Oct. 22

I was again working in trench QG#1 this week. Since last week, more progress was made at the site over the weekend at an event that coincided with Brown’s Family Weekend and National Archaeology Day. The team working on Saturday finished in the middle of context 4 and that is where we started today. While I was working in the QG#1 trench with two others, the rest of the of the class was divided up between opening a new trench a few meters from the Hope College entrance on the Quiet Green, taking photographs and recordings, and surveying points with the total station. An added treat today was two guests: a cameraman from media services and a BDH reporter.

This week it was comforting to more or less already know what to do and get in the swing of things. My team started by clearing off loose debris that had accumulated since we had last worked there, including twigs and branches. Then, after opening the trench we began to trowel. Over the weekend, the team who had worked on the trench made some considerable progress and site had begun to show some varying levels and even a feature – some rubble. We continued toweling until a new context started to become apparent, a beige tan colored layer that appeared to be of a sandy clay composition. While some areas of the trench reached this context (which was subsequently named context 6) quickly, certain segments, like the SW corner, where some of the rubble was, took more time to clear. It was quite interesting to work with the rubble, because we did not want to clear it but did want to clearly define it, so often instead of troweling we used brushes and smaller instruments to unearth the crevices. Context 4 continued to produce similar finds, including ceramic, glass (although in small numbers it seemed), and metal (nails and another bullet casing!). To close the context we used to total station to take elevation points and took pictures.

After clearing context 4, we delineated the rubble feature as context 5 and began to remove the larger stones in order to reach the similar soil composition we had reached elsewhere. While doing this we uncovered a hole in the SE corner, which became gradually larger upon removing more and more rubble. We ended the day with our closing shots and elevation and were ready to begin next time with context 6.