Brian Kelly

Week 1 (09/12/11): Introductions

This was the first meeting of ARCH1900: The Archaeology of College Hill. Before class, students completed several short readings drawn from previous reports on the excavation of the John Brown house. Initially gathering in Rhode Island Hall, students briefly introducedthemselves and met the instructor, Jessica Nowlin, and the TA, Müge Durusu-Tanriover.

Initially, I was a little nervous by the majority of my classmates who were concentrating in archaeology, however, there are a few students like myself who are non-concentrators. After class-wide introductions, we set a time for section meeting (8:00am on Tuesdays) and Jessica Nowlin gave a short lecture rehashing the assigned readings. She reviewed the history of the property, the frequently-confusing family tree ofthe Browns, and an analysis of previous excavations. After reviewing several maps of the property, we examined a quadrature map that included previous dig units and highlighted geophysical anomalies.

Using this information, the class headed into the field and, after collecting tools from the field house, surveyed several possible dig locations. After reviewing previous sites and considering new ones, students were split into three groups, each choosing a separate 2x2m to excavate.

The first group will be excavating Unit 14, an area located between previously-examined Unit 2 and Unit10. These previous digs hoped to unearth a foundational wall of the Hale-Ives House, which had been demolishedby 1926, but failed to do so. The second group is continuing excavation on Unit 11 which was backfilled afterdiscovering a wall. The aim of this group is to discover the full depth of this wall. Finally, my group will be breaking ground on a new unit in the Southeast area of the lawn in attempts to uncoversigns of a fountain or drainage system suspected to be in the area based onp hotographs, anecdotal evidence, and anomalies present in the quadrature map. It should be noted that last year, Unit 12 had a similar goal but didn’t find much.

Once we had selected the area we wanted to dig, Jessica helped us use a Topcon total station to pinpoint the exact location of the site by using pre-measured inputs and two data points. Since the setup of the station took considerable time (everyone in my group is a non-concentrator and this certainly didn’t speed up the process) we were unable to finish our mapping, but I hope to finalize the location and begin digging next week.

Week 2 (09/19/11):House Tour

Our second class consisted of a tour of the John Brown House and a question and answer session with a member of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

After meeting at the residence, we watched a video producedby the RIHS outlining a brief history of the property. Following the film, Dalila Goulart, Education & Visitor Services Manager at the JBH, led us on a tour. For the sake of brevity, I’ll only touch on those features of the tour that I found most interesting.

She began by showing us the John Brown’s carriage, the oldest of its kind in existence, which President Washington allegedly used during his visit to RI. Moving to a gallery room, she outlined the history of the slave trade and the Brown family in greater detail. The next room held a large collection of china, as well as an electric refrigerator and heating trays that had been installed by Marsden Perry when he has extravagantly redone the house.

The wallpaper throughout the house was beautiful, and certainly atypical in comparison to wallpaper used today. Hand painted panels commissioned by the Works Progress Administration depicting various scenes of Washington’s presidency adorned one room. Another room had intricate squirrel print paper that was a perfect recreation of the original thanks to the fact that the company Brown used is still in existence and still has records of the original prints they made for the house. Finally, in another area of the property, gilded leather wallpaper installed by Perry is still visible. The variety of wall coverings was by far one of the most interesting parts of the trip.

I also enjoyed several other items in the house. Specifically, John Brown’s corner chair, the nine-shell cabinet (one of only two known to exist), and the ribcageshower in Perry’s bathroom.

The Q&A session, led by Morgan Grefe was entertaining and informative. It eventually turned into Ms. Grefe sharing personal anecdotes about the history of the houseand dealing with myths ranging from slave tunnels, to haunting, to the tree root that ‘ate’ Roger Williams.

Armed with the knowledge I gained on the tour, I’m excited to begin excavation next week.

Week 3 (09/26/11): Digging

This week can easy by summarized by reviewing the following articles: Article 1 Article 2 Article 3

However, I will also offer a slightly more personal description.

Our third class began by meeting at the field house to move supplies to the John Brown House.

After arriving at the property, we were joined by a numberof students and professors from outside the class who observed/participated inthe GPR that was preformed on the property during the course of this meeting.

After further mapping, we discovered that the anomaly we hoped to be the remains ofthe previously-mentioned fountain is inaccessible because it is located directly beneath a tree. Unable to break ground on this project, myself and the others from my group joined those excavating unit 11 to help them remove backfill.

Due to the large number of students working on this unit, we were able to entirely empty the backfill and remove the tarps, revealing the previously-excavated portions of the walls. However, while digging the 2x2 and 1x1 meter squares, we dug too far in one area. To compensate for this incident, we will add a 1x1 meter square to the previously-excavated areas, bringing the new unit to a total size of 2x3 meters.

This will add some difficulty to the project as we will first have to dig the new area down to the depth of the older areas as well as incorporate its stratigraphy into the stratigraphic data of the previous digs. That beings aid, I’m looking forward to our next meeting where we will begin excavation that involves more than simple ditch digging.

Week 4 (10/03/11): Opening Up

This week began with Jessica reviewing the results of theGPR with us. The report showed an anomalyin the northwest area of the property not far from Unit 13 which led us todecide upon opening a new trench in the area of the anomaly. Having been thwarted in our quest touncover the fountain by a rather stubborn tree, this new trench—labled Unit 14—heldthe promise of a wall and/or a room of the Hale Ives house. However, the anomalies revealed by theGPR became most prevalent at ~1-2m depths, so there will have to be extensiveexcavation before we are likely to find anything particularly noteworthy.

That being said, I was excited to finally start digging aunit of my own with the rest of my group. We marked out a 1x3m area to dig, filled out context sheets, snappedpre-dig photos, and I played the lead in an intriguing film explaining the new unit/context (topsoil! exciting!). I’m still awaiting my YouTube stardom.

We removed the layer of topsoil, intending to dig down 5cm,however, due to slow progress caused by roots we didn’t reach quite as far aswe would have liked. Even so, wemade several interesting finds while sifting our dirt, including some pieces ofglass, glazed shards of pottery(?), charcoal, and a pair of very old nails withsome other aged piece of hardware (a bolt?). The areas containing the charcoal were accompanied by a noticeableblackening of soil, and once we level the depth of the trench, this newcoloration will likely become a new context.

This was definitely the most exciting week yet. I’m looking forward to continuing thetrench and hoping the weather will stay nice a little longer.

Week 5/6 (10/17/11): Putting Everything in Context

Another beautiful day of digging started by opening two newcontexts within unit 14. Thefirst, JBH11 80 roughly encompasses the western two-thirds of the trench. Measuring ~2x1m, this context was definedby its dark, moist, heterogeneous soil. The smaller context, JBH11 81, is the remaining ~1x1m square on the eastside of the trench and has patchier soil, with spots of both the dark moistsoil of context 80 as well as lighter, dryer spots distributed throughout.

After going through the steps to open the new contexts(filling out context sheets, documenting with photos and videos, measuringMunsell values, recording locations with the total station etc.) we continueddigging, with Ian focusing on context 81 and Sandra and myself working on80. We dug ~5cm down, cleared lotsof roots, and sawed through a root that ran through most of the trench tofacilitate further digging.

There wasn’t much of note pulled from the ground this week:context 80 yielded lots of coal, several pieces of glass, and some more whitepottery shards. All in all, thedigging was similar to last week when roots slowed our progress so we couldn’tdig as deep as we would have liked.

Week 7 (10/24/11): Let’s Pump Some Iron(?)

More nice weather meant that this weeks dig was as pleasantas the past weeks. We quickly gotto work on contexts 80 and 81. Once again, Sandra and I focused on 80 while Ian worked on 81.

Soon after beginning it became apparent that we were hittinga new context a few centimeters below the ones we were working on. The ground continued to be laden withroots, but gravel was becoming more prominent the deeper we dug. After a quick group conference,we decided that we were both hitting the same context, so we worked to levelthe trench in order to start a new context—JBH11 83—which would combine 80 and81. It should be noted that 83 iscurrently at different levels, as context 81 was dug slightly deeper (~2cm)than 80 before it was determined that everyone was hitting the samecontext.

While leveling 80, we found more coal, some brick remnants,more pottery shards, more glass, and some possibly-anomalous rocks that weresaved for analysis. Mostexcitingly, we discovered some sort of hardware (nail? bolt?) and a large chunkof what appears to be iron shaped by humans, but the specific identity of theobject and its composition are unascertainable. Nonetheless, it was an exciting find. In context 81 Ian found similar items(glass, pottery, etc) and once shard of ceramic that looked like it was anattempt to reverse engineer porcelain and had a small color print on it(perhaps an apple?).

After leveling out the ground and removing a root, weattended to the appropriate formalities before ending the day so that we canimmediately begin work on context 83 next week. This was another exciting week, however, with time to digrunning short, I’m worried about the lack of progress we’re making since westill have a significant amount to dig before reaching the 1m mark where anomalieswere detected.

Week 8 (10/31/11): Haunted by Roots

This week was a lot of hard work with few significant itemsto report. The weekend saw asnowstorm that left the dirt damp, cold, and heavy. This made excavating the still-rooty soil even moredifficult. To add to the roots anduncooperative soil, context 83 is proving to be quite gravely. All these factors taken together madedigging and sifting difficult.

Besides the normal finds (glass, glazed shards, nails) therewas little to report on this dig. I brought gloves which helped the sifting process, and Ian broke hisshovel on a large root. Sadly,these were the highlights of this week.

On a lighter note, we cleared a good amount of dirt(10-15cm) which left us with an impressively deep trench. That being said, there is stillsignificant distance until we hit the anomaly and, seeing as next week issupposed to be the last week to dig, we likely wont reach it. Hopefully next week will see betterconditions for digging so we can get as deep as possible.

Week 9 (11/7/11): Unit 14, Now 50% Off!

This was supposed to be our final day excavating so time wascertainly working against us. Theweather was much better than last week so we made fast progress. After starting the day, we quicklydetermined that, for the sake of reaching a greater depth, we would divide thetrench in half and focus on the western part where the anomaly was most likelyto be located.

Marking off a 1x1.5m section on the western part of the trench, we dug like neverbefore. Due to the small size ofthe dig section, it was difficult to have everyone working on the trench atonce. This proved beneficial assplitting up helped expedite digging and sifting.

The context (JBH83) remained the same throughout the day andthe ground yielded lots of brick, coal, glass, ceramic, and nails. The most exciting find came at the endof the day, after darkness had set, when we found a brick and other large rocksthat seemed to form a possible linear feature. After further inspection, at least the non-brick rock may bemade of concrete, cement, or plaster. While there wasn’t enough light left to closely examine the find, wediscussed the possibility of another day in the field. Hopefully we can dig some more; if not,this area should certainly be explored more by future Archaeology of CollegeHill classes.

Week 10 (11/14/11): (Not) Hardwood Flooring

Following the excitement of last week (for all the groups)it was decided that we would dig one more day. Since this was certainly the last week to dig we gotstraight to work. Seeing thetrench in daylight revealed that we had hit upon a new context so we quicklyleveled the trench and trimmed the edges.

While we were going through the necessary steps to open thenew context (JBH88), I noticed something in the wall of our trench and after alittle digging, pulled a large piece of stoneware from the wall. After closer examination, we decided itmight have been a connector for pipe.

After bagging the find, we started to work on JBH88. We excavated around the brick andconcrete/cement/plaster and quickly discovered an iron pipe running into thenorth edge of the trench and continuing into the unidentified rock we had foundlast week. As we dug more, wedetermined that the brick was likely not part of a linear feature so we removedit. Continuing to excavate aroundthe unidentified rock, we found that it seemed to run across the entire bottomof the trench. This may be thefoundation/basement of the Hale-Ives house that we were hoping to find. In addition to this extremely excitingdiscovery, we found lots of glass, plaster, brick fragments, ceramic, charcoal,nails, and one very large piece of glazed stoneware which may have been a pipeor a utilitarian container.

This was by far the most exciting day of digging, and basedon the foundation we hit, this site and/or its surroundings should certainly beexplored more in the future.

Week 11 (11/21/11): Fill ‘er Up

This week was about three things: backfilling, backfilling,and backfilling. After arriving,we covered each trench in a tarp, placed a 2011 penny on the tarp (to indicateexcavation year to future diggers), and placed all the dirt back in thetrenches. The work was easy enoughas everyone in the class pitched in and moved from trench to trench until thejob was done. Next time we meet,we’re supposed to start analyzing our finds in the lab, which I’m particularly excitedabout considering I have very little lab experience (archaeology or otherwise).