coming weeks!

Week 4 (Oct. 3rd, 2011):

The weather gets colder and we dig deeper every week. Today I went down about an hour early to get a headstart on the digging for the day. A few other people came down too; I think we're all getting anxious because we've realized that we don't have all that much time out in the field and we all want to get so much work done in our units! I would imagine that this sort of anxiety is common to all archaeologists at any site in the world. There's just always so much work to be done, and never enough time.

But at least, it seems, like we are using our time wisely. We got to see the results of the GPR survey done last week on our area of the John Brown House yard, and the results definitively show that there is a huge anomaly right beneath our unit, about 50 cm down. At the moment, we've dug down between 5-10cm, but the work should go a bit faster from now on now that we have a better idea of what we're doing. So it looks like we'll definitely find something this semester, but we have no idea what it will be. However, even just the initial shaving off of the topsoil that we've done has turned up a few finds, such as a very old nail and a penny from the 1940s. This week we also identified two new soil contexts, as defined by changes in color and texture of the soil. Now our unit is divided almost perfectly diagonally in half, with the top (NW) corner consisting of solid, light colored soil and the bottom (SE) corner showing a defined linear section of gravel, which could indicate that we will soon hit a man-made path or a wall (exciting!!).

The GPR results also showed a right angle created by clusters of anomalies just to the east of our unit. A right angle that shows up on GPR is almost never just a random deposit but usually is a wall or other built structure. Because of this new information, the class decided to open up a third unit right over the right-angle anomaly. The only unfortunate thing is that the anomaly only appears about 1 meter down and as of right now, the newly formed Unit 14 group can't be sure that they'll have enough time to dig down that far. For now, all we can all do is work as quickly and accurately as possible and hope that we'll be able to accomplish a lot in the coming weeks.

Week 5 (Oct. 15th and 17th, 2011):

I've actually been out at the site to dig twice since my last field blog update. After missing a day of excavation because of the Columbus Day holiday on Oct. 10th, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a day of public archaeology on the 15th. It was literally the perfect day for digging, bright and sunny, with the trees at the peak of their autumn colors. We spent about 4 hours at the site, and various archaeology students, faculty, visiting scholars, parents, Brown students, and members of the local community stopped by to assist with digging or simply to talk with us about what we were doing. Most of the non-archaeologists who stopped by were quite disappointed to learn that we were not, in fact, digging up bodies (I assured them that we would all LOVE to find a body, but it was highly unlikely). Fortunately, most everyone did stick around to hear about what we were actually doing, and people were interested in hearing about what archaeology could tell us about the history of Providence.

We got a lot of work done on context 77 in my unit on Saturday, identifying new areas of the unit that are of interest and preparing these areas for full excavation on the next dig day. So on Monday when we headed out for our regularly scheduled excavation, we really got to work on our unit. We began troweling context 78 and realized that the layer of gravel we had begun to uncover was, in fact, quite extensive. We brought out the bigger shovels and tried to see how far down the gravel layer goes. We still haven't made it to the next soil layer, and the gravel is becoming larger the deeper we go. We also began uncovering a linear rock feature cutting diagonally through our unit, right along the dividing line we established for context 77 and context 78. It was exciting to begin uncovering the sequence of large, manipulated rocks because it proved that we had correctly identified the two distinct areas of our unit. So far, about 4 large, rectangular rocks have been partially uncovered. We are as of yet unsure of what the rocks could be. They might indicate the outline of a path or, more excitingly, could be the beginnings of a wall or foundational feature.

Our digging in context 78 also yielded a lot of archaeological material. At first, we were so excited to find a fragment of a brick or a rusted nail, but by the end of the day, the excitement had worn off. Every time a shovel or trowel would hit something in the soil, there would be a moment of excitement, but then we'd realize it was just another brick or nail and we would all be a little let down. It's funny, because for the last few weeks we have been dying to find anything and now that we are, we're annoyed that all we're finding are bricks and nails! But the linear rock feature that we've started working on should prove to be interesting for weeks to come, and we did pull out one small slipped ceramic sherd (the size of my thumbnail) and a large curved and grooved iron artifact whose use we are still unsure of. These unique features and finds give me hope that we'll be finding some very, very interesting things in the coming weeks.

Week 6 (Oct. 24th, 2011):

Now that we've really gotten into the digging work and are more comfortable with excavation, the project becomes more and more routine. Right now, we're trying to clear out as much dirt as possible in our unit, since we only have a few more days left out in the field. This means that we're using a mix of shovels, trowels, brushes, anything to deepen our unit. This Monday, we opened up a new context right below context 77, because we began to find large rocks in the northwest corner of the unit, an area that had previously been full of loamy soil. We're not sure what the rocks could indicate, but they are certainly getting bigger the deeper we go (and making digging really difficult!)

We're still finding a lot of nails and pieces of brick, although we are starting to get more unique artifacts. We found a large piece of iron in the southeast corner of the unit, so big that we measured its exact location using the total station. We're still not sure what this iron piece is, though. We've also started to find a few pieces of glass, and even one significantly sized ceramic sherd. I have a personal interest in ceramics, I just find them really fascinating as artifacts. But this sherd really puzzled me, since it has absolutely no curvature. There are remnants of a white slip on the outer wall, while inside there is no slip but there are grooves about as wide as my thumb etched into the sides. I really could not figure out what this sherd might be, and I was so vexed that I talked about it with my mom later that day. She's not an archaeologist, but sometimes having a pair of fresh eyes look at a problem can make all the difference. We talked about the possibility of this ceramic sherd being a part of a windowbox, which makes a lot of sense both in terms of its shape, its slip, its size, and the grooves on the inside. Also, as I've mentioned, we have thought that some of the iron pieces we are pulling out of the unit are associated with windows, so it would make sense if the ceramic had something to do with windows too. Of course, we can't really know for sure since we haven't excavated nearly enough, but it is an interesting idea.

Week 7 (Oct. 31st, 2011):

It's hard to believe that this was our second to last day in the field. There is still so much work that I'd like to get done!

Digging was hard today. We're at a strange point in our unit, it feels in some ways like we've lost a sense of direction with our excavation. Right now, it is just about getting as much dirt out as possible, but this is proving to be a very difficult task. We have been working on excavating Context 82, which is characterized by outcroppings of large rocks. These rocks are what make excavation so difficult. It is hard to tell if the large rocks we are finding are indicative of any human action or if they are just a random soil event, but because we don't yet know, it means we have to be careful to leave as many of the rocks in situ while we dig around them. This makes for very slow going indeed.

We're continuing to find things, though, which is exciting. Today we pulled out the biggest artifact yet, a curved piece of iron that is probably about 6-8 inches long. It was such a big find that we measured its location using the total station. We've also hit a few strange spots in the soil, patches of neon orange dirt that we can't quite figure out. We took a soil sample and will look at it closer in the lab. Nails are also still pretty common, but thus far, Context 82 has been almost devoid of bricks. This is interesting to note, since all other contexts we've excavated so far have yielded a large amount of bricks and brick pieces, but they are absent from Context 82.

With only one more day left out in the field, we'll continute trying to level out our unit, which will hopefully tell us more about the linear rock feature that cuts diagonally across it. We will determine the extent of the large rocks in Context 82 and see if they are related to anything in Context 78. At this point, is really just about focusing in on a few final tasks and trying to gain as much information about stratigraphy and artifact distribution as we possibly can.

Week 8 (Nov. 7th, 2011)

Work on Unit 13 has been slow going. We mostly focused on trying to even out context JBH82, which is the area in the northwest corner of the unit. We're still coming across the large rocks that intially defined the context. At first, we were trying to live the rocks in situ in case they indicated some sort of intentional deposition, but we gave up on this once we realized that we weren't going to be able to dig much more unless we started taking out the rocks.

The amount of material we're finding now is crazy. We went for weeks without finding anything, and now every time I sift a bucket of dirt, I expect to find something cool. Today we found tons of awesome stuff, so much that we had to have two artifact bags for the day. One bag was full of iron pieces, which we are finding a lot of. It's really difficult to tell if the iron pieces are related in any way because it's almost impossible to discern their original forms due to the severe amount corrosion present on them. The deeper we go, though, the bigger the pieces of iron get. We shot a few of the pieces we found into the total station. The other artifact bag was filled with ceramic sherds, glass, and small objects. The most amazing thing we had was a small, iron, decorative crucifix! It was so cool to find an object so readily recognizable and complete, rather than just a twisted chunk of metal or a tiny sherd.

Lucky for us, we are going to have one more day of digging. We're definitely feeling the pressure, especially since our unit has just begun to yield some great finds. We'll keep pushing hard next time and hopefully keep finding such a large amount of objects!