Oct. 15th

After our initial foray into survey archaeology, it was time to start moving forward with excavation. I was placed on the team responsible for opening the trench next to the west facing side of Hope College, which was mapped out 2 weeks prior by the total station team. Another group of the class worked on geophysical survey of the possible site of the former President’s house.

The excavation team began with a debriefing of methodology, including how to record finds and photographs, naming techniques, and excavation techniques. We began by clearing away the surface layer of debris, such as leaves and twigs, and demarcating the trench with string. We then recorded the trench photographically before we started excavated. We began on excavating context 1, the top layer of the Harris level, by using trowelling. We scraped the trowel along the earth surface, both looking for artifacts as they became unearthed and scooping the earth into dustpans. This earth was discarded into buckets were they would later be sifted. We continued this process multiple times. In the first context we found some traces of ceramic and glass and recorded these accordingly and bagged them. Intermittently we would cut out any roots that we had encountered.

After we had trowelled sufficiently we closed context 1 and photographed it just as we had the opening, also taking the elevation with the total station which would be used to determine how deep the context was. We then opened context 2 just as we has context 1. This time I switched role from trowelling to record keeping. In context 2 we started using more aggressive techniques to disturb the soil, using a trowel to loosen it up and eventually shoveling away large parts of the earth. After this, the team went back over the trench again with trowel to smoothen the surface and again keep it clean. The process occurred multiple times. In this context we continued to find large deposits of glass, more varied than context 1, in addition to ceramic. It seems that the most interesting finds included a ceramic that was numbered similarly to a calendar and some sort of casing that was suggested as being from a bullet or a pen cap. As the recorder in this instance, it was my job to collect finds in bags, of which we had ones for metal, glass, and ceramic. Additionally I recorded all of the technical information, wrote notes about what we were seeing in the trench, and worked with the person taking photographs to denote which ones were which.

After closing the second context, the trench actually started to look like a real archaeological site. We convened back with the larger class to briefly discuss the day and hear about the geophysical survey, which to my understanding mapped what was underneath the ground. I’m excited to continue excavating and to interpret our data from the day!